1. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Exploring the Colonial Context

2. Critical Lenses

4. Eurocentrism
The use of European culture as the standard by which all other cultures are negatively contrasted.

5. Eurocentrism UNIVERSALISM
Judging literature in terms of its “universality”
To be considered great, literary text had to have “universal” characters and themes
That “universality” depended upon resemblance to European ideas, ideals, and experiences.
Who were the judges?
British, European, and later American cultural standard-bearers.

6. Africa 1794: “At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth” (Conrad 71)

8. “…on one end [of the waiting room]
a large shining map, marked with all the colours of a rainbow.” (Conrad,“Heart of Darkness”, 74)

9. “This Government at the outset testified its lively interest in the well-being and future progress of the vast region now committed to your Majesty’s wise care, by being the first among the Powers to recognize the flag of the International Association of the Congo as that of a friendly State.”
-- President Cleveland to King Leopold, September 11, 1885

10. King Leopold II of Belgium, sole “owner” of the Congo until 1908

11. There was a vast amount of red… a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and,
on the east coast, a patch of purple …However, I
wasn’t going
into any of these.
I was going into
the yellow.
Dead in the
centre.” (Conrad,“Heart
of Darkness”, 74)

12. Even today,
when Africa
is independent
of European
colonial powers,
It’s map still reflects
many of the borders the
Europeans imposed
upon her.

13. “And the river was there -- fascinating -- deadly -- like
a snake.” (Conrad, “Heart of Darkness” 74)

15. Colonial Ideology
Pervasive force in the British schools established in the colonies to inculcate British values and culture in the indigenous people.
Forestalled rebellion (Is difficult to rebel against a system or a people one has been programmed, over several generations, to be superior.)

16. Colonial Ideology
Resulted in “colonial subjects” (colonized people who did not resist colonial subjugation because they believed in British superiority and, therefore, in their own inferiority.)
Many tried to imitate the colonizers (mimicry)
Dress Behavior
Speech Lifestyle

17. Colonial Ideology
Native people defined as savage, backward, underdeveloped.
Colonizers believed their whole culture was more highly advanced because their technology was more highly developed.
They ignored or swept aside the religions, customs, and codes of behavior of the people they subjugated.

18. Colonial Ideology COLONIZERS: “Center of the world” Proper “self” “Us”
Civilized
COLONIZED:
Marginalized
“Other” (different,
therefore, inferior)
“Them”
Savages

19. Leon Rom (with rifle) after elephant hunt

21. “Blister the meddlesome missionaries. They write tones of [pamphlets]
“Blister the meddlesome missionaries! They write tones of [pamphlets]. They seem to be always around, always spying, always eye-witnessing the happenings … They are always prowling from place to place; the natives consider them their only friends; they go to them with their sorrows….”
--From Mark Twain’s “King Leopold’s Soliloquy”
British missionaries with men holding hands severed from victims named Bolenge and Lingomo by A.B.I.R. (Anglo-Belgium India Rubber Company) militiamen, 1904

23. Mutilated Child, Free Congo State,
circa 1903

25. The chicotte in use. Note the pile of chain at lower left
“The shed was already a heap of embers glowing fiercely. A nigger was being beaten near by. They said he had caused the fire in some way; be that as it may, he was screeching most horribly.”
-- Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”

26. Nsala, of the district of Wala, looking at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter, Boali, a victim of the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company (A.B.I.R.) militia.

27. “Each time the corporal goes out to get rubber, cartridges are given him. He must bring back all not used, and for every one used he must bring back a right hand. M.P. told me that sometimes they shot a cartridge at an animal in hunting; they then cut off a hand from a living man. As to the extent to which this is carried on, he informed me that in six months the State on the Mambogo River had used 6,000 cartridges, which means that 6,000 people are killed or mutilated. It means more than 6,000, for the people have told me repeatedly that the soldiers kill the children with the butt of their guns.”
Mark Twain, excerpted
from “King Leopold’s
Soliloquy, 1905

28. Above: This ivory caravan is preparing to take the elephant tusks from Stanley Pool (The Central Station) to Matadi (The Lower Station). Note the “Pilgrim” with his stave. (1893)
To the left: Twa Mwe, a Kwango chief. Indigenous leaders often faced the choice of supplying their people as rubber or ivory slaves or being held hostage or killed.

29. An ivory gathering post in the Congo, c. 1890
An ivory gathering post in the Congo, c Elephant tusks, bought from Africans for a pittance or confiscated at gunpoint, fetched high prices in Europe as raw material for everything from false teeth to piano keys.
“The Accountant had brought out already a box of dominoes, and was toying architecturally with the bones.” (Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”)

30. The Inner Station, Stanley Falls

31. De-Colonization Ideology
Rejection of the colonialist ideology which defined them as inferior.
Reclaim pre-colonial past.
Can the colonization be totally rejected?
Can the pre-colonial past be reclaimed?

32. “The kind of liberalism espoused here by Marlow / Conrad touched all the best minds of the age in England, Europe, and America. It took different forms in the minds of different people but almost always managed to sidestep the ultimate question of equality between white people and black people.”
-- Chinua Achebe From “Racism in the Heart of Darkness”

34. From the memoirs of Raoul de Premorel, who ran
rubber-collecting posts in the Kasai region of the Congo
from 1896 to 1901.
“I had two sentries drag [the rebel leader] to the front
of the store, where his wrists were tied together. Then
standing him up against a post with his arms raised high
above his head they tied him securely to a cross beam.
I now had them raise him by tightening the rope until
just his toes touched the floor … So I left the poor
wretch. All might long he hung there, sometimes
begging for mercy, sometimes in a kind of swoon. All
night long his faithful wife did what she could to
alleviate his suffering. She brought him drink and
food, she rubbed his aching legs …. At last when the
morning came and my men cut him down, he dropped
unconscious in a heap on the ground. “Take him away,”
I ordered …Whether he lived or not, I do not know …
Now sometimes in my sleep I think I am the poor devil
and half a hundred black fiends are dancing …about
me. I wake up with a great start and I find myself
covered with a cold sweat. Sometimes, I think it is
I who have suffered most in the years that have
passed since that night.”
One prototype for Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz: Leon Rom. This swashbuckling officer was known for displaying a row of severed African heads around his garden. He also wrote a book on African customs, painted portraits and landscapes, and collected butterflies.

35. Stanley Falls Station, the farthest trading post along the Congo River
View 3: Source of Adventure
In 1816, Captain James K. Tuckey of the British Royal Navy set off to find the Congo’s origins. Tuckey observed, rather provincially, that “the scenery was beautiful and not inferior to any on the banks of the Thames.” Many Europeans saw Africa as the supplier of valuable ivory, but for others it was a faceless, blank, empty continent, a place on the map waiting to be explored, one frequently described as “the Dark Continent”
“[The Thames] had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled -- the great knights-errant of the sea.” (Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”)
Mouth of Congo River
Excerpted from King
Leopold’s Ghost, p. 18
Stanley Falls Station, the farthest trading post along the Congo River

36. Post Colonial Criticism
Defines formerly colonized peoples as
“any population that has been subjected to the political domination of another population.”

37. Postcolonial Criticism
Analyzes literature produced by cultures that developed in response to colonial domination, from the first point of colonial contact to the present.
Formerly known as “commonwealth literature”
Some literature written by colonizers.
Rudyard Kipling
Alan Paton
Much more written by colonized and formerly colonized people.
Chinua Achebe
Wole Soyinka

38. “I respected the fellow
“I respected the fellow. Yes; I respected his collars, his vast cuffs, his brushed hair. His appearance was certainly that of a a hairdresser’s dummy; but in the great demoralization of the land he kept up his appearance. That’s backbone. … Thus this man had verily accomplished something. And he was devoted to his books, which were in apple-pie order” (Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”)
This picture was taken at Boma (Conrad’s and Marlow’s first stop in Africa), where the death rate among “prisoners” ran to 70 percent. Note the Zanzibari guards, mentioned in the story. (1904)

39. Another Kurtz prototype: Guillaume Van Kerckhoven, who cheerfully told a fellow traveler that he paid his black soldiers “5 brass rods per human head they brought him during the course of any military operations he conducted.”

43. Postcolonialism Themes
Initial encounter with the colonizer and the disruption of indigenous culture
Journey of the European outsider through an unfamiliar wilderness with a native guide
Othering and colonial oppression

44. Postcolonialism Themes
Literary text analyzed as
colonialist
anti-colonialist
Way in which text reinforces or resists colonialism’s oppressive ideology.

45. So, why does Marlow say, “And this too …has been one of the dark places of the earth”?
Steamboats used to travel the Congo River; note the pilot-house and funnel, the vertical boiler, and the decks. (1894)