A colonial context to the wars of our time

Empire of the mind

First published in 1899, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (HoD), is a classic narrative on colonialism and the amoral exploitation it subjected the indigenous populations to. Conrad was of Polish origin and English was not his first language (or even, for that matter, his second). Yet the book is simply brilliant for its storytelling. In Conrad’s own words, “One writes only half the book, the other half is with the reader”, and that is the book’s greatest strength. The reader can interpret it as she wants to: as a stinging indictment of the horrors of subjugation in colonialism or as an apologetic defence of the imperial project of ‘civilising the native.’

The story is disturbing. Marlow, British merchant seaman of the eighteen-nineties, travels up the Congo in the service of a rapacious Belgian trading company, hoping to find the company’s ivory trader, Mr Kurtz, who has mysteriously disappeared. In Africa, everyone gossips about Mr Kurtz, envies him, and, with rare exception, loathes him. The reader does not learn what Kurtz actually does, but if you surmised “kills some people, has sex with others, steals all the ivory”, you would not be far wrong. In Kurtz, the alleged benevolence of colonialism has descended into criminality.

As Marlow goes deeper into Congo, it is as if you are there, as confused and bewildered by it all as the narrator himself. Imperialism is the central theme of HoD, and relative to other writers of his time, Conrad is a more thoughtful writer on the empire. Consider Marlow’s account of the dying African natives: “They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now – nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom...Then, glancing down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose, and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly.”

This passage continues: “He had tied a bit of white worsted round his neck. Why? Where did he get it? Was it a badge, an ornament, a charm, a propitiatory act? Was there any idea at all connected with it? It looked startling round his black neck, this bit of white thread from beyond the seas.” From this, Marlow turns to describing the next European he meets: “When near the buildings I met a white man, in such an unexpected elegance of get-up that in the first moment I took him for a sort of vision. I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clean necktie, and varnished boots. No hat. Hair parted, brushed, oiled, under a green-lined parasol held in a big white hand. He was amazing and had a penholder behind his ear.”

The contrast could not be clearer. The ‘greenish gloom’ in which the dying African youth fades away has become that thing of comfort – the European’s ‘green-lined parasol’. The ‘bit of white worsted’ tied around the African’s neck is replaced by the colonialist’s ‘clean necktie’. The ultimate denouement of the evil at the heart of the imperial mission is Mr Kurtz himself, who has set himself up as a god among the African natives.

Marlow meeting Kurtz, at last, is the most famous death scene written since Shakespeare: “Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before and hope never to see again... I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror – of an intense and hopeless despair… He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: ‘The horror! The horror!’”

In a trenchant criticism, Chinua Achebe accuses Conrad of being racist, and that a work that depersonalises a part of the human race should not be considered a great work of art. But as Edward Said points out, “It is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence – its truth, its meaning, its subtle and penetrating essence... We live, as we dream – alone.”

The abiding relevance of HoD in the backdrop of the wars in Gaza, Middle East, and Ukraine is that the world continues to grapple with the moral and ethical implications of Neo-imperialism – Western involvement in foreign lands. HoD also points to the challenge society encounters in ensuring the lawful, ethical, and moral conduct of war.

Read HoD. You will come under Conrad’s spell. There is a tension – of colonialism’s unconscionable evil – and at that point, you might exclaim: “Mistah Kurtz, he dead!”