Rebel uprisings, bodies rotting in the sun, a sickening megalomaniac. In newsrooms across the globe, shaking their heads over yet another unfathomable African crisis, producers and sub-editors dusted off memories of school literature courses and reached for the clichés. Zaire was Joseph Conrad’s original ‘Heart of Darkness’, they reminded the public. How prophetic the famous cry of despair voiced by the dying Mr Kurtz at Africa’s seemingly boundless capacity for bedlam and brutality had proved yet again. ‘The horror, the horror.’ Was nothing more promising ever to emerge from that benighted continent?
Yet when Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness and penned some of the most famous last words in literary history, this was very far from his intended message. The title ‘Heart of Darkness’ itself and the phrase ‘the horror, the horror’ uttered by Mr Kurtz as he expires on a steam boat chugging down the giant Congo river, probably constitute one of the great misquotations of all time.
For Conrad, the Polish seaman who was to become one of Britain’s greatest novelists, Heart of Darkness was a book based on some very painful personal experience. In 1890 he had set out for the Congo Free State, the African colony then owned by Belgium’s King Leopold II, to fill in for a steamship captain slain by tribesmen. The posting, which was originally meant to last three years but was curtailed after less than six months, was to be the most traumatic of his life. It took him nine years to digest and turn into print.
Bouts of fever and dysentery nearly killed him; his health never subsequently recovered. Always melancholic, he spent much of the time plunged into deep depression, so disgusted by his fellow whites he avoided almost all human contact. His vision of humanity was to be permanently coloured by what he found in the Congo, where declarations of philanthropy camouflaged a colonial system of unparalleled cruelty. Before the Congo, Conrad once said, ‘I was a perfect animal’; afterwards, ‘I see everything with such despondency – all in black’.
Mr Kurtz, whose personality haunts the book although he says almost nothing, is first presented as the best station manager of the Congo, a man of refinement and education, who can thrill crowds with his idealism and is destined for great things inside the anonymous Company ‘developing’ the region. Stationed 200 miles in the interior, he has now fallen sick, and a band of colleagues sets out to rescue him.
When they find him, they discover that the respected Mr Kurtz has ‘gone native’. In fact, he has gone worse than native. Cut off from the Western world, inventing his own moral code and rendered almost insane by the solitude of the primeval forest, he has indulged in ‘abominable satisfactions’, presided ‘at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites’ says Conrad, hinting that Kurtz has become a cannibal.
His palisade is decorated by rows of severed black heads; he has been adopted as honorary chief by a tribe whose warriors he leads on bloody village raids in search of ivory. The man who once wrote lofty reports calling for the enlightenment of the native now has a simpler recommendation: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ When he expires before the steamer reaches civilisation, corroded by fever and knowledge of his own evil, his colleagues are relieved rather than sorry – a potential embarrassment has been avoided.
Despite its slimness, the novella is one of those multilayered works whose meaning seems to shift with each new reading. By the time Heart of Darkness was published in 1902, the atrocities being committed by Leopold’s agents in the Congo were already familiar to the public, thanks to the campaigns being waged by human rights activists of the day. So while Heart of Darkness is in part a psychological thriller about what makes man human, it had enough topical detail in it to carry another message to its readers. Notwithstanding the jarringly racist observations by the narrator Marlow, the way Heart of Darkness dwells on the sense of utter alienation felt by the white man in the gloom of central Africa, the book was intended primarily as a withering attack on the hypocrisy of contemporary colonial behaviour. ‘The criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling the civilising work in Africa is a justifiable idea,’ the writer told his publisher.
So when Kurtz raves against ‘the horror, the horror’, he is, Marlow makes clear, registering in a final lucid moment just how far he has fallen from grace. The ‘darkness’ of the book’s title refers to the monstrous passions at the core of the human soul, lying ready to emerge when man’s better instincts are suspended, rather than a continent’s supposed predisposition to violence. Conrad was more preoccupied with rotten Western values, the white man’s inhumanity to the black man, than, as is almost always assumed today, black savagery.
Why then, nearly a century on, has the phrase, and the title, become so misunderstood, so twisted?
The shift reflects, perhaps, the level of Western unease over Africa, a continent that has never disappointed in its capacity to disappoint: Hutu mothers killing their children by Tutsi fathers in Rwanda; the self-styled Emperor Bokassa ordering his cook to serve up his victims’ bodies in Central African Republic; Liberia’s rebels gleefully videotaping the torture of a former president – the terrible scenes swamp the thin trickle of good news, challenging the very notion of progress.
On a disturbing continent, no country, appropriately enough, remains more unsettling than the very birthplace of Conrad’s masterpiece: the nation that was once called the Congo Free State, later metamorphosed into Zaire and has now been rebaptised the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In Mobutu’s hands, the country had become a paradigm of all that was wrong with post-colonial Africa. A vacuum at the heart of the continent delineated by the national frontiers of nine neighbouring countries, it was a parody of a functioning state. Here, the anarchy and absurdity that simmered in so many other sub-Saharan nations were taken to their logical extremes. For those, like myself, curious to know what transpired when the normal rules of society were suspended, the purity appealed almost as much as it appalled. Why bother with pale imitations, diluted versions, after all, when you could drench yourself in the essence, the original?
The longer I stayed, the more fascinated I became with the man hailed as inventor of the modern kleptocracy, or government by theft. His personal fortune was said to be so immense, he could personally wipe out the country’s foreign debt. He chose not to, preferring to banquet in his palaces and jet off to properties in Europe, while his citizens’ average annual income had fallen below $120, leaving them dependent on their wits to survive. What could be the rationale behind such callous greed?
Zaireans had demonised him, seeing his malevolent hand behind every misfortune. From mass-murder to torture, poisoning to rape – there were few crimes not attributed to him. But if Mobutu had approached near-Satanic proportions in the popular conception, he remained the lodestar towards which every diplomat and foreign expert, opposition politician and prime ministerial candidate, turned for orientation.
Rail as it might, the population, it seemed, simply could not imagine a world without Mobutu. ‘We are a peaceful people,’ Zaireans would say in self-exculpation, when asked why no frenzied assailant had ever burst from the crowd during one of Mobutu’s motorcades, brandishing a pistol. It was to take a foreign-backed uprising, dubbed ‘an invasion’ by Zaireans themselves and co-ordinated by men who did not speak the local Lingala, to rid them of the man they claimed to loathe. The passivity infuriated, eventually blurring into contempt. Every people, expatriates would shrug, deserves the leader it gets.
My attempt to understand the puzzle kept returning me to Heart of Darkness – not to the clichés of the headline writers, with their inverted, modernistic interpretations, but back to Conrad’s original meaning.
No man is a caricature, no individual can alone bear responsibility for a nation’s collapse. The disaster Zaire became, the dull political acquiescence of its people, had its roots in a history of extraordinary outside interference, as basic in motivation as it was elevated