That is why the two of them are immortal, and why four hundred years after they were first brought into the world by Cervantes, they continue to ride on, relentlessly, without losing heart. Through La Mancha, Aragon, Catalonia, Europe, America and the whole world. And there they are still, in the rain, the roaring thunder, the burning sun, where the stars shine in the great silence of the polar night, or in the desert, or in the jungle thickets, arguing, observing and having different interpretations of everything that they encounter or hear, but, despite this disagreement, needing each other more and more, indissolubly linked in that strange alliance that is between dreaming and waking, reality and the ideal, life and death, spirit and flesh, fiction and life. They are two unmistakable figures in literary history, the one long and lofty like a Gothic arch, the other stout and short, two attitudes, two ambitions, two ways of seeing. But in the distance, in our memories as readers of their fictional epic journeys, they join together and meld with each other and become ‘a single shadow’, like the couple in the poem by José Asunción Silva, that depicts our human existence in all its contradictory and fascinating truth.
Madrid, September 2004
Heart of Darkness
The Roots of Humankind
I. The Congo of Leopold II
On a plane journey, the historian Adam Hochschild found a quotation from Mark Twain in which the author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn asserted that the regime imposed in the Free State of the Congo between 1885 and 1906 by Leopold II, the King of the Belgians who died in 1909, had exterminated between five and eight million of the native inhabitants. Disconcerted, and with his curiosity aroused, he began an investigation that, many years later, would culminate in King Leopold’s Ghost, an outstanding document on the cruelty and greed that drove the European colonial adventure in Africa. The information contained in the book and the conclusions that it reaches greatly enrich our reading of Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece, Heart of Darkness, which was set in that country just at the time when the Belgian Company of Leopold II — who must rate alongside Hitler and Stalin as one of the bloodiest political criminals of the twentieth century — was perpetrating the worst of its insanities.
Leopold II was an obscenity of a human being; but he was also cultured, intelligent and creative. He planned his Congolese operation as a great economic and political enterprise designed to make him both a monarch and a very powerful businessman, with a fortune and an industrial and commercial network so vast that he would be in a position to influence political life and development in the rest of the world. His Central African colony, the Congo, which was the size of half of western Europe, was his personal property until 1906, when pressure from various governments, and from public opinion that had been alerted to his monstrous crimes, forced him to cede the territory to the Belgian state. It was also an astute public relations exercise. He invested considerable sums in bribing journalists, politicians, bureaucrats, military men, lobbyists and church officials across three continents to put in place a massive smokescreen that would make the world believe that his Congolese adventure had the humanitarian and Christian aim of saving the Congolese from the Arab slave traders who raided their villages. With his sponsorship, lectures and congresses were organised that attracted intellectuals — mercenaries without scruples, both naive and stupid — and many priests to discuss the most practical means of taking civilisation and the Gospels to the cannibals in Africa. For a number of years, this Goebbels-style propaganda was effective. Leopold II was decorated, praised by religious groups and the press, and was considered a redeemer of black Africans.
Behind this imposture the reality was different. Millions of Congolese were subjected to iniquitous exploitation in order to fulfil the quotas on rubber, ivory and resin extraction that the Company imposed on villages, families and individuals. The Company had a military organisation and abused the workers to such an extent that, in comparison, the former Arab slave traders must have seemed like angels. They worked with no fixed hours and without payment, terrified at the constant threat of mutilation and death. The physical and mental punishments became sadistically refined: anyone not reaching their quota had a hand or a foot cut off. Dilatory villages were sacked and burned in punitive expeditions that kept the population cowed and thus curbed runaways and attempts at rebellion. To keep families completely submissive, the Company (it was just one company, hidden behind a dense thicket of different enterprises) kept in their custody either the mother or one of the children. As it had few overheads — it did not pay wages and its only real expense was arming uniformed bandits to keep order — its profits were fabulous. As he had set out to be, Leopold II became one of the richest men in the world.
Adam Hochschild calculates, persuasively, that the Congolese population was reduced by half in the twenty-one years that the outrages of Leopold II continued. When the Free State of the Congo passed to the Belgian state in 1906, even though many crimes were still being committed and the merciless exploitation of the native population was maintained, conditions did improve quite considerably. Had that system continued, it is in the realms of possibility that these people might have been completely wiped out.