Hochschild’s study demonstrates that, while the crimes and tortures inflicted on the native population were grotesquely horrendous, the greatest damage done to them was the destruction of their institutions, their kinship systems, their customs and their most fundamental dignity. It is not surprising that when, some sixty years later, Belgium gave independence to the Congo in 1960, the ex-colony, in which no local professional infrastructure had been created by the colonising power in almost a century of exploitation, plunged into chaos and civil war. And finally it fell into the hands of General Mobutu, an insane satrap, a worthy successor of Leopold II in his voracity for wealth.
There are not only criminals and victims in King Leopold’s Ghost. There are also, fortunately for humankind, people who offer some redemption, like the black American pastors George Washington Williams and William Sheppard who, when they discovered the true nature of the farcical regime, took immediate steps to denounce to the world the terrible reality of Central Africa. But the two people who, showing extraordinary bravery and perseverance, were mainly responsible for mobilising international public opinion against Leopold II’s butchery in the Congo, were an Irishman, Roger Casement, and a Belgian, Morel. Both deserve the honours of a great novel. The former (who in later years would first be knighted and later executed in Great Britain for participating in a rebellion for the independence of Ireland) was, for a period, the British vice-consul in the Congo. He inundated the Foreign Office with lapidary reports on what was happening there. At the same time, in the customs house in Antwerp, an enquiring and fair-minded official, Morel, began studying, with increasing suspicion, the shipments that were leaving for the Congo and those that were returning from there. What a strange trade it was. What was sent to the Congo was in the main rifles, munitions, whips, machetes and trinkets of no commercial value. From there, by contrast, came valuable cargoes of rubber, ivory and resin. Could one take seriously the propaganda that, thanks to Leopold II, a free trade zone had been created in the heart of Africa that would bring progress and freedom to all Africans?
Morel was not only a fair-minded and perceptive man. He was also an extraordinary communicator. When he discovered the sinister truth, he made it known to his compatriots, skilfully circumventing the barriers erected to keep out the truth of what was happening in the Congo, which were kept in place by intimidation, bribes and censorship. His analyses and articles on the exploitation suffered by the Congolese, and the resulting social and economic depredation, gradually gained an audience and helped to form an association that Hochschild considers to be the first important movement for human rights in the twentieth century. Thanks to the Association for the Reform of the Congo that Morel and Casement founded, Leopold was no longer seen as some mythic civilising force, but rather in his true colours as a genocidal leader. However, by one of those mysteries that should be deciphered one day, what every reasonably well-informed person knew about Leopold II and his grim Congolese adventure when he died in 1909 has now disappeared from public memory. Now no one remembers him as he really was. In his own country he has become an anodyne, inoffensive mummy, who appears in history books, has a number of statues and his own museum, but there is nothing to remind us that he alone caused more suffering in Africa than all the natural tragedies and the wars and revolutions of that unfortunate continent.
II. Konrad Korzeniowski in the Congo
In 1890, the merchant captain Konrad Korzeniowski, Polish by birth and a British national since 1888, could not find a post senior enough for his qualifications in England, and signed a contract in Brussels with one of the branches of the Company of Leopold II, the Société Anonyme Belge that traded in the upper Congo, to serve as a captain on one of the company’s steamboats which navigated the great African river between Kinshasa and Stanley Falls. He was employed by Captain Albert Thys, an executive director of the firm and a close associate of Leopold II, to take command of the Florida, whose previous captain, Freisleben, had been killed by local people.
The future Joseph Conrad took the train to Bordeaux and embarked for Africa on the Ville de Maceio, with the idea of remaining in his new post for three years. He disembarked in Boma at the mouth of the river Congo and from there he travelled the forty miles to Matadi on a small boat, arriving on 13 June 1890. Here he met the open-minded Irishman Roger Casement, with whom he lived for a couple of weeks. He would later write in his diary that of all the people he met in the Congo, Casement was the person he most admired. Through Casement he would doubtless have received detailed information about other horrors taking place there, alongside those that were immediately apparent. From Matadi he left on foot for Kinshasa, accompanied by thirty native bearers with whom he shared adventures and setbacks very similar to those experienced by Charlie Marlow in Heart of Darkness, as he covered the two hundred miles that separated the camp from the Central Station.
In Kinshasa, Conrad was informed by the directors of the Company that instead of boarding the Florida, the boat that he had been asked to captain, but which was being repaired, he would serve as second-in-command on another steamer, the Roi des Belges, under the command of its Swedish captain, Ludwig Koch. The boat’s mission was to go upriver to the camp at Stanley Falls, to pick up an agent of the Company, Georges Antoine Klein, who was seriously ill. Like Kurtz in the novel, Klein died on the return journey to Kinshasa, and Captain Ludwig Koch also fell ill on the journey, so Conrad ended up in charge of the Roi des Belges. Troubled by diarrhoea, disgusted and disillusioned by his Congolese experience, Conrad did not stay the three years in Africa that he had intended, but instead returned to Europe on 4 December 1890. His journey through the hell created by Leopold II therefore lasted just over six months.
He wrote Heart of Darkness nine years later, describing quite faithfully through the character of Marlow, whom it would not be unjust to call his alter ego in the novel, the different stages and developments in his own Congolese adventure. In the original manuscript, there is a sardonic reference to Leopold II (‘a third-rate king’), some geographical references, as well as the authentic names of the Company’s factories and stations along the banks of the river Congo that were later taken out or changed in the novel. Heart of Darkness was published in instalments in February, March and April 1899, in the London review Blackwood’s Magazine, and three years later in a book — Youth: A Narrative; And Two Other Stories — that included two further stories.
III. Heart of Darkness
Conrad would not have been able to write this story without the six months that he spent in the Congo that was being devastated by the Company of Leopold II. But although this experience was the primary material for the novel, which can be read, among many possible readings, as an exorcism of colonialism and racism, Heart of Darkness transcends these historical and social circumstances and becomes an exploration of the roots of humankind, those inner recesses of our being which harbour a desire for destructive irrationality that progress and civilisation might manage to assuage but never eradicate completely. Few stories have managed to express in such a synthetic and captivating manner this evil that resides in the individual and in society. Because the tragedy that Kurtz personifies has to do with both historical and economic institutions corrupted by greed, and also that deep-seated attraction to the ‘fall’, the moral corruption of the human spirit, which Christian religion calls original sin and psychoanalysis calls the death wish.