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A Theme of Imperialism in The Heart of Darkness

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Words: 1303 |

Pages: 3|

7 min read

Published: Sep 19, 2019

Words: 1303|Pages: 3|7 min read

Published: Sep 19, 2019

Imperialism can be defined as a policy that helped foreign countries to expand his influence and territory by militarism or diplomacy. As we saw in the class of World History this type of government was different from the colonialism because it force the natives to acquire their costumes, traditions and also beliefs of the foreign countries. In my opinion the book “Heart of the Darkness” written by Joseph Conrad can show us both cases, since the French and Belgium empire forced the Africans to acquire their own costumes and activities using the violence and likewise they could expand his territory and also commerce with products that they could only be found there, like the ivory.

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So according to the facts previously mentioned I am going to talk about some parts of the reading that explain the situation in which the natives were and also the violence that the outlandish implemented but besides that I am going to talk about a little of how the sailors saw the jungle of Africa in his own perspective.

Marlow was a captain of a steam ship that transported ivory from the center of Africa, called Belgian Congo, to the empires of France and Belgium, in order to do that they spend several months only to arrive to the settlements where the traffickers of ivory were located. During those months the crew must have to do stops across the river where some settlements were built. The imperialism caused in some way that the empires among themselves did not know the language of their neighbors but in the other hand the Africans did know the language of their conquerors. Joseph Conrad in his work said: “I could not believe my eyes! They were encrypted! Yes, they looked like encryption” referring to the notes that Marlow found in a book in an abandoned house, but when Marlow, the character who said that, knew the author of that notes he found out that those “encryptions” in fact were Russian (that was also in that time a language not so common).

It is important to know that not every native of Africa was “domesticated”, there were a lot of tribes that still were continue their normal life but hiding themselves from the foreigners because they did not wanted to acquire the traditions or to be slaves. Those natives were savage but sometimes they could have been seduced by the gifts from the traffickers or by their treats or knowledge. Mr. Kurtz, a trafficker of ivory, since the beginning of his trip hewanted to vindicate a group of savages and he success after a few months. The tribe, that Mr. Kurtz vindicated, adored him and also he felt like a part of the tribe but without losing his objective that was obtaining ivory. A thing that I did not mentioned is that Mr. Kurtz was the best trafficker on the French empire but some people did not like his methods and wanted him dead.Most of the seafarers did not know all the Belgian Congo and when somebody got deep on the jungles (in the book it is commonly named the center of the jungle as the heart of the darkness) they got scared and they did not know what would happen to them. The imperialism caused part of that ignorance because all the territories of Africa were divided by the European countries so every country has their own territories and they could not enter into other territories. Also the seafarers did not know at all the Belgian Congo because some zones were dangerous since there were savage tribes and they could attack the ships and the crew.

There is a situation on the book that left me intrigued, almost at the end of the story when Marlow arrives to the settlement where Mr. Kurtz was, he saw in the distance a lot of buried stakes and at the top it seems like there was a type of ornament but later when he got closer he saw that the “ornaments” were in fact the heads of the rebels of the tribe. It seems like a little creepy but real because that tribe was conservative and it conserve its traditions if somebody dared to rebel. As you can see the violence not only occur among white and black people but also between natives, but there is a huge difference since the white people thought that they were superiors and the natives were not though that.

As I understood, there were like three types of people in the steam ship: the pilgrims, the black domesticated people and the cannibals; the first ones were the people who were in charge of the ship and also they were in charge of the black domesticated people and the cannibals. The rest of the crew (black people) helped in a certain way with the activities of the ship, the foreigners educate them to make all kind of activities and spend the rest of his live in ships without payment. An interesting thing about the cannibals that were on board is that they could control the hungry to eat meat whether it was human or animal flesh. In some part of the book, Marlow said how was that possible if they were cannibals by nature but the same happen with the normal people because they can control savage habits throughambitions, goals or purposes so with that logic the cannibals could control the hungry by waiting patiently when the ship stop so they could hunt some animal or eat the dead bodies of the soldiers or another option (they did this on the book) was to take a dead animal to the ship even if it was rotten and even if the sailors got upset by the stench.There is a part on the book where Marlow says: “I was thinking of remote times, when the Romans first came to these places, nineteen centuries ago…”, if you start to analyze that comment and think about the romans it result that Roma was an empire and in fact a Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom said once: “It has been alleged that Africa is developing under a natural incapacity for civilization… Permit to apply this principle to Africa, and then I would like to know why it cannot be applied also to an ancient and uncivilized Britain. Perhaps some Roman senator predicted with the same crudeness: ‘There is a people destined to never be free, a people depressed by the hand of nature below the level of the human species, and created to provide slaves for the rest of the world’… We were once so dark among the nations of the earth, so diminished in our morality, so wild in our ways, so degraded in our understanding as those unfortunate Africans are today” so in sum what William Pitt was trying to say is that the people of Africa is destined to provide the slaves to the rest of the world especially for the empires who conquered his own territory. According to Robert Hampson the slaves of Africa were in England before the English arrived in Africa due to the Romans in the 45 b.C. had those slaves in his army.

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To sum up, this book written by Joseph Conrad seems to me like a little confused because it had a lot of metaphors and I tried so hard to understand each one of them but in general it was interesting because I learned a little bit more about what was the imperialism and the way in which that system was used. I believe that the violence that was used against the Africans was over exaggerated because in a part of the book when they become useless they were liberated but the Africans did not know where to go and later they die.

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Dr. Charlotte Jacobson

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A Theme of Imperialism in the Heart of Darkness. (2019, August 27). GradesFixer. Retrieved March 29, 2024, from https://gradesfixer.com/free-essay-examples/analysis-of-heart-of-the-darkness-written-by-joseph-conrad/
“A Theme of Imperialism in the Heart of Darkness.” GradesFixer, 27 Aug. 2019, gradesfixer.com/free-essay-examples/analysis-of-heart-of-the-darkness-written-by-joseph-conrad/
A Theme of Imperialism in the Heart of Darkness. [online]. Available at: <https://gradesfixer.com/free-essay-examples/analysis-of-heart-of-the-darkness-written-by-joseph-conrad/> [Accessed 29 Mar. 2024].
A Theme of Imperialism in the Heart of Darkness [Internet]. GradesFixer. 2019 Aug 27 [cited 2024 Mar 29]. Available from: https://gradesfixer.com/free-essay-examples/analysis-of-heart-of-the-darkness-written-by-joseph-conrad/
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