A Reflection on The Book Heart of Darkness

Introduction

Heart of Darkness, a book written by Joseph Conrad, is one of the best books that are related to imperialism and the expeditions that empires undertook to expand their territories and influence through diplomacy or militarism. In a certain way, this book narrates the journey of Joseph Conrad through the Congo River, which is located in the Belgian Congo, a territory that belonged to the Belgian Empire. There, they trafficked ivory and all sorts of materials to commercialize them. Joseph Conrad tells his own story through a character called Marlow, who wanted to travel to the Congo River since he was a child. Also, in the book, I could read how the sailors viewed the jungle and the river with fear and ignorance.

Marlow's Journey

At the beginning of the book, we see Marlow telling his own story to his partners who were with him on the boat. When he was a child, he wanted to go to the Belgian Congo, and when he grew up, he used all his contacts to become the captain of a steamship. Later, he arrived at the Congo River, but he did not know anything about Africa. Despite that, he still wanted to continue his journey. One day, when he was in a settlement, he saw a group of slaves carrying materials to construct a railway track. Those railways were very important in the Congo because of the immense benefit they brought to the Belgian and French colonies. However, to construct railways, the native slaves were supposed to work every hour without a break, and they finished it after many months. If a slave was hurt while working, the soldiers in charge were required to kill him because, for them, he was useless. The only way he would become useful was by trying to find his tribe, but he would not succeed. This is a clear example of the brutality and violence against Africans, and I think such treatments were unacceptable because the natives were also human beings and they should have had rights. “They died slowly... That was clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly, only black shadows of illness and exhaustion, that lay confusedly in the greenish darkness” (Conrad, 1902, p. 27). Marlow, the main character, said that when he found a lot of black malnourished people abandoned by their owners around the river for being useless to them. They died slowly because there was nothing to eat, and some of them were not born in their tribe and grew up with Europeans. This caused that none of them knew how to use any kind of weapon to hunt. According to Conrad’s words, he felt a kind of empathy, compassion, and pity for the Africans because they did not know what freedom was. The slaves spent all their lives living with strangers and doing what they were ordered, but they were not at fault for being mistreated; it was destiny and a bigger cause. It should be noted that in 1899, there were laws that “protected” the slaves with contracts. These laws said that every month, the owners must deliver 4 kilograms of rubber to their slave people. The population must act in peace and accept the rubber, but if somebody tried to act violently, the owners were allowed to use violence and their weapons. In 1865, Leopold II said that all regions that were not civilized should be forced to work. Somebody asked, “Why?” and he stated two points: the first one said that the people should value the work and security by paying taxes to the conquerors; the second one said that indigenous people should value the habit of work, so in that way, the owners could be rewarded by their work. In a few words, those statements said that the natives or indigenous people were only destined to work for the conquerors and to provide them with all the luxuries that they wanted.

Mr. Kurtz and the Ivory Trade

As I mentioned before, the Belgian Empire trafficked a lot of ivory, and in this activity, there were some recognized traffickers such as Mr. Kurtz. Mr. Kurtz was an imaginary person created by Conrad through several famous people. When he was traveling across the Congo River, he met an agent of the company who was sick with dysentery (a common disease in Africa), and unfortunately, he was going to die after three days. In the story, Marlow met Kurtz when he was sick, and he died on the journey after three days. Arthur Eugene Constant was a trafficker of ivory who extracted it in a fancy and apparently a little violent way. His enemies considered that he related too much with the natives, and this also occurs with Mr. Kurtz. Guillaume Van Kerckhoven and Leon Rom collected heads, and Rom put them on stakes around his house. As you can see in the reading, Kurtz did the same but with the rebels of the tribe he was related to. To summarize, Kurtz was a trafficker who cared about the natives, but he did not lose the purpose of extracting ivory.

The Central Settlement Incident

In the book, you can see a scene in which Marlow and his crew were in the central settlement of the Belgian Congo, and suddenly the steamship, on which Marlow was the captain, crashed with rocks and broke apart. This situation caused a lot of problems for Marlow because the repairs to the boat required a lot of time and effort. Since the slaves were responsible for repairing the ship, they did not know how to repair it because they were not engineers, or at least they did not know how to read. Another problem related to the repair is that the materials Marlow needed arrived many months later, and without the materials, the slaves could not repair the ship.

The Treatment of Natives

Something that caught my attention was that only a few cared about the natives, like Mr. Kurtz or Marlow; the rest saw them as enemies and animals. One objective of the book is to make the reader see that deep in the heart, a person could have an evil side or a good side. The characters, in their majority, showed an evil side because the only thing they cared about was themselves. Not only were the slaves discriminated against, but also the privates and the sailors. This is a problem that we live with today, and it is called hypocrisy. You think that a person is good, kind, and all sorts of things, but deep in his heart, he or she has an evil side or talks wrong things about you behind your back.

Methods of Punishment

Previously, I talked about a way of punishing the slaves, but there is another method called whipping through the chicotte, a whip made of dried skin from a hippopotamus that left terrible wounds on the victim. Over time, the slave could die. This, for me, was brutal because such violence was unnecessary, even for small things and especially for bigger ones. As a conclusion, I think that the slavery imposed by the conquerors of the empires on the Africans was a cruel and violent practice. They were forced to do hard work that required a lot of effort and strength, and women were used for other activities like cooking or being maids. They did not have medical attention, which caused the death of thousands. They did not have freedom, and they worked many hours under the sun, causing damage to their skin.

Conclusion

It also felt inhuman to me that they had to be separated from their families, forced to Europe in such bad conditions, and used as a workforce, marked like animals to control them. What is worst for me is that they were punished, throwing away the hope of being free and also discarding the value they deserved. At that point, the soldiers did not respect their rights, but the saddest thing is that nowadays, racism is still present.