In brief
On a yawl at anchor in the Thames, a seaman named Marlow tells four friends about the time he took a job with a Belgian company and went up the Congo to fetch an ivory agent called Kurtz. He finds a trade run on chained labour and rot, and at the end of the river a man of brilliant promise who has set himself up as a god, with heads on stakes around his house. Kurtz dies on the way back. Marlow lies about him to the woman he was to marry. That is the whole story, in about forty thousand words.
The book is two things at once, and both are true. It is one of the fiercest accounts of colonial robbery by a European of its time, drawn from what its author saw. It is also, as Chinua Achebe said in 1975, a book that denies Africans the full humanity on whose behalf it claims outrage. A reader who holds only one of these has not read it.
The Congo Free State
Conrad never names the country or the king. The Congo Free State was recognised at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 as the personal possession of Leopold II of Belgium, under promises of philanthropy and free trade. It was run as a business. Ivory came first; from the 1890s wild rubber made it enormously profitable, and villages were forced to meet quotas under the guns of the state’s army, the Force Publique. Soldiers cut hands from the dead, and sometimes the living, to account for their cartridges. The population fell by a number that is still disputed, with estimates running from over a million to ten million.
This was not hidden. George Washington Williams published an open letter to Leopold in 1890, the year of Conrad’s voyage. Roger Casement, whom Conrad met and liked at Matadi, wrote the British consular report on the rubber regions in 1904, and E. D. Morel’s Congo Reform Association made the scandal international. Morel called Conrad’s story “the most powerful thing written on the subject”. In 1908 Belgium took the colony from the king.
The chain gang, the workers abandoned to die under the trees and the “merry dance of death and trade” are reportage at one remove. Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost (1998) argues that criticism has spent too long on Kurtz’s soul and too little on this accuracy.
The argument
Marlow’s opening line takes the sting of the story and applies it at home. “And this also,” he says of the Thames, “has been one of the dark places of the earth” (Part I). Rome came here and “It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale”, and so it has always been: “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.” Then the catch: “What redeems it is the idea only.”
Kurtz is that idea in person. “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” (Part II), and he goes out as an emissary of progress, carrying a report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs which promises that “we can exert a power for good practically unbounded”. It ends with a scrawled postscript: “Exterminate all the brutes!” The company men are merely greedy. Kurtz is worse because he believed, and the distance from his peroration to his postscript is short.
Marlow keeps faith with “the nightmare of my choice” (Part III), and though he says lies have “a taint of death, a flavour of mortality” (Part I), he tells one in a Brussels drawing room: “The last word he pronounced was—your name” (Part III). It is an act of mercy, and it is also how the idea survives.
Achebe’s charge
In February 1975, in a lecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Chinua Achebe called Heart of Darkness “an offensive and deplorable book” and Conrad a racist: “bloody” in the first version, “thoroughgoing” in the revised text printed in Hopes and Impediments (1988). The lecture, published as “An Image of Africa”, changed how the book is read.
The argument needs stating fairly, because it is stronger than its reputation. Achebe says that Conrad uses Africa as a foil, “the other world”, a place of negations against which Europe can measure its own condition. Africans are a backdrop for one European’s moral crisis: bodies, limbs and eyes that make noises. Achebe points to how rarely they are given language. On only two occasions do they speak English: the crew’s headman saying “Eat ’im!” (Part II) and the manager’s boy announcing “Mistah Kurtz—he dead” (Part III). The fireman who tends the boiler is “an improved specimen” who looks like “a dog in a parody of breeches” (Part II). The woman on the bank, “savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent” (Part III), is given no words on the page, while the white woman in Brussels gets a whole scene and a noble lie.
Achebe’s sharpest reading is of the passage that comes nearest to granting kinship. Marlow, seeing the people on the bank, says that “what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar” (Part II). The kinship is granted as a thrill and a horror, and the travellers are said to be going back through “the night of first ages”. Africa is the European past. People living in the present, with their own histories, politics and art, do not appear, though Achebe pointed out that Fang sculpture was then changing the course of European painting. Marlow also uses the common racial slur of his time throughout, and Achebe would not let that pass as period colour.
The standard reply, made by Cedric Watts in 1983 and many since, is that Achebe confuses Conrad with Marlow, ignoring the frame around him, and that the book’s irony is aimed at the very language Achebe objects to. There is something in this: the grove of death is not written by a man indifferent to suffering. Edward Said took a middle position in Culture and Imperialism (1993): Conrad saw that imperialism was robbery but could not grant the people it enslaved their freedom, even in imagination.
Achebe’s answer to the frame defence was that Conrad supplies no alternative point of view from which to judge Marlow, and that answer has held up well. His later comments narrowed the claim: he said he had not asked anyone to stop admiring the book’s art, only that his reading stand beside the others. A book can be an indictment of empire and also an instance of what it indicts. Caryl Phillips wrote in 2003 that “Achebe is right”, and that what Conrad’s denunciation costs an African reader is the recycling of racist notions of a dark continent. Those who find the novella great, and I do, should not suppose that its greatness answers the charge. Both have to be carried.
The voice
An unnamed narrator on board relays Marlow’s words, and warns us that for Marlow “the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale”. Darkness falls as Marlow talks, until he is reduced to what he says Kurtz was: “A voice. He was very little more than a voice” (Part II).
When the steamer is attacked, Marlow first sees “Sticks, little sticks” flying past him (Part II), and only then realises they are arrows. Ian Watt named this method delayed decoding: the impression comes before the meaning. The heads on the stakes work the same way: “not ornamental but symbolic” (Part III). F. R. Leavis complained in The Great Tradition (1948) about the book’s “adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery”. Achebe saw the same adjectives doing political work.
The people
Marlow
Charles Marlow is Conrad’s recurring teller, also found in “Youth”, Lord Jim and Chance. He is honest, tired and sardonic, with a seaman’s faith in work and rivets, and less detached than he thinks.
Kurtz
We meet him late, as a dying man on a stretcher, all “gift of expression”. The wilderness whispered to him, says Marlow, and the whisper “echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core” (Part III). His last words, “The horror! The horror!”, can be read as a verdict on himself, on Africa or on the whole enterprise; Marlow calls it a moral victory, and the reader need not agree.
How it was made
Joseph Conrad, born Józef Korzeniowski, went to the Congo in 1890, hired by a Belgian trading company. He travelled up the river on the steamer Roi des Belges, briefly took command when the captain fell ill, and carried an agent named Georges-Antoine Klein, who died on board. He left at the end of the year, with his health damaged for good. Klein is one of more than twenty proposed models for Kurtz, among them Arthur Hodister and Léon Rom. In his 1917 note Conrad called the story experience pushed “a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case”.
He wrote it eight years later and it ran in Blackwood’s Magazine in February, March and April 1899, starting in the magazine’s thousandth number. It appeared as a book in Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories in 1902.
Afterlives
T. S. Eliot used “Mistah Kurtz—he dead” as the epigraph to “The Hollow Men” (1925). Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) moved it to Vietnam and kept the voice, the river and the dying god. Sven Lindqvist took Kurtz’s postscript as the title of his Exterminate All the Brutes (1992), and Raoul Peck reused it for a television series in 2021. The most important response is in another genre: Achebe’s own Things Fall Apart (1958), written long before the lecture, supplies the world that Conrad’s river passes by.
How to read it
- Read it twice, the second time watching the Africans. Note each one who appears, what they are doing and what they are allowed to say. The exercise is Achebe’s, and it changes the book.
- Read Achebe’s lecture next. The Norton Critical Edition prints it with the novella.
- Keep the frame in mind. The listeners are a company director, a lawyer and an accountant, and the Director’s only reply is about the tide.
Read next
- Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958). The colonial encounter from the other bank, with language, law and history on it.
- Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (1998). The history behind the story, told as a narrative.