King Leopold's Ghost: The Plunder of the Congo and the Twentieth Century's First Great International Human Rights Movement

The history of central Africa before the European arrival was as filled with wars and conquests as Europe's own, and even during Leopold's rule not all the Congo's violence was between colonizer and colonized. Because so many Congo peoples had earlier fought among themselves, the Force Publique was often able to ally itself with one ethnic group to defeat another. But sooner or later the first group found itself subdued as well.

Once, in his later years, while he was talking in his study with several Cabinet ministers, his nephew and heir apparent, Prince Albert, opened a window, and a draft blew some papers onto the floor. Leopold ordered Albert to pick them up. "Let him do it," the king said to one of the ministers, who had hastily offered to do so instead. "A future constitutional monarch must learn to stoop."
But in the Congo there was no stooping; Leopold's power was absolute.

Africans in the Congo, meanwhile, were singing very different songs. A missionary transcribed this one:O mother, how unfortunate we are!... But the sun will kill the white man, But the moon will kill the white man, But the sorcerer will kill the white man, But the tiger will kill the white man, But the crocodile will kill the white man, But the elephant will kill the white man, But the river will kill the white man.

These were years when, to the distress of many a young male European, Europe was at peace. For a young man looking for battle, especially battle against a poorly armed enemy, the Congo was the place to go. For a white man, the Congo was also a place to get rich and to wield power. As a district commissioner, you might be running a district as big as all of Holland or Belgium.

We do not know whether Rom was already acting out any of these dreams of power, murder, and glory when Conrad passed through Leopoldville in 1890 or whether he only talked of them. Whatever the case, the moral landscape of Heart of Darkness and the shadowy figure at its center are the creations not just of a novelist but of an open-eyed observer who caught the spirit of a time and place with piercing accuracy.

All these illusions are embodied in the character of Kurtz. He is both a murderous head collector and an intellectual, "an emissary of ... science and progress."

However laden it is with Victorian racism, Heart of Darkness remains the greatest portrait in fiction of Europeans in the Scramble for Africa.

In describing the caravans of porters that walked this trail, Marlow gives a crisp summary of the Leopoldian economy: "a stream of ... rubbishy cottons, beads, and brass-wire set into the depths of darkness and in return came a precious trickle of ivory." In 1890, this was still the colony's most prized commodity.

After brooding about his Congo experience for eight years, Conrad transformed it into Heart of Darkness, probably the most widely reprinted short novel in English.