A real-life Kurtz?
There may be another reason why Conrad scholars have sought models for Kurtz among the perpetrators of specific horrors. It is easier to accept the idea of an individual trader who goes mad and loses all restraint than to accept the idea that the entire scramble for Africa on the part of European powers was not an occasion for restraint. It is easier to blame Kurtz's 'horror' on specific acts of brutality than to acknowledge that the great civilising mission was an excuse for 'robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a grand scale, and men going at it blind – as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness' (50).
This darkness is itself a European import, for Marlow notes that central Africa had become a dark place in the course of his own lifetime: 'It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery – a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness' (52; see also Brantlinger).
It is a convention among Conrad scholars that even though Kurtz 'goes native', natives are oddly exempt from service as models to explain his indulgence in horrors. Kurtz is white, and must therefore be based on white prototypes. But the accounts of missionaries and medical officers suggest a wide range of reference to native practices about which Conrad might well have been informed. Alexander Mackay, a Scottish missionary sent to Buganda by the Church Missionary Society, reported for example that Mtesa, the Kabaka (king) of Buganda,
had a loathsome, incurable disease, and was advised by the witch doctors to resume the practice of kiwendo – human sacrifice – to propitiate the gods. Victims taken at random, unsuspecting peasants bringing in plantains to sell in the capital, were bundled off and held in slave-sticks for the night, then publicly butchered in the morning. Sometimes 2,000 people were killed in a single day. (in Pakenham 302)
Two early German explorers who penetrated into Katanga from Angola described their encounter with a local warlord named Msiri: 'It was Msiri's way of impressing his European visitors to show them the varied collection of human skulls hanging on the trees outside his hut 'like hats on pegs'' (Slade, in Pakenham 400).
The Batetela chief Gongo Lutete displayed an even larger collection at his stockade at Ngandu: 'According to the count of [commandant Francis] Dhanis's medical officer, Captain Sidney Hinde, 'at least 2,000 polished human skulls formed a solid white pavement in front of each loop-holed gateway. Human skulls crowned every post in the stockade' ' (Pakenham 439). Trophy skulls were a waste product of cannibalism, and – as we now know from studies of kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease – the cannibals of Africa would have been wise to forego the consumption of the nerve tissue of their enemies.
It is curious that while great political fanfare was made about the abolition of (Arab) slavery in Africa, relatively little noise was made about the abolition of cannibalism; gentleman cannibals who know the virtue of restraint serve as crew members in Marlow's riverboat. One eats and displays one's defeated enemies, and the white man's designation of all natives as 'enemies' or 'criminals' or 'rebels' constitutes a license to torture and humiliate.
Yet here again, the proper referent for Kurtz is cannibalism on a grand, European scale: back in the sepulchral city, Marlow has a vision of Kurtz as a sick man with an insatiable appetite, whose colonial imperatives amount to cannibalism on an earth-devouring scale: 'I had a vision of him on the stretcher, opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the earth with all its mankind' (155). Lord Salisbury, explaining British colonial policy to the French ambassador in London, cited the proverb that 'l'appétit vient en mangeant' ('appetite comes with eating'; Pakenham 336); and colonial accounts frequently record the complaints of native rulers about the white man who comes to 'eat our land' (cf. Pakenham 413).
Stanley's diaries record an encounter with natives on Lake Tanganyika in 1876, which can be taken as emblematic of the presumption of the European white man in his confrontation with natives, who seek only to protect themselves and their families and to preserve some vestige of human pride, like the rowers Marlow observes from the French steamer, fine and natural fellows who 'wanted no excuse for being there' (61). Stanley recorded the encounter in his own words:
On coming near a village on the west bank of the Kasansagara River, we were forewarned by the female natives flying wildly away loaded with articles, of a rude reception. But approaching nearer we were told by the Wabembe cannibals not to advance unless we desired war. Wishing to test how far they would venture without sufficient provocation, I motioned the boats to advance. From wild gestures, striking spears on the ground, beating the water, and hopping up and down, they turned to stones of such large sise as might well be termed dangerous missiles.
Motioning a halt, we quietly surveyed the natives, watched the rocks flying into the air making deep pits in the water as they fell, like at an entertainment specially got up for our amusement. Not a word, a sign or a movement on our part indicated either wrath or pleasure, until the natives, as if tired, made a pause and regarded each other with encouragement. For my part I remembered the gentle-souled Livingstone and told them, if they were not such fools, I could feel hearty anger, but we had nothing to say to people who treated strangers so rudely without cause.
We tried to make a camp at Kiunyu, Chief Mahonga's land. As we spoke they mocked us. When we asked them if they would sell some grain, they asked us if they were our slaves that they should till their land and sow grain for us. Meanwhile, canoes were launched and criers sent ahead to proclaim that we were coming. The beach was crowded with infuriates and mockers.
Perceiving that a camp was hopeless in this vicinity, we pulled off, but having gone about half a mile, we perceived we were followed by several canoes in some of which we saw spears shaken at us. We halted and made ready, and as they approached still in this hostile fashion, I opened on them with the Winchester Repeating Rifle. Six shots and four deaths were sufficient to quiet the mocking etc. etc. etc. and to establish a different character for ourselves somewhat more respectable, if not more desirable. (Stanley and Nearne, eds., 125; entry for 27 July 1876)
Two early German explorers who penetrated into Katanga from Angola described their encounter with a local warlord named Msiri: 'It was Msiri's way of impressing his European visitors to show them the varied collection of human skulls hanging on the trees outside his hut 'like hats on pegs'' (Slade, in Pakenham 400). The Batetela chief Gongo Lutete displayed an even larger collection at his stockade at Ngandu: 'According to the count of [commandant Francis] Dhanis's medical officer, Captain Sidney Hinde, 'at least 2,000 polished human skulls formed a solid white pavement in front of each loop-holed gateway. Human skulls crowned every post in the stockade' ' (Pakenham 439).
Trophy skulls were a waste product of cannibalism, and – as we now know from studies of kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease – the cannibals of Africa would have been wise to forego the consumption of the nerve tissue of their enemies. It is curious that while great political fanfare was made about the abolition of (Arab) slavery in Africa, relatively little noise was made about the abolition of cannibalism; gentleman cannibals who know the virtue of restraint serve as crew members in Marlow's riverboat. One eats and displays one's defeated enemies, and the white man's designation of all natives as 'enemies' or 'criminals' or 'rebels' constitutes a license to torture and humiliate.
Yet here again, the proper referent for Kurtz is cannibalism on a grand, European scale: back in the sepulchral city, Marlow has a vision of Kurtz as a sick man with an insatiable appetite, whose colonial imperatives amount to cannibalism on an earth-devouring scale: 'I had a vision of him on the stretcher, opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the earth with all its mankind' (155). Lord Salisbury, explaining British colonial policy to the French ambassador in London, cited the proverb that 'l'appétit vient en mangeant' ('appetite comes with eating'; Pakenham 336); and colonial accounts frequently record the complaints of native rulers about the white man who comes to 'eat our land' (cf. Pakenham 413).
Stanley's diaries record an encounter with natives on Lake Tanganyika in 1876, which can be taken as emblematic of the presumption of the European white man in his confrontation with natives, who seek only to protect themselves and their families and to preserve some vestige of human pride, like the rowers Marlow observes from the French steamer, fine and natural fellows who 'wanted no excuse for being there' (61). Stanley recorded the encounter in his own words:
Stanley sees himself here as mild and reasonable, a follower of Livingstone, a man of restraint provoked beyond endurance by the hostile gestures of 'cannibals', 'fools', 'infuriates and mockers'. It seems above all to have been the mockery that he was unable to endure.
Conclusions
In summary, the 'horror' felt by Kurtz is not limited to the specific acts of individual demons of rapacity, nor is it an indictment of Belgian or Francophone colonialism alone; it is not the method that is at fault, but the 'idea'. The quest for prototypes of Kurtz should not distract us from recognising that he embodies the strengths and weaknesses of the very 'idea' by virtue of which Europeans, at least since the glorious days of Drake and the Golden Hind, have claimed the right to possess the globe and consume its riches, to eat the land, 'to devour all the earth with all its mankind'. Kurtz's unrestrained appetite is the mentality of the scramble. When he says 'My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river' (116), it is not because he has gone mad in the heart of darkness, but because he is a European who understands property rights and the law of vae victis, of 'finders keepers, losers weepers'.
Kurtz goes to the Congo not like an anthropologist seeking to understand and appreciate alien cultures, but in order to 'suppress savage customs'. He is thoroughly European in his ambition, his arrogance, and his hypocrisy. On his way out to the Congo, Marlow noted that 'Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary contact with reality. It was paddled by black fellows' whose energetic movement 'was as natural and true as the surf along their coast' (61); but André Gide, following in Conrad's footsteps in 1925, complained that he was unable to escape from the filtering influence of his own culture: 'Surtout je m'aperçois qu'on ne peut y prendre contact réel avec rien; non point que tout y soit factice; mais l'écran de la civilisation s'interpose, et rien n'y entre que tamisé' ('Above all I realise that one cannot make real contact with anything; not that everything there is artificial, but the screen of civilisation interposes itself, and nothing enters without being filtered'; Gide 30).
One can only hope that the filters of political correctness, nationalism, and the scapegoating of individuals will not prevent Conrad scholars from appreciating the timeliness and relevance of Heart of Darkness as a profoundly disturbing reflection on what it means to be civilised and to be European.
