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Who are Savages between Europeans and Africans? An Open Heart Surgery of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

The concept of a ‘savage/ civilized’ dichotomy is very controversial in different area of studies. In English, the OED defines “uncivilized” as “existing in the lowest stage of culture”. And the term ‘savage’ has performed an essential service in Eurocentric epistemologies and imperial/ colonial ideologies. In “An Image of Africa”, Chinua Achebe, citing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, notes how Africa is used by the West to define and establish its own superiority as a “civilized” culture against the ‘darkness” of a “primitive” Africa. Achebe also entitles Conrad as “a bloody racist” for his way of representing Africa. However, it is noteworthy that Conrad has represented ironically the white European people as civilized, while the black people of the Dark Continent Africa have been portrayed as savage. In fact, he has dismantled how the colonizers were doing and how the colonized were reacting during British colonial exploration, and how evil was conquering civilization with savagery. Thus, a bitter irony lies in the fact that the people who look apparently civilized in the novel are most savage in reality. In fact, power, jealousy and greed for ivory or money have metamorphosed them into corrupt, monstrous, brutal animals. So, Conrad finds in the binary image of ‘civilization and savagery’ a powerful tool for the radical and disturbing critique of our easily assumed cultural norms: “What are the criteria of civility and savagery? Are the so called European really civilized and the Africans really savage?”

To begin with the aspect of colonial motive, almost all the characters in Marlow’s tale take part in the colonialist enterprise for selfish purposes. The narrator does not realise that by pointing to the two symbols of that enterprise, “the sword” and “the torch” (p.19), he is actually referring to brutal forces and to the negation of the native culture by the so called light of civilization. His aunt is pleased with herself for helping to send Marlow to Africa as one of the ‘workers’ and as an ‘emissary of light’. She subscribes entirely to the view that the motive behind colonialism is to civilize the conquered people, ‘weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways’. What Marlow ironically calls ‘the work!’ is an irrational and meaningless violation of the land and its people. The transplantation of the trappings of white civilization (the boiler and the railway-truck) and of a type of behaviour specific to it (the blasting on the hillside and so on) seems to make no sense here. And, no effort is made by the invaders to understand the alien population that they exploit as “raw matter” (p.30). For instance, Marlow’s travelling companion tells him that ‘of course’ (p.35) he has come here to make money, and the agents of the manager have turned ivory into a god. In the meantime, instead of turning his station into ‘a centre… for humanizing, improving, instructing’ (p.48), the central figure Kurtz has given in to the ‘fascination of the abomination’ (p.21) as the human heads on the poles around his house indicate. In fact, the Europeans have set themselves in Congo as the saviour and light bringer, but ironically they are doing nothing beneficial for the natives other than suppressing, oppressing and degrading them.

As for the politics of representation, the words used to describe the black African ­– ‘shapes’, ‘bundles of acute angles’, ‘phantoms’– eloquently express the fact that these men have been reduced to mere objects, squeezed out of life through hard labour, then discarded. Further, Marlow’s insistence on blackness, disease and death indicates that it is not light but darkness the white men have brought with them, unless it be the false light radiated by the accountant.

A narrator cum important character Marlow’s first close contact with the natives is at the Company Station and his first impression is one of horrors at their misery and wretchedness. There are powerful scenes, heightened in their effect by a sinister background of aggressive, futile activity by the colonialists — upon the so called criminals, iron-collared and chained, whose ribs and joints were visible ‘like knots in a rope’, and the ‘black shadows of disease and starvation’ who have withdrawn to the inferno- like green gloom of the trees to die. And it is ivory, the beautiful luxury of obsessed civilized men, which is the root of all evil against these so called savages. In Conrad’s words:

They were dying slowly- it was very clear. They were not enemies… not criminals… nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom… lost in uncongenial surrounding, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest. (Penguin: 44)

Here, Marlow remarks that he had previously seen the devil of violence, the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire, but that now he was seeing the ‘devil of rapacious and pitiless folly’. Now, it is obvious that the whites’ indifference is responsible for such states of the blacks, and it conveys to us the callousness of the so-called civilized colonizers towards the so-called savage colonized. At one point, Marlow sees a warship anchored off the coast and firing its guns without having any target in view. He feels that there is a touch of insanity in what the warship is doing. Marlow also feels the need to tackle the darkness, and through this lack of moral equipment and greed for money and power, is unable to cope with the forces of savagery and malevolence within him that the wilderness brings out.

Lust for power and wealth corrupts humanity to a great extent and reduces into savagery. Mr. Kurtz, an agent of the civilized, lacked restraint in the gratification of his lusts. Similarly, the ‘reclaimed’ or ‘detribalized’ native helmsman has no restraint, and so is killed. In fact, nobody in the story has any restraint except the most savage of all men, the half-starved cannibals on board the steamer who restrain themselves from tucking into the pilgrims. However, a criticism lies in the negative attitude of Marlow towards the natives as ‘cannibals’, because there is no evidence of their eating human flesh. Conrad is often accused to be a racist for conferring the cannibalistic expression in the mouth of the African slaves:

“Catch ‘im,” he snapped, with a bloodshot widening of his eyes and a flash of sharp white teeth- “catch ‘im. Give ‘im to us.” “To you, eh?” I asked; “what would you do with them?” “Eat ‘im!” he said curtly. (786)

Not only that, the whites are absolutely unconcerned about the welfare of the blacks without whose labour and toil their steamer could not go ahead at all. Since Marlow is from civilized Europe, naturally his attitudes towards the natives are somehow brutal. For instance, when he finds the helmsman dying, he does nothing to help him but throws the dead body into the river; and brutally remarks: “During life he was a second class worker, but now he might be a first class food for the fishes”.

Again, Mr. Kurtz, who has allegedly ‘civilized’ the savage natives and brought them education, is metonymising the decay and corruption of the colonial imperialists. His appetite for power leads him to sell his soul for ivory business. So, he deserves facing the horrors at his eleventh hour. And, this is his ultimate dehumanization. He, being a supreme intellectual power and representative of the forces of civilization in Congo, in fact, instigates and partakes in unspeakably savage rites. The imperialists’ self appointed duty to govern and ‘civilize’ non-white societies prompts Kurtz to write a 17 page report on the ‘Suppression of Savage Customs’ to the society that concludes with the exhortation: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’. But his degradation is legitimized as the influence of barbaric Africa.

However, the civilizing venture proves fickle for both the society whose customs are overthrown and the one whose morals are sacrificed in the name of conquest. In fact, these ventures are intended to enhance European wealth and power, but the by-products are the exploitations of the native population and the moral deterioration of the traders. Thus, by using the weakness of blacks, the powerful whites exploit them in many ways to make themselves more powerful. They use the natives only as their slaves for their own purposes. But after all, they will return to their own country with ivories from this dark-continent and the natives will be more savage. In this way, the actual savagery hides under the cloak of ‘civilization’. Meanwhile, there is also a hint of evil in Marlow’s reference to the city of Brussels as a ‘whited sepulchre’, meaning a place which is outwardly pleasant and righteous; but inwardly corrupt and evil.

To some critics, Mr. Kurtz represents utter savagery as an individual civilized. He presides over the natives’ midnight dances which always end with ‘unspeakable rites’. This means that he has begun to take pleasure in human sacrifice, in the shedding of the blood of human beings, in sexual orgies, in sexual perversions, and in similar other monstrous passions. Thus, he has begun to occupy a high place among the devils of the land. ‘All Europe’, in Marlow’s words, ‘contributed to the making of Kurtz’. In this way, Marlow exposes a discrepancy between the Europeans’ words, particularly their public utterances, and their actions; which reveals the failure and perversion of white civilization to put its ideas into practice. Gradually, white civilization has been tested and found wanting. In other words, Marlow systematically undermines the destructive role of white civilization, exposing its shortcomings and deceptions; while at the same time, by calling Africa and its people an ‘enigma’, he recognizes that they have a specific character which the white men should try to understand. In fact, what Marlow learns about the isolated moral values in Congo, becomes the measure of the hypocrisy and false idealism of European civilization. And, the behaviour of the white men in Africa becomes worse than the cannibalism of the black men. That is, the latter adhere to an aboriginal existence which is natural to him. The Europeans on the other hand, unable to identify with the African environment, become hollow men, empty of humanity; hence, unnaturally savage.

It is pathetic that the whites treat the blacks as animals for their physical features and they are portrayed as ant-like being without human qualities. Further, they are like silent, naked robots to function for the white people since their minds are captured by the intruders’ gun power. By this process of dehumanizing the blacks, the whites are trying to glorify and establish their own ‘superior identity’ in the world. Indeed, the Africans are depicted with all the negative associations to assert the hegemony of the Europeans.

It is necessary to mention that Conrad evidently believes that there is much evil in the African savages. He certainly does not hold up them to be free from cruelty and violence. So he does not believe in the existence of the ‘noble savage’. And, the barbarian customs of the savages are certainly horrifying to him. So, he warns that the western people should beware of falling a prey to the barbarism of the savages whom they conquer. Of course, Conrad depicts the savages in a favourable light too, but he is fully alive to the obnoxious customs of the savages and warns the civilized people against the menace of those customs.

According to Marlow, when the natives are represented at all, they are seen as a single mass of savages, engaged in incomprehensible rituals or combative behaviour. And, Africa is used ‘as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity’.  Moreover, the novel assimilates the stereotype of primitive savagery–the black as animal, as barely human body without intellect and the European cultural stereotypes. Now, the political theme of colonizer versus colonized is displaced by a different ‘couple’- civilized versus savage. Even the master/slave structure of power which has characterized the colonizer/colonized relationship has not been abandoned in Marlow’s perception. And, this relationship of colonizer to colonize is one of the dominant processions. The colonizer assumes, he owns and controls the colonized space and can use its indigenous inhabitants as he wishes.

Now comes the issue of ‘intertextuality’ or ‘discourse’ regarding the history of a system of representation: Conrad’s novel draws heavily upon a large body of ‘cultural texts’ rich in images and assumptions about Africa and the African as primitive which pervaded the mid and late nineteenth century European culture. Here, ‘cultural texts’ refer to different sorts of media via which Africa and the African were being represented for European understanding and ‘consumption’ in ways which produced and endorsed stereotypic images of this ‘other’ or ‘savage’. Thus, they have been injecting their propaganda in our mind till today to make their evil scheme successful. In this novel, the qualities which Conrad had attributed to the ‘savages’ are shared by the ‘civilized’. He thus critically undermines the ‘progressive’ thrust of the Darwinian view of evolutionary social development by suggesting that the ‘civilized’ is nothing more than the ‘primitive’ dressed up in ‘pretty rags- rags that would fly off at the first good shake’ (p.69). Looking at the savages, the truth and dark underside of the so called civilized themselves can be seen, stripped of the ‘cloak’ of time.

From cultural perspective, the natives’ weird incantations and drum beats work as the brutal instincts which drive ‘civilized’ Kurtz into the wilderness. In sum, the binary opposition ‘civilized/savage’ is radically questioned by the text. In Anthony Fothergil’s views on Heart of Darkness:

If the black savage doesn’t actually exist, it has to be invented by the European to define not the alien ‘darkness’ but the European self. Whether radical or complacent, the concept ‘European’ entails and needs the concept ‘savage’, which paradoxically reaffirms ethnocentricity. On the complacent Darwinian ‘progressive’ view, the European is defined via negation- the European civilized is what the savage is not (and vice versa). (p.83)

But the fact is- “However mysterious and inscrutable, savagery is not something so utterly alien that it has no connection with European men. On the contrary, the wilderness mirrors what is present and lurking beneath the skin of civilized people were they but to know and acknowledge it”. (Fothergil: 84)

Therefore, Kurtz’s last cry ‘horror! horror!’ can be his recoil from European brutality in Africa and thus, a judgement on failure of white civilization. We find deadness and illusory greatness of Western civilization in this novella.

To conclude, as a central theme the binary image of ‘civilization and savagery’ raises a quite far-reaching issue in this work. Through Heart of Darkness, Conrad in a way questions the values of white civilization and the desirability of its transplantation to what were then considered as ‘primitive’ countries. Here, the so-called civilized people are depicted as greedy monsters out to suck the blood of the backward (savage!) people of the earth and hardly giving any evidence of realizing what has come to be known as the white men’s burden. After all, the colonial greed and oppression of the story, the vast gap between civilized people’s good intentions, high ideals and what they actually do–still have a horrible relevance. And the darkness, as Marlow finally has seen it, is all around us and inside us. But the problem is–who has the restraint necessary to ‘tackle’ it? Above all, the novella relies heavily and unconsciously on the European cultural stereotypes of the ‘savage’, dealing with ethnocentric cultural representations of the ‘other’ which are, after all, historical and political. Thereby, the dispute over whether Conrad is a “racist” (Achebe) or not, is overshadowed by his critical insight in using ‘savagery’ as a metaphor for the hierarchized relationship between Europe and Africa.

 

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. Hopes and Impediments. London and New York: Doubleday, 1988.

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies.

London and New York: Routledge, 2004.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: Penguin, 1989.

Fothergil, Anthony. “‘Civilization’ and ‘Savagery’: Marlow Imagining the Other”, Heart of Darkness. New Delhi: Viva Books, 2003.

 

About the Author

Lecturer in English, Green University of Bangladesh

Former Lecturer, Darul Ihsan University, Bangladesh

E-mail: ruman31@yahoo.com

+8801722198344.

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