1890 In his ‘personal record’, published in 1912, Joseph Conrad recalls ‘imagining Africa’ in his childhood (he was then Teodor Korzeniowski, living with his exiled Polish family in Russia):
It was in 1868, when nine years or thereabouts, that while looking at a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on the blank space then representing the unsolved mystery of that continent, I said to myself with absolute assurance and amazing audacity which are no longer in my character now:
‘When I grow up I shall go there.’
Conrad was 33 years grown up when he finally entered the white space of the heart-shaped ‘dark continent’. He had the year before received his only command as a (British) mariner and – while on shore – had begun writing his first novel, Almayer’s Folly. In May 1890, he made his first visit to Poland in sixteen years. It was a period of multiple transitions for him. He was between careers, between countries, in the middle years of his life.
The circumstances that brought him to the Belgian Congo in June 1890 are explained in a letter to his uncle Aleksander:
I am now more less under contract to the ‘Société Belge du Haut Congo’ to be master of one of its river steamers … when [they] will send me to Africa, I do not yet know; it will probably be in May [1890].
As Zdzislaw Najder, the editor of Conrad’s Congo Diary, records:
Conrad’s stay in Congo (12 June–4 December 1890) is one of the most important periods of his life … He left Europe full of energy and thrilling expectations, with ideas about a ‘civilizing mission’. He returned gravely ill, never to regain fully his good health, disillusioned, with memories to be used later in his most famous story, Heart of Darkness.
Conrad put it more trenchantly. Before he went to the Congo he was, he said, an ‘animal’. The experience made him a human being – and, one might speculate, the novelist he later became.
Conrad’s Congo experience is, thinly veiled (with careful anonymities as to employers and employees of the Société Belge du Haut Congo), transmuted into Charlie Marlow’s experiences in Heart of Darkness, published (serially) in Blackwood’s Magazine nine years later.
The work is, as Najder says, his most ‘famous’. Arguably concentration on it has siphoned off attention to other, full-length works (such as Nostromo) which, literary criticism would aver, are even worthier of attention than this novella. Over the last 30 years, however, Heart of Darkness has become notorious as well as famous. For decades in the 20th century the work was prescribed as an exemplary text on the iniquities of racism, as filtered through Conrad’s liberal sensitivity. This comfortable view was contradicted, violently, by the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, initially in a lecture at Amherst College on 18 February 1975, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’. ‘Conrad’, Achebe observed:
was born in 1857, the very year in which the first Anglican missionaries were arriving among my own people in Nigeria. It was certainly not his fault that he lived his life at a time when the reputation of the black man was at a particularly low level. But even after due allowances have been made for all the influences of contemporary prejudice on his sensibility there remains still in Conrad’s attitude a residue of antipathy to black people which his peculiar psychology alone can explain. His own account of his first encounter with a black man is very revealing:
A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days. Of the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards.
Certainly Conrad had a problem with niggers.
Conrad, Achebe concluded, was, on the evidence of Heart of Darkness, a ‘bloody racist’.
Achebe’s revisionist verdict provoked critical disagreement, fierce defences of Conrad’s integrity, and, for the novel itself, an ambiguous place in the standard ‘Great Books’ courses in Britain and America. In one of the periodic outbursts of student rebellion at Stanford University in the 1980s, one placard read: ‘Read Heart of Darkness; Get your Racist Education here.’