In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the dangers of imperialism - and the line between man and beast - are explored in detail, through the story of Charlie Marlow and his encounters with Mr. Kurtz. The place and the right of civilized man to command and control other cultures that are less technologically advanced is explored, as is the transition of men between good and evil. While many physical objects are used in literature to denote certain things, Conrad's use of the Africans in his book constitutes, just as easily, the same narrative and thematic purpose of an object. To that end, the fact that Kurtz and the other whites in the book, including Marlow, use and treat Africans as objects is indicative of their inherent feelings of mastery over them, and their imperialistic desire to see themselves as above other races.
The treatment of the African as an object is largely indicative of the colonialist and imperialistic attitudes put forth by Conrad in the writing of this book: Africans, whenever they are shown or discussed, are noted as savages - unintelligent, imbecilic, and overall ignorant of the sophisticated nature of modern European man.
Ivory seems to be the overall goal of the white man, and Africans are part of the means by which this precious material is cultivated. When Marlow first arrives at the Central Station, he marvels at just how preoccupied everyone is to gather this miracle material:
“The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I’ve never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.” (Conrad 60).
Marlow's first glimpses of the native villages help to cement his inability to consider them as human at all; in fact, he suspects that they are simply not able to qualify for the term:
“It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—the suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend. And why not?” (Conrad 97).
This 'dim suspicion' of meaning that Marlow describes, attributing it to some strange fog of comprehension in the innate savagery of man, is the closest Marlow truly comes to treating them like humans. However, he cannot quite make that leap into true understanding and acknowledgement of their humanity, due to their 'ugly' behavior. He never questions whether or not he might be equal to them - just that he may never understand the strange goings-on that he sees in the villages. In many ways, this description of people as 'wild and passionate,' as a barometer for finding things inhuman, is an interesting bit of irony presented in Conrad's novel - the white men, who are stiff, civilized and logical, consider themselves to be less of an object than the primitives they find, despite their behavior being considered much more 'alive' than perhaps their own.
The other characters of the book carry similarly disgusting and dehumanizing attitudes toward savages, making Marlow's and Kurtz's opinions far from the fringe when it comes to treatment of the African natives. When Marlow talks to the chief agent at Central Station, the man laments, "When one has got to make correct entries, one comes to hate those savages--hate them to the death" (Conrad 49). These savages are merely a part of the background, something to only think about insofar as they affect the business overall. Kurtz's Congolese mistress is yet another object to be worshipped; upon her first appearance in the book, Marlow describes her based on her stature and her appearance, noting her beauty and how she is commoditized by the male gaze. Being likened to the wilderness, the reader gets the impression that Marlow simply sees her as part of the landscape, but an attractive part of the landscape nonetheless - "She stood looking at us without a stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose" (Conrad 169).
Marlow's own viewpoint of blacks is far from glamorous, and is only positively favored when compared against the nearly-evil Kurtz's treatment of them. Regarding the helmsman on the steamboat he boards, Marlow says, "An athletic black belonging to some coast tribe and educated by my poor predecessor, was the helmsman. He sported a pair of brass earrings, wore a blue cloth wrapper from the waist to the ankles, and thought all the world of himself. He was the most unstable kind of fool I had ever seen" (Conrad 121). By describing him based on his ornamentation more than anything else, Marlow portrays him as merely the means by which his ship is steered; he has no real intelligence, and is even more foolish for thinking that he does.
After the helmsman's death at the hands of his own kind - 'savages' - Marlow notes that he misses him. However, this is not the kind of mourning one carries for another human being; instead, he merely had utility. "Perhaps you will think it passing strange this regret for a savage who was no more account than a grain of sand in a black Sahara. Well, don't you see, he had done something, he had steered; for months I had him at my back—a help—an instrument" (Conrad 139). Marlow's own self-reflection in this moment is not for the helmsman's sake at all; it is for himself, as he uses the dead helmsman's memory like he does the recollections of the other savages, as a tool for his own benefit. Even in death, Marlow considers him something to be used; no consideration is made for the welfare of the lost boy, just as he does not consider the welfare of the savages when seeing Kurtz's 'going native.' To Marlow's mind, at least at first, Kurtz has become compromised and joined the savages, making him dangerously close to becoming an object in his own right
In conclusion, the use of Africans as objects in Heart of Darkness shows just how little the white characters, both good and bad, regard them with agency or compassion. The world of the book is presented as a tacitly acceptable system, where white men invade Africa and hunt for ivory, while the most primary concerns available to them are avoiding the natural dangers of the wilderness, which include the aforementioned 'savages.' Those who have been 'domesticated,' like the helmsman, are treated like pets and tools without any consideration for their equality to man, and attractive native women are ogled and considered exotically beautiful without considering their personhood. The result is an incredibly imperialistic and ill-mannered culture that values traditional sophistication to the exclusion of all else; Marlow's attempts to return Kurtz to civilization are the primary goal, with his effects on the native people being a secondary concern.
Works Cited
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Blackwood's Magazine, 1899. Print.
