GREAT BRITAIN and the EMPIRE

• imperialism and colonialism

• the `Scramble for Africa”: the territorial conquest of the unchartered, uncivilized and impenetrable continent (scientific, commercial and ideological reasons)

• to improve and civilize Africa in the name of the Queen and the Empire

• Africa for Victorians: cannibalistic, sexually promiscuous, stricken with diseases

• destruction of sociopolitical structures found in Africa

• Dr. David Livingstone (1813-1873)

• he traveled all over southern Africa

• Victoria Falls was one of the many names he could put on the map

• the only hope for Africa was development and "civilization" in European-style

• shocked to see the horrors of the slave trade

• died in Zambia without solving the mystery of the Nile

• Henry Morton Stanley (1841 - 1904)

• he was commissioned by the paper to go to Africa and search for Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone (proceeded to Lake Tanganyika; greeting him with the famous words 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?')

• described in 'Through the Dark Continent' (1878)

• success with King Leopold II of Belgium, who was eager to tap Africa's wealth

• worked to open the lower Congo to commerce by the construction of roads (forced and brutal labour of the natives).

• knighted in 1899

• clearly despised the black Africans

• Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936):

• the British pride vs responsibility for the uncivilized

• "Take up the White Man's burden"

• "your new-caught sullen peoples, half devil and half child"

• "the silent sullen peoples shall weigh your God and you"

Joseph Conrad (Korzeniowski (1857 - 1924)

• he left Poland as a seventeen-year-old

• learnt seamanship

• naturalised as British citizen in 1886 (MA in London)

• he travels to the Far East and Congo

other fiction:

• about: Malayan islands

• Lord Jim (1900); guilt complex; sea moral code

• problems connected to the British imperialism

Heart of Darkness:

“All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz”

• the structure: novella with the 'story-within-the story' pattern (narrators)

• ideology of the colonial Empire:

• emissaries of light, apostles

“Each station should be like a beacon on the road towards better things, a centre for trade of course, but also for humanizing, improving, instructing.”

• the perfect white man who keeps up his appearance in the “great demoralization”

• enlightenment: the sketch by Kurtz

• the truth behind words:

• ruthless exploitation

• corruption and disintegration

• the conquerors from the past vs colonists

• the images:

• darkness and the heart of Darkness:

• evil, primitive

• the unknown, the unconquered (blank spaces on earth/maps)

• immense darkness within humans

• heart of darkness - self-knowledge

• the report begins with the need for enlightenment, but finishes with “Exterminate all brutes”

• whiteness:

• ivory, luxury (the source of evil)

• white man

• the supposed enlightenment the white man brings

• Africa and its influence on the Europeans:

• wilderness taking the natives into its bosom;

• the jungle has eyes: Africa as a living organism

• diseases and madness for the white man

• living like in a dream, outside reality, a state of trance

• moral choices when there are no moral restraints

• rivers: Congo vs the Thames (literal Congo journey and a journey within)

• Thames and Congo lead to “the heart of an immense darkness";

• Thames: the link between the past and present)

“But the darkness was here yesterday”

• natives / savages (white pilgrims vs native cannibals)

• admiration of the natives vitality and bodies

• cannibalism

• fine fellows though cannibals

“the thought of their humanity - like yours - the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar”

• improved specimen when educated

1

---