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Heart of Darkness
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Marlow recalls accepting command of a river steamer for a European trading company operating in central Africa. Travelling from Brussels to the Congo coast and then inland, he encounters abandoned machinery, forced labour, sickness and a bureaucracy interested chiefly in ivory. His assignment is to reach Kurtz, an exceptionally successful agent whose reputation for eloquence and civilisation conceals the violent power he has built far upriver.
The journey gradually strips away the company’s humanitarian language and exposes an extractive colonial system sustained by coercion and distance from public scrutiny. Kurtz appears only near the end, physically ruined but still surrounded by the consequences of his rule. Marlow’s return to Europe leaves him unable to reconcile what he witnessed with the reassuring ideals through which imperial expansion is presented at home.
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