African Apoc­a­lypse and the painful lega­cy of ​‘Heart of Darkness’

Joseph Conrad’s ​‘Heart of Dark­ness’ is per­haps the best known and most wide­ly debat­ed nov­el about colo­nial­ism. The sto­ry fol­lows the pro­tag­o­nist Marlow’s jour­ney from Lon­don, the great impe­r­i­al cap­i­tal, to the Con­go on a job for ​“The Com­pa­ny”. Once he arrives Mar­low is sent up riv­er to make con­tact with ail­ing ivory trad­er Mr Kurtz and pro­tect the Inner Station.

Along the way he wit­ness­es the atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted by The Com­pa­ny and becomes obsessed with Kurtz who has become bru­tal and unhinged, slaugh­ter­ing the native pop­u­la­tion and com­pelling them to wor­ship him as a god. As Kurtz suc­cumbs to his ill­ness he gasps, ​“The hor­ror! The hor­ror!” and Mar­low returns to Lon­don scarred by what he has seen. A night­mar­ish jour­ney into the psy­che of a cor­rupt­ed man, ​‘Heart of Dark­ness’ is fet­ed as the first mod­ern nov­el and com­mon­ly regard­ed as the sem­i­nal work on Europe’s atroc­i­ties in Africa.

The most famous adap­ta­tion of ​‘Heart of Dark­ness’ is Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Viet­nam-set Apoc­a­lypse Now, in which Mar­tin Sheen’s Cap­tain Willard is sent upriv­er to track down rogue Green Beret Colonel Kurtz, played with haunt­ing pathos by Mar­lon Bran­do. Like the source mate­r­i­al this is a sto­ry about the invaders not the invad­ed. Willard and Kurtz are cor­rupt­ed by the war while no time is spent on its effect on the Viet­namese. Just as in ​‘Heart of Dark­ness’ the only line spo­ken by an African is ​“Mis­tah Kurtz – he dead!” Cop­po­la assigns only one Viet­namese char­ac­ter dia­logue: an army trans­la­tor call­ing a vil­lager ​“a dirty VC”.

In 1975, a year pri­or to the shoot­ing of Apoc­a­lypse Now, Chin­ua Achebe, Niger­ian author of ​‘Things Fall Apart’ and father of mod­ern African lit­er­a­ture, denounced ​‘Heart of Dark­ness’ in a famous lec­ture enti­tled ​‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Dark­ness’. In it, he observes Africa as ​“a set­ting and back­drop, which elim­i­nates the African as human fac­tor. Africa as a meta­phys­i­cal bat­tle­field devoid of all recog­nis­able human­i­ty, into which the wan­der­ing Euro­pean enters at his per­il. Can nobody see the pre­pos­ter­ous and per­verse arro­gance in thus reduc­ing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one pet­ty Euro­pean mind?”

The lec­ture and its sub­se­quent pub­li­ca­tion was met with much con­tro­ver­sy but Achebe’s posi­tion did not waver, adding in 2003, ​“You can­not com­pro­mise my human­i­ty in order that you explore your own ambi­gu­i­ty. I can­not accept that. My human­i­ty is not to be debat­ed, nor is it to be used sim­ply to illus­trate Euro­pean problems.”

An unlike­ly defend­er of ​‘Heart of Dark­ness’ emerged in 1995 in the mem­oirs of an aspir­ing politi­cian named Barack Oba­ma. He, like Achebe, recog­nised the dehu­man­i­sa­tion of the Africans but saw that as key to the book’s message.

“The way Con­rad sees it, Africa’s the cesspool of the world, black folks are sav­ages, and any con­tact with them breeds infec­tion… but the book’s not real­ly about Africa. Or black peo­ple. It’s about the man who wrote it. The Euro­pean. The Amer­i­can. A par­tic­u­lar way of look­ing at the world. If you can keep your dis­tance, it’s all there, in what’s said and what’s left unsaid. So I read the book to help me under­stand just what it is that makes white peo­ple so afraid. Their demons. The way ideas get twist­ed around. It helps me under­stand how peo­ple learn to hate.”

This is the spir­it in which the sto­ry is told in James Gray’s loose adap­ta­tion from 2019, Ad Astra, where Africa is replaced by the solar sys­tem and a Kurtz-like fig­ure is sta­tioned by Nep­tune. There are no natives to bru­talise but ideas are twist­ed, and men learn to hate when sim­ply giv­en the space to do so. At its core, ​‘Heart of Dark­ness’ is not a sto­ry about coloni­sa­tion so much as what hap­pens to men who pos­sess the free­dom and pow­er to degrade others.

Now a rev­o­lu­tion­ary inter­pre­ta­tion of Conrad’s nov­el arrives in the form of British doc­u­men­tary African Apoc­a­lypse. Rather than fol­low­ing a colonis­er, our Mar­low is British-Niger­ian poet and activist Femi Nylan­der. The film fol­lows Femi on a jour­ney from Oxford to Niger to uncov­er the hor­ri­fy­ing lega­cy of French Cap­tain Paul Voulet, whose geno­ci­dal mis­sion in 1898 has per­ma­nent­ly scarred Niger and its peo­ple. In the film Femi uncov­ers the hor­rors of Voulet’s grue­some cam­paign across Niger. Voulet ordered each vil­lage they passed to be attacked and the vil­lagers were tor­tured, raped, muti­lat­ed, mur­dered, burned alive and their sev­ered heads placed on stakes.

Although the orig­i­nal Kurtz was not a cap­tain the par­al­lels with Voulet were uncan­ny to direc­tor Rob Lemkin. ​“Voulet goes through the same process of moral and psy­cho­log­i­cal degra­da­tion that Kurtz does in ​‘Heart of Dark­ness’,” he explains. ​“Both start off work­ing for a very pub­lic project of con­quest but by the end, for each, it has become a mat­ter of pri­vate per­son­al grab­bing pos­ses­sion… Brando’s Kurtz is cut from the same cloth. All three embody the essen­tial spir­it of total­is­ing colo­nial con­quest through their indi­vid­ual per­son­al­i­ties. All three ​‘go native’ in a grotesque way.

“By the end, he was hir­ing a Hausa gri­ot to sing of his exploits, as if he was an African war­rior king, and plan­ning to cre­ate his own per­son­al empire in Africa that could rival France’s. Read­ing through what remains of Voulet’s hand-writ­ten notes from his last days, felt like read­ing dis­patch­es from Kurtz. Voulet is the real-life proof of the amaz­ing accu­ra­cy in Conrad’s depic­tion of the Euro­pean colonis­ing mind.”

What res­onates most in African Apoc­a­lypse is the voice of the Nige­riens. The film doesn’t just chart Voulet’s jour­ney but his impact on Niger and the gen­er­a­tional trau­ma still being passed down. Though he lived over a cen­tu­ry ago they are sur­round­ed by reminders, the main road fol­lows Voulet’s mas­sacres and when it rains they can still see the bones of his vic­tims pro­trude from the ground. A man tells the sto­ry of his preg­nant grand­moth­er escap­ing Voulet, haul­ing her large bel­ly con­tain­ing his father over the walls of Kon­ni while the vil­lagers were being slaughtered.

Anoth­er talks of ​“the whites’” prac­tice of round­ing 100 peo­ple in a build­ing, releas­ing 10 and then burn­ing the remain­ing 90 alive in front of them; his aunt was one of the ​“lucky” 10. It remains intense­ly painful for them to talk about. ​“We are not proud of what the whites did to us,” one of the men inter­viewed in the film says. ​“Imag­ine they burnt your broth­er to death before your eyes! You feel impo­tent. Total­ly humil­i­at­ed. They want us to know how much they hate us.”

By includ­ing the Nige­rien people’s sto­ries, African Apoc­a­lypse man­ages to breathe new life into Conrad’s sto­ry. Not only is this a film about a descent into mad­ness but the humans fac­ing unspeak­able cru­el­ty and vio­lence. As Lemkin puts it, ​“I would like audi­ences to think about how the vio­lence of inva­sions like this one have cre­at­ed a world of extra­or­di­nary inequal­i­ty. I would hope that the film might help us dis­cuss how colo­nial­ism – and its con­tin­u­ing ero­sion of self-respect and auton­o­my – is a prob­lem for all of us.”