Content area
Full Text
The possibility of native resistance to colonial tyranny and the threat of the loss of colonial "order" is a continual, sustained anxiety throughout Joseph Conrad 's novella Heart of Darkness. Critics have largely ignored or downplayed these inscriptions of resistance in Conrad 's text. Much of the criticism that surrounds this novella, according to Patrick Brantlinger, is focused on the European subjects of the text, and therefore renders Africa and its native peoples as a kind of backdrop. Literary critiques of Heart of Darkness that do discuss the African natives tend to portray them as victims rather than having any kind of agency. This latent fear of native resistance demonstrates the fantasy of stability and superiority endemic to imperialism: a narrative that the imperial administration must continually tell itself.
Keywords: Joseph Conrad / resistance / imperialism / anxiety / Congo
. . . it was the case nearly every where in the non-European world that the coming of the white man brought forth some sort of resistance . . . Never was it the case that the imperial encounter pitted an active Western intruder against a supine or inert non-Western native; there was always some form of active resistance, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, the resistance finally won out.
- Edward Said, Culture and ImperIalIsm
The state soldiers are constantly stealing, and sometimes the natives are so persecuted they resent this by killing and eating their tormentors.
- The Journals of Edward James Glave (1895)
Belgian colonialists in the Congo during the late eighteenth century enforced their reign through a variety of brutal means. Conscription, severe labor practices, torture, killing, and burning villages by the Force Publique (an army under Leopold's command) as well as employing Capitas - black foremen who were encouraged by the Europeans to enforce a reign of terror - were just some of the practices through which the imperial center tried to control the native people of the Congo. According to the authors of The Congo: Plunder and Resistance, a number of rebellions - including the uprising led by King Misri - killed scores of Capitas in a matter of months.1
The exploits of one anticolonial Congo leader, Kandolo (from the Kasi region), are detailed by Molefi Asante...