When Joseph Conrad traveled the Congo Free State as a young sea captain on a small steamboat representing a Belgian commercial company in 1890, he expected to encounter the exotic Africa of his childhood dreams. Instead, Conrad was confronted with what he called, as Hochschild quotes him in King Leopold's Ghost, "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience". Conrad translated the traumatic experience of this journey as well as the experiences of failure and guilt into Heart of Darkness, a terrifying parable of the decline of Western ideals. It does not lie at Hochschild's heart to provide a literary analysis of Conrad's experience in the Congo. As a consequence, Heart of Darkness is given a discussion of only eight pages, within which, however, Hochschild proves that Colonel Kurtz is modeled after an actual character of the Belgian colonial forces who was notorious for his violent tempers and committed atrocities against the indigenous population. Rather, a great numb er of scholars have lost track of the historical point of reference: Conrad's witnessing the Belgian colonial regime's cruelties and will to exterminate the local people. Hochschild quotes Conrad's remark that "Heart of Darkness is experience ... pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual fact of the case".
It is Hochschild's aim in King Leopold's Ghost to tell "the story of ... the first great international human rights movement of the twentieth century ...,of the savage crime that was its target, of the long period of exploration and conquest that preceded it, and of the way the world has forgotten one of the great mass killings of recent history". The author has compiled an astonishing amount of material on the colonial regime of terror in the heart of Africa. In order to bring his message across, he delivers his account in the form of a historical narrative, putting less emphasis on analyzing structures and processes.
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