The Congo: a great farm in Africa

Leopold II, king of the Belgians during the second half of the 20th century, animated by the idea of ​​possessing a huge territory, and moved by an irrepressible greed for wealth and power, concluded that colonial expansion was desirable and necessary. His greedy staff landed on the African continent, following the trail and sponsoring the expeditions of Henry Morton Stanley, renowned explorer of Central Africa.

A military expedition dedicated to the extraction of ivory and rubber would not have had support in the international community; for this reason he based his intervention on the most beautiful humanitarian purposes: «The mission that the Agents of the State have to complete in the Congo is noble -Leopold II had said in 1898—. They have to continue the development of civilization in the center of Equatorial Africa, receiving their inspiration directly from Berlin and Brussels. Face to face with primitive barbarism, struggling with bloodthirsty customs dating back thousands of years, they are forced to gradually reduce these. They must accustom the population to general laws, of which the most necessary and healthy is that of work.

Months later, thanks to the support of the Berlin conference (1884-85), Europe consecrated him sovereign of the newly founded Congo Free State: the great massacre had begun. Looting, torturous punishments and the buying and selling of slaves took place under a violent coercion that, it is estimated, decimated the native population by ten million people.

The footprint of the Congo in Conrad

The young Conrad left his studies animated by a passion that he never abandoned. He was just seventeen years old when he got the first of many jobs as a seaman on coasters; profession that he carried out until obtaining the title of Merchant Captain of the British Navy, and that would allow him to pursue a naive obsession nurtured since childhood, when the mysterious African continent, still unmapped, offered itself to his dreams as the greatest glory of exploration and civilization projects. At the age of thirty-three, Conrad left for the Belgian Congo, being a privileged witness to the "vilest looting in the history of geographical exploration and human consciousness" (Last Essays), an irreversible experience that completely changed his life. vision of the world.

Heart of Darkness

Written at great speed and originally published in serials by Blackwood magazine (1899); the bitterness, the astonishment, the indignation…, “ah, the horror! The horror!" harvested on his trip to the Congo motivated Conrad to write Heart of Darkness.

Marlow, alter ego of Joseph Conrad, protagonist and exegete of his stories, at a time of low tide on the River Thames, narrates to the crew of the Nelly an old journey as captain of a riverboat that enters the depths of the Congo River .

In the heart of Africa, he must meet the indomitable and mysterious boss of an ivory farm, revered as a god by the natives: Kurtz, who arrived in the jungle carrying a suitcase full of moralisms, now shows himself to be implacable and cruel. Kurtz will go through the pages of the novel as a spectral figure fascinated by the jungle, seized by a deep darkness, which grows larger as the story progresses. The jungle seems to have whispered to him a hidden secret, a discovery to dominate or submit to.

Enrique Breccia's art expresses with singular mastery the tensions of the Conradian story between the latent and brutal forces of the human condition and the indomitable darkness of the African jungle.