Moral Conditions for Genocide in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness1, The

College Literature, Winter 2005 by Lackey, Michael

Consequently, when Marlow's helmsman dies later in the text, Marlow does not mourn the loss of a full-fledged human being; he laments the death of a deficient tool:

Perhaps you will think it passing strange this regret for a savage who was no more account than a grain of sand in a black Sahara. Well, don't you see, he had done something, he had steered; for months I had him at my back-a help-an instrument. It was a kind of partnership. He steered for me-I had to look after him, I worried about his deficiencies, and thus a subtle bond had been created, of which I only became aware when it was suddenly broken. (Conrad 1996, 67)

Marlow thinks of this little-account savage in terms of his utility; he is a deficient instrument who must be looked after (the sub-"human" is not an independent agent that can govern itself) and who enables (serves as an "instrument") chosen superiors to achieve their ends.

Africans can be converted into instruments because of their inability to be governed by noble principles. Such is the implicit view Marlow betrays when he discusses how the thirty starving Africans on his steamboat resist the temptation to revolt against the five whites on board. On noting the Africans' restraint, Marlow responds, "And these chaps too had no earthly reason for any kind of scruple. Restraint! I would just as soon have expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst the corpses of a battlefield" (Conrad 1996, 58). For Marlow, hungry animals do not forgo a feast in the name of a higher principle; in fact, their most basic needs determine their behavior. Humans, by contrast, cultivate values and principles that transcend animal needs, so they can resist the temptation to satisfy an animal need in the name of a higher principle. Because Marlow considers Africans more animal than human, he is surprised by the restraint of the Africans in his steamboat. Such self-control is obviously inconsistent with his view of the African. More importantly, by likening Africans to hyenas, Marlow does more than just ontologize the natives as animals; he implicitly specifies why they are more animal than human-animals are governed exclusively by animal appetites, whereas humans can be governed by a moral precept. And Marlow's observation that the natives on his steamboat show restraint does nothing to mitigate his racist view; these Africans are an anomaly, an exception to what he considers the African/hyena rule. The last example, while the least overt and offensive, is the most significant in terms of the genocidal mentality in Heart of Darkness. Kurtz's Russian disciple tells Marlow about the unspeakable rites that the natives offered up to Kurtz. In his brief narrative, the Russian specifies that the natives "would crawl" (74). From a white European perspective, this act of crawling justifies labeling Africans as sub-human savages. For instance, when talking to the Russian, Marlow cannot tolerate the harlequin's obsequious relationship to Kurtz. To condemn the Russian, Marlow likens his fawning behavior to an act of crawling, which he links with the "savages": "If it had come to crawling before Mr. Kurtz, he crawled as much as the veriest savage of them all" (109). The more deferential the crawling behavior, the more savage one is.