Fact and fiction

The best-known Congo journey is a fictional one that does not name its setting. Marlow's voyage to find Kurtz, the agent who has 'gone native', in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), operates on several levels: the story's critical engagement with colonialism is flanked by the mythical and psychological dimensions of the protagonists' experiences. All sorts of later travellers to the Congo refer to this tale. Most of the narratives discussed towards the end of this chapter (and still others that are not) cite it. Journalist Michela Wrong even turns to it for the title of her admirably self-effacing book chronicling the downfall of Zaire's President Mobutu, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz (2000).

Conrad spent six months in the Congo in 1890 working for the Belgian Société Anonyme pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo. His ‘Congo Diary’ records his 250-mile trek from Matadi to Kinshasa and notes the discomfort, obstacles, sickness, and the sight of murdered Africans. His ‘Up-river book’, written on board the steamer ‘Roi des Belges’, contains mainly technical information on the navigation of the river. The experiences of both journals inform Heart of Darkness and the short story ‘An Outpost of Progress’ (1898) but are different in kind from them. Curiously, the travellers who later take Heart of Darkness as their reference point tend not to mention these documents of Conrad’s actual travel. On the whole it is easy to tell such journals and fictions apart: Graham Greene’s Congo Journal, for example, which has Greene re-reading Heart of Darkness, after having ‘abandoned’ Conrad in ‘about 1932 because his influence on me was too great and too disastrous’, records a trip to the Belgian Congo in 1959 to research the novel A Burnt-Out Case. But Europe’s mythologising of Africa in general and of the Congo in particular means that fact and fiction do sometimes overlap.