In 1890, while working for the Belgian Societe Anonyme pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo, Joseph Conrad traveled on a steamer boat up the Congo River in Africa, "in order to collect a company agent named Klein" (Young 388). Nine years later, Conrad's experiences on the Congo were published as the novel Heart of Darkness. In that novel, Conrad represented himself as the character Marlow, and Klein as Kurtz. Garnett has noted that Heart of Darkness is "an impression, taken from life, of the conquest by the European whites of a certain portion of Africa" (387). Marlow, the narrator of the novel, encounters a psychological horror in Africa which is symbolized as darkness and which remains with him even after he returns to London. However, the darkness that he encounters is not that of Africa or the Africans, but rather that of the European imperialists who were exploiting Africa's resources and labor. On this point, Singh has noted that the title Heart of Darkness does not refer to a place or a people, but rather to "the evil practices of the colonizers of the Congo" (270). Garnett has agreed that the overall theme of Heart of Darkness is "the white man's uneasy, disconcerted, and fantastic relations with the exploited barbarism of Africa" (387). Singh has even gone so far as to claim that Heart of Darkness is "one of the most powerful indictments of colonialism ever written" (268).
In the late nineteenth century, the Congo region of Africa was under European domination. In particular, Belgian and other European trading companies were exploiting the resources of the land while at the same time using the African natives as subhuman slave labor. Ironically, the European imperialists in the Congo claimed that they were bringing civilization to the natives. Thus, when Conrad visited the Congo in 1890, the area was "the most ruthlessly exploited region of the whole African continent, and what made the exploitation worse was that it...