The Dark Continent? Still Have Repercussions Today
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160 + 3 mm 63 mm Frits AndersenFrits Africa: a forgotten continent that evades all attempts FRITS ANDERSEN at control and transcends reason. Or does it? This book describes Europe’s image of Africa and relates how the conception of the Dark Continent has been fabricated in European culture – with the Congo as an analytical focal point. It also demonstrates that the myth was more than a creation of colonial propaganda; the Congo reform movement – the first international · human rights movement – spread horror stories that Continent? The Dark still have repercussions today. The book cross-examines a number of witness testimonies, reports and novels, from Stanley’s travelogues and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Hergé’s Tintin and Burroughs’ Tarzan, as well as recent Danish and international Congo literature. The Dark Continent? proposes that the West’s attitudes to Africa regarding free trade, emergency aid and intervention are founded on the literary historical assumptions of stories and narrative forms that have evolved since 1870. The Dark Continent? Images of Africa in European Narratives about the Congo AARHUS UNIVERSITY PRESS a 100554_cover_the dark continent_.indd 1 02/12/15 13:10 The Dark Continent? • CONTENTS • NOTES • BIBLIOGRAPHY This page is protected by copyright • INDEX and may not be redistributed. • RIGHTS The Dark Continent? Images of Africa in European Narratives about the Congo By Frits Andersen Aarhus University Press | • CONTENTS 4 THE DARK CONTINENT? • NOTES • BIBLIOGRAPHY This page is protected by copyright • INDEX and may not be redistributed. • RIGHTS I THE CONGO IN PROSE – INTRODUCTION 25 1 Life and Works: Reading Stanley 25 2 Traveller on Global Terms 39 Bula Matari, Breaker of Rocks 40 Mr Stanley, I Presume?: New Journalism 49 World Literature 62 3 Prose: A Framework and Reading Perspective 71 Prosaic Model Examples 76 Travel Literature 86 Wonder 98 4 Literary Topography of the Congo 109 The River “That Swallows All Rivers” 110 The Discovery 121 5 Anthropoetic Narrative and Method 133 II H.M. STANLEY – MAGIC AND MARKET 143 1 Moving Perspective: Through the Dark Continent (1878) 147 “Monarch-of-all I-survey” 150 Elastic Composition 153 Rhetoric and Violence 156 Stanley’s Real and Invented Discoveries 161 Shibboleth 168 “An African Museum” 175 Stanley’s “singular fascination with white paper” 184 2 Conflicting Testimonies: In Darkest Africa (1890) 190 A Province in the Back of Beyond 192 Dubious Motives 195 The March 199 Mt. Stanley 208 “Mystery” and “Misery” 213 Testimonies under Pressure 218 Realism and Loyalty: Mounteney Jephson 225 Sentimental Aesthete, Cannibalistic Voyeur: James Jameson 233 Double Perspective 247 The Forest 254 The Marketplace 267 Aftermath 278 3 The Space of Prose: Magic and Pragmatism 285 The Book as Fetish: Stanley’s Magic 288 Open and Closed Spaces: Stanley’s Oblivion 317 III RED RUBBER – TALES OF TERROR 329 1 Heart of Darkness in Travel Literature 337 Modernist Form and Embodied Experience 342 Heart of Darkness as Adventure Fiction 347 Heart of Darkness as Gothic Romance 350 “The Congo Diary” and “The Up-river Book” 354 2 Atrocity Accounts 371 The Congo Reform Association: Morel, Casement, Twain 379 The Reform Association’s Construction of Conrad as Eyewitness 393 3 “The Espionage System”: Red Rubber in Prose 399 “The Transfer” 403 “An Outpost of Progress” 406 The Danish Congo Novels of Jürgen Jürgensen 407 Two Danish Travellers to the Congo 419 Transnational Colonial Criticism in Mirbeau’s “Red Caoutchouc” 426 The Album and World Art 433 “Red Caoutchouc” 437 4 The Field: Red Rubber and Heart of Darkness between Nationalism and World Literature 444 IV THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 453 1 The Congo in Travel Literature: History and Oblivion 457 The Whip and the Pointer 462 Indignation and Pathos: Feminisation and Non-disclosure 478 Reports: The Collapse of the Travel Account 484 Tragic Tourism and Gothic Science 497 The Congo in Oblivion 508 2 The Congo in Novels: Graham Greene, V.S. Naipaul and Urs Widmer 523 Graham Greene, A Burnt-out Case 523 V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River 532 Urs Widmer, Im Kongo 542 3 The Congo in Popular Literature: Bizarre Truths in Bizarre Stories 553 Apes 555 Leopard Men, Tintin, Tarzan and Trader Horn 560 Tintin au Congo 564 Tarzan and the Leopard Men 573 Trader Horn 583 4 The Congo, I Presume: Anthropoetic Narrative 588 V THE CONGO IN PROSE 599 1 Congo Literature: A Cross-sectional View 610 2 Place 618 3 Testimony 624 4 Atrocity Accounts and Human Rights 629 5 Oblivion and Historical Narrative 637 6 World Literature and Globalisation 641 Notes 653 Bibliography 669 Index 684 Rights 689 The Congo’s position in global media around the year 1900 can be compared to that of Iraq and Afghanistan today. The country’s immense resources and its late and savage colonisation made it a battlefield where travel accounts, testimonies, reports and novels competed to shape the European reader’s images of Africa. Preface n an account from 1907 of an automobile journey through Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, the reader comes across a chapter titled “Red Caoutchouc”. The nar- Irator has stopped over in the Belgian port of Antwerp and is looking in the window of a shop, where some product samples of unusual colour and shape are displayed. When he enters the shop, he is proved right in assuming that they are rubber samples from the Congo – the raw material from which his car tyres are made, thus facilitating the wonderful journey, its staggering speed and this new way of perceiving the world. Octave Mirbeau’s travel account is a futuristic celebration of the car, its speed and the new century. However, when the narrator takes a couple of steps into the shop, more disturbing films are played out on his inner screen: initially, a series of images that could be taken out of King Léopold’s propaganda magazines, showing the colony as an idyll and the natives as happy rabbits jumping about at the edge of the woods; subsequently, the narrator imagines a series of photographs that depict atrocities and terrors, massacres and mutilated bodies. These photographs give rise to both fascination and indignation, leading the narrator to condemn Léopold’s brutal rubber collection methods, while at the same time acknowledging that his own enthusiasm about cars and progress make him an accomplice – both a participant and bystander. After this, the narrator switches to an objective, documentary style, before the chapter fades out in a satirical passage that critically addresses all the presented images of Africa and ways of referring to the Congo; it all reflects back on himself. A combination of experimental narrative and sophisticated, precise criticism, Octave Mirbeau’s La 628-E8 became, perhaps surprisingly, a scandalous success, published in several languages and a luxury edition with illustrations by Pierre Bonnard. The author, critic and journalist Mirbeau employs a plethora of strategies in his travel account without letting the reader escape his grip. In the passage about “Red Caoutchouc”, Mir- • CONTENTS • NOTES PREFACE 1 1 • BIBLIOGRAPHY • INDEX This page is protected by copyright • RIGHTS and may not be redistributed. The many travel accounts and novels based on the experiences of Scandinavian contract work- ers in the Congo constitute a forgotten chapter in Danish literary history. The novels introduce and draw on reader expectations of the exotic, but the writer’s own ideas and perspective are often affected, challenged, and shaken. Otto Lütken was a steamboat captain working in the Congo from 1907 who had to return prematurely in 1915, as he was suffering from malaria. His Mozuri’s God (1928) was followed by other disturbing stories, including Black Moral and Fataki (1932). In 1930, Lütken published “Joseph Conrad in the Congo”, an article about Heart of Dark- ness and his reaction to the novel. • CONTENTS 1 2 THE DARK CONTINENT? • NOTES • BIBLIOGRAPHY This page is protected by copyright • INDEX and may not be redistributed. • RIGHTS beau’s display of various images of Africa is unlabelled – he does not specify who he is attacking. He assumes that the reader can distinguish between – and recognise – them as widespread, typical ways in which people talk about the Congo. To use a contemporary term: the reader is expected to recognise them as ‘discourses’. The Congo’s position in global media around 1900 can be compared to that of Iraq and Afghanistan today. Vast numbers of stories were competing to raise interest in Africa, and the continent was displayed in spectacular ways at the great World’s Fairs and cultivated through the abolitionist movement’s captivating travel accounts from “the dark continent”. Towards the turn of the century, the Congo’s immense natural resources and late colonisation turned it into a battlefield where travel accounts, testi- monies, reports and novels were competing to shape European readers’ images of Africa. One camp disseminated colonial propaganda about the need for missionary efforts to civilise the savages; another camp advocated for the Congo Reform Association – the first international human rights movement – with accounts of atrocities and terror that condensed and detailed the horror at which Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) had only hinted. Mirbeau’s travel book is one of many examples of the Congo’s prominent position in European media a century ago. Today, the Congo is all but forgotten, except for the atrocity accounts which now and then remind us about the victims of the civil war – the greatest and most gravely overlooked human disaster since the Second World War. Mirbeau’s travel book is critical towards reports, idyllic tales and atrocity tales. The book is an example of alternative narrative forms that help move Africa closer to Europe, but his example is unknown today, despite the great need for model examples to describe, e.g., the Congo as part of our world and history.