Lost in Central Africa

This essay, which briefly examines British Central African literature, from the work of David Livingstone and Henry M. Stanley through Rider Haggard to Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement, discusses the varied representations of the Englishman. The Scramble for Africa, which originated from Livingstone's missionary exploration--promoting commerce in opposition to African slave trade--and activated by Stanley's expedition for the development of Central Africa, was romanticized in Haggard's adventure fiction, which in turn influenced Conrad. The Congo slavery question, serving as a measure of the English character--as English intervention may have made a difference--seems to lapse into "darkness" in Conrad's novel, finally provoking Casement's Congo Report. The "darkness" of Central Africa, however, and correspondingly of the image of the Englishman, has been brooding from Haggard's imperial romance and even before. While Casement's official investigation of atrocities in King Leopold's Congo, followed by that of the English Company's slavery in the Amazon, confirms the death of the morally-superior white man, it was never real : Stanley's Selim is the son of the Arab slaver in My Kalulu; Haggard's Leo is destined to be wed to the Arab queen of Africa in She; and Conrad's Kurtz is lost in savagery, leading Marlow to lie about it in Heart of Darkness.