ABSTRACT
One of the most conspicuous characteristics of the explorers’ and colonialists’ writings that were discussed in Chapter 1 is the dearth of images of African workers of the colonial regime in the Congo Free State. Some travellers gave blood-curdling descriptions of violence by Force Publique sentries, but the rest of Leopold’s colonial subjects were largely described in general terms if at all. This paucity of information on the effects of colonialism upon its victims was the consequence of practical limitations such as travellers’ ignorance of regions of rubber production, and political considerations such as the Congo reformers’ initial overriding preoccupation with questions of European trade. It was also determined ideologically by observers’ acceptance of the dominant image of Central Africa as an atavistic space given over to immutable human suffering. For these reasons, populations of the Congo basin appeared in most anti-Congo publications until around 1904 as the obscure background to an ethnocentrically insular drama centring on the victimisation of European merchants by brutalised European colonialists. Joseph Conrad’s notoriously dusky image of Africans in Heart of Darkness (1899), which imparts in Angus Mitchell’s telling phrase a “horror more sensed than witnessed”, is symptomatic of this lack of knowledge of the colony’s inhabitants in the fi rst decade or so of anti-Congo literature.1
