ABSTRACT
In 1890, at the age of thirty-two, the novelist Joseph Conrad took up an appointment as captain of a river steamer on the Congo. On the face of it, this was a curious, almost incomprehensible, decision for a man who had only recently been appointed a captain in the British merchant marine. Conrad stayed in Congo for no more than six months. He had to endure a thoroughly unpleasant two hundred mile march to reach the head of navigation at Stanley Pool, and proceeded on arrival to fall out with the director of the local trading station. Conrad's experience in the Congo was to haunt him for years, and was distilled in 1902 into a minor masterpiece of English literature, his short novel Heart of Darkness. The state of affairs to which Conrad applied his literary genius has had consequences that have reverberated down the years. The Belgian colony which replaced Leopold's Free State reproduced many of its characteristic features.
