The name ‘Congo’ has lyrical beauty. It also evokes the sound of drumbeats, and images of beautiful dark bodies dancing around a fire under the moonlight. The name carries the spiritual and cultural traditions of Africa. Mention of the Congo should evoke dance, beauty, and a place of joy. Yet, over the years, the word has become a metaphor for Africa’s dehumanisation by colonial and post-colonial greed and madness. The name brings to mind Hobbes’ vision of a place where life is “poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.
In the 1880s, the Congo became the private property of King Leopold of Belgium, who named it ‘the Congo Free State’. In this free state, labourers, who failed to meet their weekly rubber harvesting quotas had their hands amputated. Labourers’ children could also have their hands cut off if their parents failed to meet their quotas. In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad paints the unhinged savagery of Leopold’s Congo. In the novella, the fictional self-righteous Mr Kurtz ventures into the Congolese jungle only to find that the savagery is deep inside his own soul.
