true colors

In both Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Jim Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, an imperialist force is attempting to subdue a force of “others,” foreigners beyond the narrow understandings of the empires who attempt to control them. In the stories, these empires do not understand is that they are not waging a war against an “inferior” foe, but are squaring off against the forces of nature and wilderness which they simply cannot comprehend –which is the inevitable undoing of the aggressors. However, the novels do contain two characters who, although being a part of the imperialist system, are “lost” from their civilizations due to the relations which ensue between them and the locals. Interestingly, it is the differences between the motives behind the relationships of Kurtz and the Magistrate with the locals which determine their fates and legacies.

Both Kurtz and the Magistrate are assigned to outposts away from the supervision and direction of their governments. It is at this point –as pointed out in Douglas Kerr’s article “Three Ways of Going Wrong: Kipling, Conrad, Coetzee”- that the two become “traitors” to their cultures. Kurtz embraces local culture and installs himself at the head of a tribe. Poisoned by his greed he becomes completely native –finding himself to be “embraced” by the African wilderness- and turns to raiding other tribes for his precious ivory. The magistrate, on the other hand, accepts the local customs and language as his own in order to manage his province effectively through peace. He then turns, as he himself is surprised to notice, to the defense of those customs once his own empire turns to a campaign against the local barbarians in a need to keep its people united. After this change of sides, however, he is wise enough to realize that he himself cannot be truly embraced by the other culture. This realization comes to him through his relations with the blind barbarian woman and, upon the realization that any comfort that he could provide for her people would be less important to them than the atrocities committed by Colonel Joll, he returns her to her people and she leaves him after his request that she stay. Kurtz’s descent into the “darkness” is also represented by his relationship with a woman. As head of his tribe, Kurtz becomes intimate with and is frequently visited beautiful African woman –even though he has a fiancée in Europe. Kurtz, once a brilliant man, is overcome by his lust and greed through his time in the wilderness, while the Magistrate, once a man of leisure, subjects himself to humiliation and torture on behalf of strangers and his beliefs. In this sense, the wilderness reveals the true nature of both men.