File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9705, message 66


Date: Sat, 24 May 1997 19:43:24 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <leata-AT-EarthLink.NET>
Subject: M-I: "Exterminate All the Brutes"


While Kipling was writing "The White Man's Burden," Joseph Conrad was
writing Heart of Darkness. That leading expression of imperialist ideology
appeared at the same time as its opposite pole in the world of writing.
Both works were created under the influence of the battle of Omdurman.

Already in An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Conrad had described what it
felt to be shot at by naval guns. Around Babalatchi, the ground is slippery
with blood, the houses in flames, women screaming, children crying, the
dying gasping for breath. They die helpless, "stricken down before they
could see their enemy." Their courage is in vain against an invisible and
unreachable opponent.

The invisibility of the attackers is remembered far later in the novel by
one of the survivors: "First they came, the invisible whites, and dealt
death from afar..."

Few Western writers have described with greater empathy the helpless rage
when faced with superior forces killing without having to go ashore,
victorious without even being present.

That novel had just been published when the battle of Omdurman was taking
place. In Heart of Darkness, written during the patriotic delirium after
Kitchner's homecoming, Conrad opens the imperial toolbox and one after
another examines what the historian Daniel R. Headrick calls "the tools of
imperialism": The ship's guns that fire on a continent. The railway that is
to ease the plundering of the continent. The river steamer that carries
Europeans and their arms into the heart of the continent. "Thunderbolts of
Jupiter" carried in procession behind Kurtz' stretcher: two shot-guns, a
heavy rifle and a light revolver-carbine. Winchester and Martini-Henry
rifles spurting metal at the Africans on the shore.

"Say!" We must have made a glorious slaughter of them in the bush, Eh? What
d'you think? Say?" Marlow hears the whites saying.

"We approach them with the might of a deity," Kurtz writes in his report to
the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. He means
the weapons. They provided divine power.

In Kipling's verse, the imperial task is an ethical imperative. That is
also how it is depicted by Kurtz, who surrounds himself in a cloud of
Kiplingesque rhetoric. Only in a footnote to his torment do we see what the
task truly is, for Kurtz as well as for Kitchener, at the Innter Station as
well as at Omdurman: "Exterminate all the brutes."


(The passage above is from "Exterminate All the Brutes", which is now
available in paperback. It was written in 1992 by the Swedish author Sven
Lindquist and got high marks when an English translation in hardcover first
appeared in the USA. It is a study of Europe's history in Africa written in
the form of a travel diary. Lindquist seeks to show that the roots of
genocide first appeared in colonized Africa in the late 19th century.)




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