Who is savage, Who is Civil?

     Racial stereotypes and power determined who was savage and who was civil in Joseph Conrad’s book, Heart of Darkness. Marlow, captain of a steamboat in the deep wilderness of the Congo, tells of his journey, but more specifically of his encounter with the indigenous tribes of Africa. Throughout the book, Marlow and his crew come in contact with different natives, who are thought to be cannibals. Based off of his own culture, Marlow perceives the African tribes as uncivilized and his self and his people as intelligent and civilized. Who decides what is and isn’t civilized?
     As Europeans entering the Congo’s wilderness, they could not but help to think that in terms of social classes, they were much more advanced, intelligent, and powerful than the Congo natives. This mind set relates to treatment the Europeans gave to native tribes. The indigenous people were taken and enslaved as workers of the land and used until worthless (17). The Europeans used the “savages” at their disposal, only feeding them the bare minimum while still working them all day (15). Since they were assumed savages, or cannibals, based on the Europeans culture, they were treated accordingly, with chains around their necks like animals, “…each had an iron collar on his neck and all were connected together with a chain whose bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking.” (15). The Europeans dictated who was and who was not civil, and treated those surrounding them accordingly.
     Due to Marlow’s dehumanization of the natives, he reduced their kind to almost a type of object. As if the tribal people were machinery at their expense or as if they were just wild animals. At one point, Marlow’s steamboat comes under attack from a native tribe. Marlow describes what he saw, “…I made out deep in the tangled gloom, naked breasts, arms, legs, glaring eyes-the bush was swarming with human limbs in movement…” (45). He portrays the Congo natives as wild animals, lurking amongst the wilderness, ready to attack.
     While under attack by the native “cannibals”, the only fire arm on the boat was taken and used without permission. A “red-haired pilgrim” originally in terror shock from the natives’ affliction, sprayed the bank with bullets in hopes of hitting a savage. The pilgrim later brags to Marlow, “We must have made a glorious slaughter of them in the bush. Eh? What do you think?” (51). He was proud of his cowardly accomplishment of killing many native tribal people. The pilgrim expresses the death of the “savages” as a “glorious slaughter”. Killing a savage was like a game, or an achievement, so brag about.
     Who sets the standards and boundaries of what is and what is not “civilized”? The basis for civil and uncivil is perceived in the eye of the culture, or the society. Throughout the Heart of Darkness, the Europeans journeying through the Congo are seen as the human beings in the right. But the real message shows that Marlow, and the other Europeans are in the wrong, by ravaging another peoples’ land and slaving and killing their people at will for personal gain. Those who came to save and civilize the savages, in the end, became the savages themselves.

Work Cited

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Ed. Paul B. Armstrong. W. W. Norton: New York, 2005