"I love the smell of napalm in the morning."

In King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild points out that when Francis Ford Coppola desired to make a film showing the brutal insanity of the Vietnam War, he turned to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and adapted it into the film Apocalypse Now. After reading the book and watching the film, it seems to me that the most important themes are of mystery and fear: fear of the mysterious and the moral lapses into violence that result from that fear. Conrad's is a tale of tragic inevitability in which the clashing cultures are both compelled and repelled by one another.

Marlow's journey up the Congo to find the missing Kurtz (shades of Stanley and Livingstone!) initiates a serious-minded meditation on the moral degradation that Conrad witnessed in the Belgian Congo, although several scenes in the novella can be read as darkly comic in the twisted reality they present. The native Africans were neither understood nor regarded as fully human, and therefore the wanton destruction of their lives was legitimized.

Of course, the practice in warfare of viewing an enemy as inherently "other" is a well established and effective one. The primary concern becomes one not of universal humanity or even ideals, but simple "pacification." Capt. Kilgore's famous speech in Apocalypse Now illustrates the process of transforming human lives into obstacles to achieving an objective:

You smell that? Do you smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one we had a hill bombed for twelve hours. When it was all over I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell, you know, that gasoline smell, the whole hill. It smelled like...victory.

In this same way, Conrad shows us how the rush (or "scramble," if you will) for resources, labor, and profit in Africa facilitated the degradation of civilized morality, both of the Europeans and the Africans. The moral restraints were weakened, and Kurtz is the culmination of that process. His assumption of control over a tribe of Africans and his depraved behavior is manifest evidence of the nadir of a society, and the slowing of "progress" to a standstill, if not a reversal of its course.

Rapacity + Depravity = Humanity

Sometimes, I wish that every history book I read didn't reinforce my natural predilection for cynicism, or, worse yet, manage to enhance it. C'est la vie, as the French were saying as they subjugated the indigenous people of their own colony, in what is now the Republic of the Congo.

I feel like it's hard to be shocked by the events described in King Leopold's Ghost. Appalled, saddened, and angered, but not shocked. How can a world that's witnessed, even secondhand, the dual horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki be shocked by anything, ever? Belsen in the 1940s, My Lai and East Timor in the 1970s, El Salvador in the 1980s, Kurdistan and Bosnia in the 1990s, Sudan and Abu Ghraib in the 2000s. While differing in severity and scale, infamous episodes such as these have proved that the 20th and 21st centuries can hold their own in terms of man's inhumanity to man.

The thing that disturbs me the most about the systematic slaughter in the Congo is that it took place not because of ideologies, however radical or twisted, but because of simple avarice. For the luxurious profit of a few, some of the worst sufferings imaginable were perpetrated on millions, destroying lives and ways of life. And the sun still came up the next day, as it has every day since. People move on, societies move on , movements moves on.

The world moves on.

But let us not think that all it took to salve the wounds left by Leopold and his like was for the imperialist troops and rubber exporters to abandon their holdings and cede control back to the natives. The legacy of brutality and authoritarian oppression left in Africa by the "civilized" nations of Europe is one that has still not been resolved today.

Mauritania has had at least 10 coups or attempted coups since 1960, the year they achieved independence from the French. The most recent, a successful one, took place on August 6, 2008. No less than 25 African nations have been ruled by a military dictatorship at some point in the post-colonial period (Libya and Zimbabwe are currently ruled by one). Others, such as Gabon, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Ugunda, the Republic of the Congo, Ethiopa, and the Central African Republic have been or are currently governed by good old fashioned Stalinist dictatorships, with or without the reactionary feel-goodery of a military junta. What European colonization bestowed upon Africa was not the glory of Christian democratic civilization, but decades of bloodshed, political destabilization, and oppression. Nice work, guys!

The people of Africa, like oppressed and powerless people the world over, have consistently paid the price for the fact that humanity's darkest nature, that which needs it the most, is the one that we are the least willing to confront.


Postscript: Don't make the same mistake I made. The film Congo is not a moving and powerful indictment of Leopold's colonial dreams and nightmares. In fact, it mostly concerns vicious, supersmart gorillas.

"What do you mean, you can't repeat the past? Of course you can. "

Reading King Leopold's Ghost, I was struck by how little the great European powers seemed to have progressed between Columbus's initial expeditions to the New World. starting in 1492, and Stanley's trips for Belgium in the 1880's. They still viewed unfamiliar societies as "primitive" and "savage," much like they had during the colonization craze in North and South America. As Hochschild points out:

The very word treaty is a euphemism, for many chiefs had no idea what they were signing. Few had seen the written word before, and they were being asked to mark their X's to documents in a foreign language and in legalese.

Sounds familiar. In the Americas, European explorers and colonizers neglected the dazzling variety of cultures, customs, and beliefs of indigenous peoples in favor of lumping them all together into one big bowl of heathen stew. And what else do you do with a bowl of stew, but trick it out of its land and try to kill it? On a side note, the original caption for this photograph reads, "A typical Native American." Somehow I doubt that serenading woodland creatures with flute music was or is on the list of daily activities for most of them.

It's just sad to see that it took humans so long to even start recognizing that we are more similar than we are different. And sadder still to see how far from our ideals we still are today. Unfortunately, the story of what happened in the Congo seems to be a sad one, told many times. Rather than battling (both figuratively and literally) over religion, ideology, and culture, humans should probably spend some time focusing on being better than we have been, and better than we are.

Yep, that's more like it.

Stanley/Livingstone

Stanley and Livingstone were arguably the best-loved vaudeville act in the history of Victorian London, in addition to being disguised space aliens sent to colonize earth....wait, bear with me for a minute. Okay, someone hacked this Wikipedia page. Please ignore the previous sentence.

Stanley and Livingstone were intrepid travelers who did, in fact help to colonize part of the earth: the part called Africa. Both men impacted the course of African history in ways good and bad (mostly bad, if you were an African).

David Livingstone (1813-1873) was a famous, indeed almost mythical, British national hero. His roles as Christian missionary, geographic explorer, and anti-slave trade abolitionist granted him great fame in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. He is well-known today for "discovering" Victoria Falls and being the subject of one of the most famous phrases in Western culture. He tried to find the source of the Nile River, but didn't.

Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904) lived one hell of a life. A journalist and explorer, he was born in Wales, but moved at a young age to America. He reluctantly served in the American Civil War, eventually having the distinction of deserting both the Confederate and Union forces. After that nifty trick, he became a journalist. In 1869, while a correspondent for the New York Herald, Stanley was recruited to mount an expedition into Africa to find Livingstone, who had not been heard from for six years. And find him he did.

Stanley's 700 mile, eight month expedition into present-day Tanzania, including around 200 porters, culminated on November 10, 1871 near Lake Tanganyika. Upon finally coming face-to-face with his quarry, Stanley uttered one of the most famous greetings in history: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

Or maybe he didn't. Let's just say he might have. Livingstone's account doesn't mention what would seem to be a singular way of addressing someone you've just met. And Stanley himself tore out the pages of his diary that recount the meeting. At any rate, it made for great reading in the papers. Stanley's books, including How I Found Livingstone and Through the Dark Continent, made him a renowned and successful explorer, and financed his other trips to Africa.

Livingstone stayed in Africa after his famous meet-and-greet with Stanley. Eventually he got sick and died of malaria and internal bleeding. He had spent so much time in Africa that his six children grew up fatherless, and his wife also died of malaria trying to journey to Africa to meet him. Livingstone's heart was buried under a tree, and his body was taken to England by his two loyal servants, Chuma and Susi.

Stanley tinkered around in Africa for awhile, eventually signing on to help King Leopold II of Belguim to claim lands and introduce "civilization" and Christianity to the Congo. We will read much more about that in King Leopold's Ghost, so suffice to say that Stanley spent a lot of time in his twilight years defending himself against charges that his expeditions in Africa were needlessly cruel and brutal, plagued by savage beatings and exploitation. Predictably, he was also knighted.

Here's a link to a video made by a bunch of twerps for a class project: Dr. Livingstone's African Journey.

Welcome to beautiful downtown Umuofia! Condos coming soon!

Sometimes, a picture can represent a moment that in retrospect seems inescapable in the history of humankind. It compels us to consider history not as a neat progression of grand events, but instead as a rough-edged confluence of disparate lives lived in small moments. This photograph does just that. The coming of Christianity to the African continent altered, as it did in the Americas, India, Australia, and elsewhere, the way that both European and native societies viewed themselves and their world. This image says to us, "There can be no going back from this. What was can be no more. Everything is changing."

The picture shows a Christian missionary church that's been built in the middle of an Igbo village. Livestock hang around outside, unaware of the social and political significance of the building next to them. To some people involved, the church is a brave outpost, bringing the promise of salvation to a primitive people at the edge of civilization. To others, it is a puzzling new addition to an ancient way of life, full of both mystery and danger. It is important to recognize that native peoples who came into contact with colonizing powers were not pure victims; they were full participants in an inevitable cultural exchange.

I try to imagine what it would have felt like to be Igbo at the time this photograph was taken. A strange new religion appears, essentially out of nowhere, brought by exotic people with unfamiliar attitudes and behaviors. The old ways are being replaced with the new. What is it like to witness the coming of a new world? And to watch your world die?

Surely some revelation is at hand...

This is my second time reading Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Both times, the thing that struck me the most about the novel is the power and obscenity of the final chapter, the last paragraph in particular. Okonkwo's entire life, faults and virtues alike, indeed his humanity itself, is reduced to a single paragraph in a book being written by the District Commissioner called The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. His experience is no more than an anecdote in an imperialist history book.

This is the most meaningful element of the novel, in my mind. The British who colonize Umuofia, imposing their religious and political institutions, give no thought to the people who have called the region home for centuries. They are merely savages to be subdued and "civilized." Achebe, purposefully, spends 207 pages detailing the tragic demise of a man and his society, and then two pages showing us what all that suffering and loss meant to the Western world: nothing.

I find the characterization of Okonkwo interesting, as well. It would be easy for Achebe to show him as an innocent, gentle soul, one who never hurt anybody and was always kind to people. Instead, the novel's protagonist is a severe, angry (even cruel) man with staggeringly destructive daddy issues. Achebe doesn't position Okonkwo as the clan's everyman, either; he clearly displays some traits that perplex and frustrate his peers. The author makes it difficult for us to sympathize with him; but sympathize we must. We know that Okonkwo is behaving how he feels he should, and Achebe is careful to tell us good things about him as well. In the end, we mourn for Okonkwo because we recognize what is universal in his life and his humanity, not because we feel great affection for him personally.

On a final note, it's significant that the novel's title comes from a line in W.B. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming," written in 1919 during the aftermath of the First World War. The poem's religious, foreboding imagery laments the decline of European aristocratic values and presumes that Western Civilization is about to be ruined and reborn. The lifted title suits Achebe's novel well; for Okonkwo and the Ibo, things do, indeed, fall apart.

P.S. Embedding is disabled for this video, but it's creative and kind of funny.

The Roman Empire in Africa

Rome, 264 BCE. The powerful civilization of Carthage, on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa, has become an itch that the Roman Empire just has to scratch. Tired of competing for economic and military influence in the region, these two great powers are about to engage in three separate Punic Wars, the resolution of which will in 146 BCE leave Carthage in ruins, its history and culture destroyed, and Rome as the undisputed ruler of the region.

The Roman Empire set the standards and benchmarks for the imperialistic European nation-states that would colonize the world during the Age of Exploration and beyond. The primary reason for establishing influence in Africa (or any province, for that matter) was to exploit the area's resources and labor. The Roman Provinces of Africa (present-day Tunisia), Numidia (present-day Algeria and Tunisia), and Mauretania (present-day Algeria) supplied the empire with, according to one estimate, around 250,000 thousand tons of grain annually, in addition to olives, grapes, livestock, marble, wine, lumber, fruit, textiles, wool, and human slaves.

Egypt also figures prominently in the history of Rome in Africa. In 30 BCE, Rome established rule over Egypt, which would last for six centuries until the fall of the Byzantine empire. The fertile Nile River valley provided the empire with massive supplies of grain and other crops. This exploitation of natural resources was similar to that done by the previous Ptolemaic dynasty (themselves a foreign ruling family from Hellenistic Macedonia), the difference being that under Roman rule the proceeds solely benefitted the Roman patricians and merchants who exported the goods; the products (as well as the taxes they generated) did not stay in Egypt.

The period of Roman rule in North Africa foreshadowed the tragic exploitation of resources, both human and natural, that would characterize the relationships between Africa and the colonial powers in centuries to come. Even the love stories were sad.

Introducing...

My name is Darius Goebel, and I am an English major at Western Michigan University. I plan on becoming a secondary school teacher in the (hopefully) near future.

Besides reading, writing, and teaching, my primary interest is rock and roll music, as well as its related American (specifically African-American) antecedents. When I was eleven I heard Nirvana's album Nevermind and it wrapped its subversive tentacles around my head and my heart. Music has been consistently important to me ever since, as I've worked backward through rock's chronology. Three years after Nevermind I discovered The Sex Pistols and The Clash, and two years after that it was The Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan, and then Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. Music, to me, is more than a fun diversion; it is a vital expression of human experience (much like literature).

I haven't read much writing from Africa, aside from Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. I'm looking forward to getting a sense of the spirit and character of African literature, and therefore Africa itself, during this course. Hakuna Matata!