Tyrants at the Heart of Darkness: Conradian Dictators in Golding, Steiner, Naipaul, and Foden

Abstract

Since its publication in 1899, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has been received as a fable addressing the nature of evil. However, Conrad’s representation of Kurtz as a tyrannical figure and his indirect allusion to King Leopold II, the supreme ruler of the Congo Free State, also foreshadows the rise of 20th-century dictators, from Adolf Hitler to the military leaders in postcolonial countries such as Mobutu Sese Seko and Idi Amin. In fact, whether set in Africa or elsewhere, post-war English novels, such as William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), George Steiner’s The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. (1979), V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River (1979), and Giles Foden’s The Last King of Scotland (1998), not only borrow and update the framework of Conrad’s work but also critically expand its possibilities in a new context following Nazism and African decolonization. By shedding light on the intertextual relationships between Heart of Darkness and these later novels depicting dictatorship, this article reveals how these works respond to Conrad’s legacy and draw on his mythical exploration of evil for their own critique of the problems of dictatorship or totalitarianism.

Keywords

• dictators
• heart of darkness
• africa
• decolonization
• nazism