Heart of Darkness

Steamboat captain hired by the Company to travel upriver and retrieve their most successful — and most dangerous — ivory agent

You have always been a sailor — the sea is your trade and the river is its cousin. When the Company offered you a steamboat command on the Congo, you took it because a map of Africa had a blank space in the middle and you wanted to see what was there. You have connections: an aunt in Brussels pulled strings with the Company to secure the appointment. What you have found so far is not what the maps promised. The Outer Station was a grove of death. The Central Station is a hive of petty intrigue. And everywhere — in the chains, the dynamite, the exhausted bodies — you see the machinery of an enterprise that calls itself trade and looks like something else entirely. Now your steamer has a hole in the bottom, the rivets will not come, and everyone keeps whispering about Kurtz: the genius, the prodigy, the man who sends more ivory downriver than all the other stations combined. They want him retrieved. They may want him dead. You are not sure the distinction matters to the Company.

The Congo Free State is not a state. It is a rubber and ivory extraction operation disguised as a civilizing mission, the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium, and arguably the most brutal colonial enterprise in human history. European trading companies dot the river with stations — outer, central, inner — each one further from oversight and closer to madness. The agents of the Company speak of bringing light to the Dark Continent while they work enslaved Africans to death in chain gangs. The ivory flows downriver. The bodies pile up in the jungle. And somewhere at the innermost station, a Company agent named Kurtz has stopped sending reports and started collecting something other than ivory. The Company wants him found. They say he has gone mad. But madness implies a departure from reason, and what Kurtz has done may be the most rational response to a system built on organized cruelty: he has simply dropped the pretense. You have been hired to captain a steamboat upriver and bring him back. The river is the only road. The jungle is the only wall. And the further you travel from the coast, the more you suspect that darkness is not a place but a direction.