Exposing The Truth

Adam Hochschild uncovers the truth behind Belgium’s dominion over the Congo in King Leopold’s Ghost. Concerned specifically with the effects of slavery over the African territory, Hochschild narrates the toil of individuals who strived to expose this cruelty. As he shares the factual evidence in history, he contradicts an erroneous take on events that has become widely accepted as the legitimate account. Belgium was nowhere near to being the victim. How could a group of people ever imagine that they would manage to hide events of such magnitude from the world with any success?

In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad describes an expedition into mysterious lands in Africa. The novel deals with the Dark Continent as the unknown. Conrad tries to expose those interior lands, where Kurtz dwelled in harmony with the natives, to help shape our understanding of European colonization. Likewise, Hochschild deals with a dark period in history as the unknown. There was minimal information available, for most of the historical documents “burned for eight days, turning most of the Congo state records to ash and smoke” (294). These authors try to trace our understanding of European colonization back to its origin in an attempt to correct modern understanding of history. Slavery decided the fate of countries for centuries after it vanished as they fought to “[emerge] from the shadow of its past” (301). If this is true in places where its existence is widely admitted and confronted, how much harder will it be for territories where slavery is dealt with as fiction to overcome their burdens?

Consequently, schools preach about the importance of understanding the mistakes of our ancestors as to avoid their concurrence but filter the cruelty from our memory, thus failing to prevent their repetition. This might help explain how the world appears to be a worse place as day goes by, as if humanity had no limit to its cruelty and our only limitation was the time taken to device new means of cruelty. How can we progress in our understanding of human behavior when its flaws are treated as “taboo. Like the history of millions killed” ?(298). Both authors reach places previously barred to the public. If we take Conrad’s novel as an adventure into his own mind, we face the mysterious functioning of human brain as another limitation to our understanding of human cruelty. In effect, they try to prove how enlightening the general public naturally concludes in progress. The more we know, the more we are able to understand and assimilate. When we are able to filter things through our reason, we prevent the fueling of passions that often drive people to bestow disaster upon others.

Finally, I think it is important to highlight the power Europe had in shaping the face of the world. There has been no place on earth where Europeans didn’t determine the fate of its people. Their legacy survives to the present days where many of the habits of tyrants translate into corrupt individuals leading countries. Only by acknowledging our heritage will we ever overcome the obstacles engraved in our history. There is no use in denying what has happened. We must strive to shed light onto those dark spaces in human understanding if we are to evolve out of the shadows and “a hundred black fiends” that trouble us daily (295).