An Outpost Of Progress

“Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.”

When the narrator intervenes in the story of Kayerts and Carlier, it is to interject this sort of insight. Be careful, he warns the reader, from a moral and ethical perspective, people are little more than chameleons. The narrator suggests that a person is only as moral and as ethical as their culture. This foreshadows the revelations later in the story about how easily the civilized Christians from Belgium so entirely and completely surrender to the jungle with its distinct sense of right and wrong.

“Society not from any tenderness, but because of its strange needs, had taken care of these two men, forbidding them all independent thought, all initiative, all departure from routine; and forbidding them under pain of death.”

Given that the premise behind colonial imperialism is the European idea that their presence will bring foreign cultures refinement, here the narrator observes that society, far from encouraging healthy moral and ethical growth, stymies moral evolution by compelling its members to think like everyone else or risk exclusion. This sense of society’s rightness, in the end, dooms Kayerts, as he cannot evolve to meet the new circumstances of Africa.

“They lived like blind men in a large room, aware only of what came in contact with them (and of that only imperfectly), but unable to see the general aspect of things.”

In Africa, the Belgians have no clue where they are. The jungle gives them no reassuring context. The narrator suggests how ill-equipped both Belgians are for the difficult and complex realities about human nature, right and wrong, and the human heart that the jungle can teach. They are, the narrator says, more like the blind in a room whose dimensions they cannot begin to guess.

“They took up these wrecks of novels, and, as they had never read anything of the kind before, they were surprised and amused. Then during long days there were interminable and silly discussions about plots and personages.”

Both Kayerts and Carlier are quickly bored by life at the outpost. Here they manage to find old novels scattered about their hut, left, they assume, by the previous administrator, a failed artist. The image the narrator offers here works on the irony of juxtaposition: the two cultured white men sit on a veranda discussing characters in novels while all around them is the impenetrable jungle, masses of local men working for the company, and oppressive heat. 

“Carlier was hollow-eyed and irritable. Kayerts showed a drawn, flabby face above the rotundity of his stomach, which gave him a weird aspect. But being constantly together, they did not notice the change that took place gradually in their appearance.”

The novel suggests the inner deterioration of the Belgians through the use of how physical conditions in the outpost, particularly the heat and the lack of adequate food supplies, dramatically alter their physical appearance. The change is gradual, a suggestion of how slowly but steadily the two regress from their cultured, educated, civilized personas. Drawing on the new scientific theory of evolution, here the two are not evolving but devolving.

“Kayerts also did not like these chaps. They both, for the first time, became aware that they lived in conditions where the unusual may be dangerous, and that there was no power on earth outside of themselves to stand between them and the unusual.”

The arrival of the armed band of rogue locals (whom Kayerts patronizingly calls chaps) alerts both Belgians for the first time that they are in a dangerous and threatening place. That the idea has not occurred to them before this indicates how insulated, self-involved, and smug they are. For the first time, the two glimpse the reality of where they are stationed.

“Had they been of any other tribe they would have made up their minds to die—for nothing is easier to certain savages than suicide—and so to have escaped from the puzzling difficulties of existence.”

Here the narrator, speaking through the limited (and corrupt) perceptions of Kayerts, reveals how deeply held are the misconceptions of the European colonizers. Set upon by difficult circumstances—the heat is getting to him, the food is running out, the roving band of armed locals alarm him—Kayerts bloviates that such dire circumstances would more than justify a local person dying by suicide. But not a European. The irony is so evident only Kayerts misses it—first, the locals, like Makola, are not only not destroyed by these conditions, but they thrive in them. And, more disturbing, Kayerts in the end will die by suicide, will himself surrender, overwhelmed.

“They lay on their hard beds, but did not sleep. They heard footsteps, whispers, some groans. It seemed as if a lot of men came, dumped heavy things on the ground, squabbled a long time, then went away.”

The irony here is rich. What the two are hearing is Makola taking care of the business of the ivory trade. He is getting the locals at the outpost drunk, after which he forces them into the control of the rogue band of armed locals. The two Belgians are concerned only with their safety. What they are hearing are the sounds of men being trafficked like commodities. How simple, how unconcerned is the description of the abomination. The phrasing sounds as if Kayerts and Carlier are like children, oblivious and worried only about themselves.

“I believe you have sold our men for these tusks…You fiend.”

This moment, when Kayerts confronts Makola over the shocking reality that Makola has traded the outpost’s servants in return for securing the ivory tusks, could easily have marked Kayerts’s moment of heroic insight. However, there is more show to Kayerts’s objections. Quickly this confrontation de-escalates as Makola calmly explains the logic of the transaction and, in turn, how the outpost (and Kayerts) will profit from the deal. Fiend quickly becomes friend.

“A great silence seemed to lie heavily over the station and press on their lips. They hardly exchanged a word that day. Makola did not open the supply store; he spent the day playing with his children…It was a touching picture.”

The contrast between how the white Europeans react to the slave trade and how Makola reacts to the slave trade is telling. Bothered by their sense of propriety and moral rightness, the white men cannot accommodate what has happened, and they dwell on the trade as a moral offense. Makola, who actually negotiates the deal, is fine with it, even takes a day off and plays with his kids to reward himself for making such a lucrative deal. Not that Conrad endorses slavery. Rather, he offers two strikingly disturbing reactions: helplessness and indifference. He leaves it to the reader to assert an appropriate moral response.

“Everybody shows a respectful deference to certain sounds that he and his fellows can make. But about feelings people really know nothing. We talk with indignation or enthusiasm; we talk about oppression, cruelty, crime, devotion, self-sacrifice, virtue, and we know nothing real beyond the words.”

The story reveals the irrelevance of language, how words have little to do with the reality they try to define. Slavery is just a word for Kayerts until his experience in the Congo. The cruelty of human trafficking is a catchphrase of the abolitionist movement back home. Here, not only has he learned the experience first-hand, but he has been a participant in the slave market against all of his upbringing. The story suggests the disparity between words—even noble words like virtue—and the complex and contradictory reality those words try to simplify.

“Meanwhile Kayerts and Carlier lived on rice boiled without salt, and cursed the Company, all Africa, and the day they were born. One must have lived on such a diet to discover what ghastly trouble the necessity of swallowing one’s food may be. There was literally nothing else in the station than rice and coffee; they drank the coffee without sugar.”

Conditions deteriorate, certainly, but this is no Donner party story. Yes, supplies are running low because the company’s steamer has been delayed, but supplies are on the way, probably arriving the next day. Yes, the two eat a lot of rice. The supreme sacrifice, the one that precipitates Carlier’s murder, is a spoonful of sugar. The irony is palpable. Carlier dies for want of a spoonful of sugar. The Belgians are short tempered, spoiled, and petty. Dying for sugar in your coffee is hardly the sort of noble and lofty ideals that Europeans like to think are worth dying for.

“Come! Out with that sugar, you stingy old slave-dealer.”

There it is: the truth that Kayerts prefers to ignore. He is, by not intervening in the deal, a slave-dealer. Revealed at a moment of frustration and anger (the two quarreling over rationed sugar), Cartier knowingly delivers a challenge. He is, after all, a career soldier and understands the power of an insult to a man’s sense of honor and integrity, particularly one that is honest. These are fighting words—and that is exactly what follows, despite the fact that really no one hears the accusation, and the two nevertheless continue the grand drama of the fight over Kayerts’s pride.