Conrad's Congo

About this book

In 1890, at the age of 33, Joseph Conrad fulfilled his childhood dream of visiting Central Africa when he became captain of a paddle-steamer on the Congo River, under the employ of the Société Anonyme Belge. However, as he would later write, in place of the dream came the realisation that the colonial enterprise was ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration’. The journey was to profoundly affect him, both mentally and physically, for the rest of his life, proving formative in his development as a writer and the creation of Heart of Darkness.It is a journey explored in this new exclusive collection from The Folio Society. Conrad’s ‘Up-river Book’, the ship’s log in which he recorded his six-week journey aboard the Roi des Belges, is central to this story, and is framed by his ‘Congo Diary’, recording the eight months he spent in the Congo Free State. Interspersed with these texts are his letters to family and friends. The short story, ‘An Outpost of Progress’, which foreshadows Conrad’s most ambitious and acclaimed work, and is the only other to draw directly on his experiences in the Congo, is also included. Two European men take charge of a trading station, puffed up with a sense of superiority, but regarded as ‘imbeciles’ by their superiors and oblivious to the simmering hatred of their conduit slave from Sierra Leone.Two appendices provide additional context. One consists of testimonies on how the journey affected the course of Conrad's life, from writers including Bertrand Russell and Ford Madox Ford. The second is an extract from then British Consul Roger Casement's 1903 Congo Report, which documented the human rights abuses committed by the colonial administration. Conrad expert J. H. Stape, who advised on the compilation of this illuminating collection and provided linking passages, has written a new introduction, which sits alongside a preface by Adam Hochschild adapted from his bestselling history King Leopold's Ghost. Conrad's hand-drawn diagrams from his diary and the original 'Up-river Book' accompany a series of photographs from the archives at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, which has an extensive collection of photographs of the Congo from the period that Conrad was there. One is an unusually clear image of the Roi des Belges; others provide disturbing insights into the brutality of the slave trade. The source material that forms this unique collection weaves together a remarkable story about the genius that would produce one of the 20th century's greatest works of fiction.