Marlows Dilemma and Ours; Conrad and Africas Development Agenda: A Reading of Heart of Darkness

Consciously or unconsciously Heart of Darkness is a statement on the (our) difficulty of negotiating development and moral sanity. Marlow’s quest to understand Kurtz’s ventures and remedy him lead rather to the blank realization that the man torn apart by violent verbiage is himself a victim of the quest for development in an environment that seemingly needed domestication. More than a hundred years after its publication, the ripple effect of Heart of Darkness are insistent, the more so because its producer’s virile imagination finds adequate space in our modern political andeconomic consciousness. In spite of the numerous criticisms levelled against Kurtz, he remains the quintessence of a legitimate capitalist search for self-aggrandizement. In this regard, the paper questions and investigates the impact of the exploitation of Africa’s natural resources on the physical and social environment. Additionally, it attempts to understand the extent to which this may exacerbate our moral outrage. In the light of this, the paper locates Kurtz’s, Marlow’s and the reader’s anguish in their difficulty to resolve both the cultural and economical moral stigmas that come with progress. Therefore, this paper argues that Kurtz, Marlow and the reader are all drawn into a moral battle with themselves because of their inability to reconcile the necessity for development and the urgency of preserving the physical and moral environment that makes this possible.