A Common Enemy

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Heart of Darkness, The Age of Wonder and King Leopold’s Ghost talk about slavery. The most obvious connection is this common theme. Further into this complex theme is human nature, human instinct and natural urge of behavior. WE discussed in class the aggressiveness of humans. Today that aggressiveness has a wrong connotation, goes against the law, is worthy of prison, unacceptable. But before we were “civilized” or “sivilized” as Huck Finn calls it, that violence within us, against each other, was comprehended, common among us. Freud argues that we are born this way. If you think about it, animals, the other living things that resemble humans the most, are in fact aggressive among themselves. They kill each other for survival, they fight for a female, they wrestle to prove their male superiority, etc.. Watch Animal Planet or National Geographic. Our inner self, the ID as Freud calls it, does tend to put down another human being.

I have not yet established Conrad’s opinion of slavery. I am sure he disagrees with the imperialistic ways of his time and is aware of the atrocities happening at the Congo for ivory, yet he also portrays the Africans as cannibals and untamed beasts. What I was surprised to find out was that the Africans, among themselves, before the Europeans came along, practiced slavery, “Some Congo basin peoples sacrificed slaves on special occasions, such as the ratification of a treaty between chiefdoms; (…) Some slaves might also be sacrificed to give a dead chief’s soul some company on its journey into the next world.” (Hochschild 10) The Europeans only imposed the trading of slaves, buying and selling people and their treatment of the slaves was even less harsh than that of the Africans. Some slaves could gain freedom and they supposedly had a monetary value. The Europeans then are not the ones to blame for the atrocious practice of slavery. It was part of the culture before they converted it into an industry. The difference was that when they came along they are the common threat for all the Africans, the common enemy, and as Freud discusses in one of his theories, a common adversary to hate. The Europeans’ fear of the African natives, and image of them as Conrad exposes them, was reciprocal, “The whites were thought to turn their captives’ flesh into salt meat, their brains into cheese, and their blood into the red wine Europeans drank.” (Hochschild 16) Makes me nauseous.

It all gets me thinking, what if the normal guys are those violent criminals we call mentally sick, and those that are wrong are the rest of us? I guess war does not only have political and economic reasons, but one of natural violent behavior of human nature. Have we become further and further away from our instincts? I guess so, and it is not wonder we are so thrilled with the topic, like Twain, Conrad, Freud and Hochschild are.