Heart of Darkness Section Two

African Americans are displayed as savages. Marlow can make observations about their savage appearance but his feelings contrast with what his eyes see. When he was thinking about the death of his helmsman he said, "I missed him even while his body was still lying in the pilot house. Perhaps you will think it passing strange this regret for a savage who was no more account than a grain of sand in a black Sahara" (46). Marlow is aware of how African Americans don't count for much in Sahara; he misses the helmsman and feels sorrow. He also uses the term "savage" and "nigger" showing how he views African Americans as inferior but not necessarily referring to the color of their skin. He may feel superior to African Americans but that doesn't make him racist. According to the American Heritage Dictionary corruption is ruining morally, perverting, contaminating and destroying integrity. The Europeans have corrupted African Americans by simply using the terms "savage", "nigger" and describing them as wild and untamed. Marlow speaks of the African Americans when he says, "Well, you know what was the worst of it--this suspicion of their not being inhuman" (32). Marlow states that when people begin to suspect that African Americans are not inhuman it can be the worst feeling. "They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces" and ugly as it might have looked "he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore" meaning a real man knows there is a relation between himself and the African Americans, whether he speaks of it or not the thought is there (32).

Marlow displays some thoughts of colonialism when he says, "We were wanderers on prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil" (32). He is stating that they were wondering in what seemed to be unclaimed land that they could have taken possession of but they would have been overpowered by distress and hard work. Mr. Kurtz also explains that "we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, a must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings--we approach them with the might as of a deity" This shows how many white people thought they could approach African Americans as supernatural beings and godlike, showing they had good intentions for colonizing.

Marlow said that "all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz" relating to the idea that Mr. Kurtz' mother was half-English and his father half-French. Meaning Kurtz was not of one background and not the average European looking to colonize Africa. Kurtz had a diverse background "all Europe" not just a part of Europe shaped him.