An Outpost Of Progress

By contemporary standards, reading “An Outpost of Progress” can be uncomfortable, a kind of eye-rolling, even wincing experience. For a contemporary culture sensitive to the deep moral offense of slavery, any story that tells about the relationship between locals and white settlers who are intent on exploiting local resources (and their people) for financial gain would seem a simple, direct cautionary tale to tell: locals—good, innocent victims; white interlopers—bad, hypocritical Christian victimizers, who are greedy, ruthlessly mercenary, and prone to fits of anger and violence.

Conrad’s dark tale of Kayerts’s suicide and the entirely pointless shooting of Carlier is defiantly, deliberately, unapologetically politically incorrect. Not only does the text use the “n-word” repeatedly (true as that is to its era when the word was part of the popular parlance) but it tells the tragic story of the downfall of two very white Belgians, who arrive at this isolated outpost (more than 300 miles from the next outpost) to help build the economic base of the struggling Belgian Congo. They are there to assist in the development of a struggling quasi-nation still hopelessly mired within antiquated and unworkable economic structures. The two white men are there at the behest of the grandly named Great Trading Company to help the locals to create an outpost of progress, a model of civilization, in what they believe is an “uncivilized” country. Admittedly, the two men are a bit incompetent, not terribly swift, a tad lazy, and, as novices in the trading business, initially way over their heads in the tropics, a “wilderness rendered more strange, more incomprehensible by the mysterious glimpses of vigorous life it contained” (Part 1, Paragraph 5).

That susceptibility to the dark and forbidding emptiness of the jungle makes the two vulnerable as the weeks turn into months, and the locals take quick advantage of that. It is the locals themselves, who mock and quietly the two white men. It is the locals, not the two white men, who so coolly, so openly deal in the slave trade. It is specifically Makola who gets the other locals drunk on palm wine and then negotiates his own people into servitude to secure a harvest of valuable ivory. It is the locals who provoke the fear that, in turn, exploits the vulnerability of the two white men. In the end, it is Makola who counsels Kayerts on how easily the shooting of Carlier can be covered up and how easily the rule of law can be subverted. Driven mad by the fathomless moral degeneracy of these locals, it is Kayerts who does the only noble thing an outraged and outplayed white man of conscience can do while immersed within such an amoral wilderness: he heroically sacrifices himself and leaves the corrupt and feral locals to the dark jungle they deserve.

In that reading, the white men are the victims, the locals the victimizers and opportunistic predators. Indeed, the immediate market for Conrad’s story, the comfortable middle and upper-class readers back in London, would expect just such a story. For the better part of a century, the British, along with other European countries, had tirelessly worked to bring the enlightenment of Western civilization to colonial outposts in both Africa and Asia, intent on bringing civilization to the locals. Those readers back home would expect just such a tale that demonized the locals and portrayed the white men as heroic. Indeed, Conrad himself plays to those expectations and, through the use of irony, upends those assumptions to unmask the evil and moral weakness of the two white traders. The ironic story reveals how the veneer of their civilized and cultured characters quickly and completely fails them when confronted by the tropical wilderness. Thus, Conrad uses the two traders to expose the immorality of colonialism and how the European crusade to Europeanize Africa was doomed because, at its heart, is the sure sense that these wondrous and ancient civilizations are theirs to fix and to save.

Conrad uses irony to suggest the disparity between what Kayerts and Carlier understand about themselves and how they really are. The story both records the experience of the white traders in the deepest Congo and deflates their pretenses. It exposes the exaggerated sense of the white men’s own importance and their calm assumption that, because they are white educated Christians, they are morally, ethically, and spiritually superior to locals.

The two are hardly heroic adventurers as they arrive at the outpost. One is a displaced office clerk, broke and desperate to find enough money to make his daughter more attractive as a potential wife; the other a failed military officer whose own family exiles him to the deepest reaches of the Congo because of his annoying personality and his tendency to mooch. The two, strangers in a strange land, resist mingling with the locals or trying to learn their customs, preferring to observe them as if they were “exotic animals.” They have little interest in the jobs they are sent to do—even the director of the entire operation dismisses the two as “imbeciles” (Part 1, Paragraph 3). Their prattle on the broad veranda of their hut in the middle of the outpost reflects how nervous they are, how unsettled they are being surrounded by the sheer depths of the jungle’s inhospitable emptiness, drawing close together whenever they would walk the dirt streets “as children do in the dark” (Part 1, Paragraph 6). They epitomize the hypocrisy of European colonialism in their determination to direct as much ivory as they can to Belgium while still maintaining a safe distance from the locals, who, in the minds of these white men, are there only to amuse them or to serve them.

The jungle slowly works to corrode the psychological health and moral well-being of the two Belgians. After five months, “they became daily more like a pair of accomplices than a couple of devoted friends” (Part 2, Paragraph 41). The arrival of the armed band of locals with surplus ivory to negotiate with reveals the shocking reality of a world unimpressed by the Western/Christian moral code. For Makola, the deal he strikes with the rogue band is a simple, clean, and logical negotiation, uncomplicated by hyper-hypocritical Western moral outrage. The armed band needs carriers to continue their trading; Makola needs a bumper crop of ivory to meet the quotas at the outpost. It is Kayerts, now confronted with what his Western civilization background tells him is the vilest of evil endeavors and is, in fact, criminal—treating human beings as commodities— who rants on about the immortality of the deal. Makola asks if Kayerts wants the ivory, exposing the irrelevance of Kayerts’s precious morality. The hypocrisy is revealed shortly after his self-righteous outburst when Kayerts calms himself thinking about how the surplus ivory will impress his director.

As a joke, Carlier calls Kayerts “you stingy slaver-dealer” (Part 2, Paragraph 47) when he asks for some sugar for his coffee. The fight that erupts between the two reveals how easy it is to succumb, when exposed to the complex and paradoxical morality of the jungle, to the animal impulses their civilization pretends to control and contain. As they chase each other, even Kayerts pauses to tell himself that fighting over sugar was “absurd” (Part 2, Paragraph 55). Shooting Carlier does not register with Kayerts: “A loud explosion took place, between them” (Part 2, Paragraph 58) as if the gun is in somebody else’s hands. That dissociative moment marks Kayerts’s collapse into madness, “a feeling of exhausted serenity” (Part 2, Paragraph 66).

His suicide is appropriately carried out in a cloaking morning fog that suggests Kayerts’s own difficult understanding of a troubling world where right and wrong do not appear to operate, where each person is doomed to struggle to find coherence, meaning, identity, and dignity. As the boat bringing the Director of Operations nears the dock, the hanging body of Kayerts resolves itself against the fog. In the closing image, the blackened tongue of the dead Kayerts sticking out irreverently closes the story on a darkly ironic note: the very model of a European colonial administrator mocks the arrival of more Europeans, determined to do what Conrad, as narrator, understands cannot be done: civilize humanity’s complex and dark nature.