Of Degenerated Heroes and Failed Romance: King Léopold’s Congo in Popular European Literatures

Heart of Darkness is certainly the most important founding text for a literary tradition of representing the Congo. Yet at the historical moment, it was just one text in a much larger corpus of travel writing, reports, pamphlets and fiction that formed a discourse on the so-called Congo atrocities, a subject which provoked heated debate among colonial powers at the time. The larger discursive formation has political implications for Europe and the colonial politics of the day. This article explores the contribution of popular genres, including adventure and romance fiction, to the representation of the particular crimes committed in the Congo Free State. Focussing on Henri de Vere Stacpoole’s The Pools of Silence (1909) and Arnaldo Cipolla’s L’Airone: Romanzo dei fiumi equatoriali (1920), I argue that contemporary fiction served to construct the Congo as a space of terror and degeneration while simultaneously employing discursive patterns and images taken from contemporary political debates about the Free...