Heart of Darkness

So I've been reading this thing after watching Apocalypse Now and it. is. creepy. The movie captured the mood perfectly. What the hell is going on with this story?

There's a lot of assumptions and priors in the characters that I don't have, and so a lot is lost on me, but one thing that annoys me is the attitude to "savagery" and "wild men"! For such a globetrotter, the provincialism is extreme: even "the Continent" is treated as something foreign and strange and uncomfortable. It's frankly irritating.

Joseph Conrad was very much a product of his time. He was trying to criticize European colonialism, and paint the colonists as worse than any of the Africans. Marlow even calls London a place of darkness. But Conrad still slips into racist clichés about the Africans, I guess because he didn't know better.

In short: the depictions of European savages are much better than those of the Africans.