Attack on Colonialism in Heart of Darkness It is very easy for a reader to see Heart of Darkness as a representation of and attack on colonialism in general and, more specifically, the form particularly brutal assumed by colonialism in the Belgian Congo. Consider the book from this point of view and you will be led to those details describing the mistreatment of Africans, the greed of the so-called "pilgrims", the broken idealism of Kurtz, and so on. You will find it important to note, for example, that French warship dropping shells into the jungle, or the grove of death that Marlow comes across, or the short note that Kurtz attaches to his noble essay on The Suppression of Savage Customs, or the importance of ivory for the economy of the system. As a historian, however, you may also feel a little frustrated by the strange fact that the book is so evasive in naming places, people, and dates. We might assume, for example, that Brussels is the city of the whitewashed speculcher, but we might wonder why Marlow fails to give it a name. One reason for the lack of names, I suppose, is that Conrad was not only interested in the particulars of the history of colonialism as applied to the Belgian Congo; he was apparently also interested in a more general sociological inquiry into those who conquer and those who are conquered, and the complicated interaction between them. In this light, different, more sociological questions can be raised and different answers found. Details that might be noted in this context are, for example, Marlow's invocation of the Roman conquest of Britain, or the cultural ambiquity of those Africans who adopted some of the ways of their Europeans: Marlow's helmsman, for example, or the manager's rude servant - or the ways in which wilderness tends to strip the civilization of Europeans and brutalize them.