As an old "Conraddict" I own all of Joseph Conrad's books, including the nine-volume Doubleday edition from the 1930s. Two of his most famous stories were made into movies: "Lord Jim" and "Heart of Darkness". I've only just now discovered a third one, "An Outpost of Progress".
The story is best read at a symbolic level. It focuses on the colonial situation in Africa towards the end of the nineteenth century and challenges readers to examine the ethical questions raised by the policy of colonialism. From the very beginning it becomes clear that the title "Outpost of Progress" is ironic, for the two white men are lazy and incompetent. The theme of the incompetence, destructiveness and cruelty of colonialism is developed as the story progresses. The gradual physical and moral degeneration of the two colonial administrators, leading to their deaths, can be interpreted as a reflection of the general state of colonialism.
Here are the opening lines, "There were two white men in charge of the trading station. Kayerts, the chief, was short and fat; Carlier, the assistant, was tall, with a large head and a very broad trunk perched upon a long pair of thin legs. The third man on the staff was a Sierra Leone nigger, who maintained that his name was Henry Price. However, for some reason or other, the natives down the river had given him the name of Makola, and it stuck to him through all his wanderings about the country. He spoke English and French with a warbling accent, wrote a beautiful hand, understood bookkeeping, and cherished in his innermost heart the worship of evil spirits. His wife was a negress from Loanda, very large and very noisy. Three children rolled about in sunshine before the door of his low, shed-like dwelling. Makola, taciturn and impenetrable, despised the two white men. He had charge of a small clay storehouse with a dried-grass roof, and pretended to keep a correct account of beads, cotton cloth, red kerchiefs, brass wire, and other trade goods it contained. Besides the storehouse and Makola’s hut, there was only one large building in the cleared ground of the station. It was built neatly of reeds, with a verandah on all the four sides. There were three rooms in it. The one in the middle was the living-room, and had two rough tables and a few stools in it. The other two were the bedrooms for the white men. Each had a bedstead and a mosquito net for all furniture. The plank floor was littered with the belongings of the white men; open half-empty boxes, torn wearing apparel, old boots; all the things dirty, and all the things broken, that accumulate mysteriously round untidy men. There was also another dwelling-place some distance away from the buildings. In it, under a tall cross much out of the perpendicular, slept the man who had seen the beginning of all this; who had planned and had watched the construction of this outpost of progress." Continue to read here.
Conrad travelled to the Congo Free State as an ambition of his childhood in 1889, filled with illusions and hopes, but instead of that he returned to Europe with an emotional trauma of the atrocities that he witnessed there. These experiences served as inspiration to write both "Heart of Darkness" and "An Outpost of Progress".
