One Hundred Years of Darkness

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Stunning, provocative images of a Congo journey - Rated
Fifth longest river in the world and second only to the Nile on the African continent, the Congo river is 2720 miles long. It is also sub-Saharan Africa’s greatest thoroughfare: a living roadway up which, even at the driest times of the year, barges in excess of 1000 tons are able to penetrate more than 650 miles. But the heart of darkness referred to in the title of Conrad’s famous story didn’t originate in the unexplored far reaches of the river. Instead it slid against the flow towards the interior during the vast region’s exploitation by nineteenth century colonialists. Conrad witnessed this rape first hand in 1890, was horrified by it, and Heart of Darkness was the parable by which he described its effect upon him..

One hundred years on from first publication of Conrad’s classic story the photographer Marcus Bleasdale found himself sitting on the banks of the river reflecting on the manner in which the inheritors of the colonial past have so easily adopted the manner of their European predecessors. In his introduction to One Hundred years of Darkness he talks of witnessing through Conrad’s lens the “anonymous lives” of today’s Congolese: “as desperate and as dire today” as in the time of Conrad’s fictional creation Kurtz.

Bleasdale describes his journey in monochrome. Colour is cheaper to produce today but Pirogue Press have spared no expense, reproducing Bleasdale's imagery in delicate tri-tone. And the words of Conrad’s story intertwine themselves with Bleasdale’s contemporary captions. Bleasdale’s own journeys on the river do not however adopt the traditional photojournalistic narrative, the images instead revealing their layered secrets slowly and in details often placed at the edges of the frame. Captions describe the subject of individual pictures as we learn of child soldiers, millions displaced by wars rarely mentioned in Europe, salaried employees of the UN sunning themselves beside hotel swimming pools, children born with Malaria and abandoned by parents, ferryboats that remain the region’s lifeblood and pygmies: the original inhabitants of the Congo, apparently still renowned as trackers. But taken as a whole the photographs combine to bear witness to the greater truth: the darkness first witnessed by Conrad remains to this day.

A fascinating book and far from the last I imagine we will see from the camera of Mr Bleasdale.

Simon James