While trying to learn about what my interlocutor called the first genocide of the twentieth century—the German colonial war against the Herero people in today’s Namibia—I found "Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide, by a Swedish author named Sven Lindqvist.

It’s already over a decade old, but still contemporary-feeling, because despite a few cracks in the ivory tower barracks discussed a few weeks ago, our deliberations over European/White guilt have by and large not progressed much beyond the level Lindqvist reaches here.

Which isn't very far.

Lindqvist tells the story of Joseph Conrad’s writing of Heart of Darkness, interspersing the history bits with a travelogue of his own, crossing the Sahara on buses from the Mediterranean coast to Chad, to the site of a French colonial massacre.

His whole point is that Conrad’s grotesque Belgian Congo was no exaggeration, and was not unique. Rather, genocide lies at the very heart of European civilization. It’s tiresome and heavy-handed, and very readable.

The problem is not the ascribing of guilt. Guilt is appropriate to talk about. Nor is the problem his Euro-centric vision of agency: even if all peoples are guilty of inhuman crimes, we can still talk about particular crimes. Still, there is always a risk of dehumanizing victims by writing them as objects of the perpetrators' agence, rather than full people, capable of their own moral actions. Lindqvist can’t seem to avoid the trap: Europeans alone know good and evil; Africans are simple creatures acted upon by outsiders.

That’s not the main problem. The main error of Lindqvist’s essay comes on the last page:

Everywhere in the world where knowledge is being suppressed, knowledge that, if it were made known, would shatter our image of the world and force us to question ourselves—everywhere there, Heart of Darkness is being enacted.

You already know that. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.

And thus, capping a discussion of “the origins of European genocide,” we land on … drawing conclusions.

And accordingly, an undermining of evil. If genocide can be prevented by drawing conclusions, it’s a matter of error, not evil.

In the end, genocide is far too important for us to allow enlightenment humanism a monopoly of action. Genocide is evil, and must be stopped by a stronger force than telling stories.

[photo credit: flickr user AKFudge]