‘Your White Supremacy, like Kurtz’s, still haunts our modern world’
Daniel Nelson
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a novel more quoted - often misleadingly, to make a contemptuous point about Africa - than read. But here’s a film that gives the book an original, urgent and powerful update.
British-Nigerian poet and activist Femi Nylander finds a parallel story of a French military officer who goes rogue in Africa, brutalising and murdering hundreds, but unlike Kurtz in Conrad’s book, Captain Paul Voulet is a real historical person.
Nylander follows Voulet’s route through Niger from village to village, from atrocity to atrocity, occasionally quoting – accurately – Conrad’s book. African Apocalypse is the story of the two journeys.
Though separated by 120 years both journeys are horrifying – Voulet’s for its ruthless barbarity, Nylander’s for revealing the horrifying truth and showing how it has scarred survivors and descendants.
He admits he wasn’t sure anyone in Niger would remember the pathological killer, but they certainly do. Villagers mark Nylander’s visit by summoning people to listen to the elders’ testimonies: “They told me no-one had ever come here before to ask about their history.” He is given a dusty tape recording of a 93-year-old woman recalling one of the massacres, of which she was the lone survivor.
Voulet is part of their history: “It will remain engraved on our hearts as long as France continues to ravage our country heartlessly.”
That’s not mere rhetoric, for Nylander is told that the region has never recovered. “People were scared. They lost everything. They were driven back to square one. Now it’s better but we are still scared – the Whites might return and destroy everything again.” Agriculture was disrupted, hunger struck, people started to leave, and continue to do so: “He found us rich and left us poor.” “This is where our poverty began.”
Musing on what he has heard, Nylander addresses Voulet: “Now I see you never really died. Your White Supremacy, like Kurtz’s, still haunts our modern world, my world.”
And in case you think these massacres were an aberration, a one-off by a man who had lost his mind, we are reminded that the killing is typical: Kitchener’s revenge at Omdurman for the killing of General Gordon, German genocide in Namibia, the Belgian killing spree in Congo that may have reduced the population by 10 per cent in a decade.
The exploitation continues. France mined Niger’s uranium for its nuclear industry. Workers had little or no protection, earned a pittance, became ill, died. “I think one out of three lightbulbs [in France] is powered by Niger’s uranium,” says a former mineworker, “but we have almost no electricity.”
Nylander’s front of camera role and his reactions might have been a bathetic distraction to these awful events, but he just about carries it off. At one point the two Nigeriens who guide him on his way tell him he – and they – are hearing these harrowing accounts but his face shows no emotion. After that reproach, Nylander becomes more of a participant in village gatherings and less of an observer.
The film ends with Nylander back at home, addressing a Black Lives Matter rally, reflecting on what he has witnessed: “We cannot forget the injustices of history… We must confront them if we ever hope to be free.”
* Next screening: from Saturday 22 May, 9.30pm, BBC2