He repeats an old theory that Kurtz was based on the EIC officer Léon Rom whom Conrad “may have met” in 1890 and “almost certainly” read about in 1898. Hochschild certainly wishes this was Conrad’s purpose. “he main point is that Conrad realistically described the terrible things done by Belgians in the Congo. King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.
Whatever its authenticity, it could not be a source for a book published in 1902.” The brutalities by whites in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now were inspired by the novel, Hochschild avers, because Conrad “had seen it all, a century earlier, in the Congo.” In another example of creative chronology, Hochschild cites a quotation that he believes was the inspiration for Kurtz’s famous scrawl, “Exterminate all the brutes!” The quotation was made public for the first time during a Belgian legislative debate in 1906. Hochschild will have none of it, insisting that Conrad “saw the beginnings of the frenzy of plunder and death” which he then “recorded” in Heart of Darkness. So whatever sources Conrad was using when he began work on Heart of Darkness in 1898, his personal experiences would at most have added some color and context. There is no mention of rubber in the novel because Conrad was there five years before rubber cultivation began. “Conrad spent six months working for a cargo company in the EIC in 1890, three weeks of it aboard a steamship traveling up river to today’s Kisangani.
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