Africanist discourse and its transnational malleability: Conrad's contemporaries in the Low Countries

That Conrad shared many of his ideas on the Congo Free State with reformer Roger Casement is well-known, while Outpost of Progress (1897), Heart of Darkness (1899), and his and Ford Madox Ford's The Inheritors (1901), in their critique of ruthless exploitation, visibly emerged from the same intellectual environment. Pursing this connection, this essay examines the idea of Congo reform in fictional works by two of Conrad's contemporaries in the Low Countries: Cyriel Buysse's De zwarte kost (1898), and Henri van Booven's Tropenwee (1904). Like Heart of Darkness, both are structured around a white man's journey through Leopold II's Congo Free State, and both resonate powerfully with Conrad's dystopian portraits of white colonial degeneration. Connecting Conrad's writings to the transnational networks of the Congo Reform movement, this essay also locates Buysse's and van Booven's scathing account of Belgian colonialism within the political climate of the Low Countries at the fin de siecle