Rating: 
Summary: Every high school student should read this book.
Review: This is the best expose of colonialism that I've ever read. The central thread is the author's musings on "Heart of Darkness" while travelling across Africa by bus, but he brings in everything from Adam Smith to Darwin to Adolf Hitler. The style is lyrical, almost poetic -- interspersed among the history are the author's nightmares, which increase in frequency as he gets closer to the end of the century. After this you'll never be able to read Rudyard Kipling the same way again.
Rating:
Summary: The Horror
Review: This short book doesn't attempt to say it all about genocide, racism, imperialism or the current state of Africa - but once you've read it, all those subjects will make a lot more sense.It's beautifully written. In part it is a travel journal recounting Lindqvist's own slow journey across the Sahara. This is the least developed piece of the narrative, but it gives light relief to the other material. More substantial is Lindqvist's deconstruction of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," the iconic European novel of Africa. With a light touch, Lindqvist sets Conrad's writings in the context of Europe's developing ideas of Africa in the 1890s, as a glorious playing field, a treasure-house to be looted, a distant extension of the intrigues of the European capitals. At its heart, Lindqvist's extended essay is a history of Europe's colonial instinct for genocide. He argues that Hitler's Holocaust was not an aberration in European history, but rather a logical extension of the policies used by the British in Sudan, the Belgians in the Congo, the French in Mali, and so on. Hitler's only difference was that he sought colonial expansion within the boundaries of Europe (a crime against humanity), rather than overseas (the spread of civilisation). Lindqvist charts how European imperialists seized on the emerging theories of Charles Darwin to justify genocide on pseudo-scientific grounds. And also how Germany, not initially among the imperialists, spawned the most articulate opponents of colonialism. Later, when Bismarck set out to get an empire of Germany's own, funded by Germany's rising industrial might, the prevailing scientific philosophy in Germany became increasingly racist - setting the ground for Hitler. People argue that since Lindqvist published this book, monstrous slaughters in Cambodia and Rwanda have destroyed his thesis. Not so. It is not hard to argue that both Cambodia and Rwanda's genocides were a reaction, at least in part, to European or American policies. Even if you choose not to accept that argument, there can be no denying that Lindqvist's fundamental thesis remains. Europeans in Africa (and elsewhere, including Australia) brought with them the civilisation of racism and the gun. All else is unimportant.
| 
