One Hundred Years of Darkness - Hardcover

Twenty years after first reading Heart of Darkness, I found myself sitting on the banks of the Congo River revisiting Conrad’s words. Waiting in Brazzaville for my first ferry to Kinshasa, I looked up from the page. Drunken police and soldiers were whipping travellers who strayed out of line with the chicotte, a legacy of Belgian colonial rule; rifle butts found a home in the backs and temples of a group of suspected looters, later hauled screaming to jail. Chickens squawked and polio victims shouted as they dragged themselves along the ground toward the ferry and their free trip to Kinshasa, their capital of Hell.

A few months later I found myself an inmate in a different Congo jail, watching the sad and the destitute slumped against walls. We were hungry, fed rice only three times a week. We huddled together with shadows of Kurtz cast by light from the one small window in the filthy cell door. The treatment by the guards was brutal, inflicting constant beatings, humiliation and abuse. Pairs of eyes stared at me in the darkness and I felt I was watching "the complete deathlike indifference of unhappy savages" that Conrad must have seen first-hand as a riverboat captain before he wrote his novel.

During that first trip up the river I was struck by the enduring accuracy of the images Conrad described. With every step I took and boat I travelled on I could hear his words. It was in these shadows of riverbanks, hospitals and cells where I began to witness Congo’s true horror: the Congolese leaders have assumed the guises of their colonial predecessors and, life for the Congolese people is as desperate and as dire as it was in the time of Kurtz. Now I have spent two years following, not Conrad, but the Congolese. Seeing their shadows as he first saw them, recording with each frame their anonymous lives, witnessing through the lens of Conrad, the imprint of one hundred years of darkness.

Conrad called the exploitation by the white colonialists he found in the Congo personified by Kurtz the "vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience." A century on from Conrad’s indictment of colonialism, the Congo continues to be the symbol of darkest Africa: a place of decay, inhumanity and endless fascination. Rusted overcrowded ferry boats still ply the Congo River, laden with a menagerie of forest animals bound for market. Pygmies still dwell in the vast and forbidding equatorial forests, as do rebels and smugglers, who still live off Congo’s riches from ivory to cambium to oil.

Jailed four times in the two years he spent taking these photographs, Marcus Bleasdale faced daily threats and intimidation in order to capture lifeunder Kabila's brutal regime. He is one of the few photographers to penetrate contemporary Congo's interior. Bleasdale's photographs peel away the strata of mud, water and time that overlay a century of life on the Congo River, to reveal that not very much has changed. These haunting images make a unique and powerful document