For example most would say today that colonialism was the attempt by the British to 'civilize the savages' by converting them to Christianity. Many of these same people also, now believe in Darwin's evolutionary explanation of the world as we know it. What most of them do not know nor is it ever taught in the repositories of education (private or public) is that much of the negative colonial 'urge' was as a result of an imperialist worldview predicated on the belief that evolution had delivered to certain people a 'higher' biological imperative; that is the ability, the ambition and indeed the moral nous to enlighten and rule.
Heart of Darkness reveals not just the wide gap between the official doctrines of colonialism’s aspirations and its actual practices, the truth about those ‘bearers of a spark from the scared fire (p.35) whose actions prove them to be merely ‘sordid buccaneers’ (p.67). It furnishes us also with a telling analysis of the obfuscations fundamental to the mechanics of imperialism. Because biological notions such as natural selection and survival of the fittest were translated into the social Darwinism of influential thinkers such as Herbert Spencer, the competitive economic expansion of the European powers came to be justified on ‘natural’ evolutionary grounds. Thus, by technological advantage Europe’s domination of the colonies was seen as proof of the formers fitness to not only survive but to rule, evidence of its inherent racial superiority. To cloak the often coercive brutality of the system imperialism necessarily relied on the creation of linguistic duplicities; behind words such as civilisation and enlightenment, Heart of Darkness reveals barbarism, exploitation and death.
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