Marlow's attitudes towards the "savages"

I found Marlow’s attitudes towards the African natives fascinating. Using derogatory terms like “niggers” and “savages”, he ostensibly perpetuates racial prejudices of British colonists. However, he criticizes European imperialism as a corrupting force that imposes its own materialist values of economic greed onto the natives, displacing them from the restraining values of their own cultures, compelling them to serve alien imperialist materialist aims. Imperialism causes the savage’s fall from innocence”; it is a debilitating force that destroys the cultural integrity of African societies. Although Marlow does not go so far as to call the African “a noble savage” (a primitivist concept: prelapsarian condition of essentialised humanity unencumbered by the corrupting forces of civilization), he does describe the “pure, uncomplicated savagery” of the Africans” as a positive relief from the horrors that Kurtz (who presents himself to the natives as a “supernatural deity”) has unleashed in the Congo out of material lust for ivory. Although he is initially condescending in calling the Africans “prehistoric” due to their lack of cultural, technological and intellectual sophistication, he recognizes that the values of European civilization may not necessarily be superior. His recognition that Africans possess a “humanity” just like his is evident in how he comes to the revelation that the African drums may possess “as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country.” He perceives Africans less tainted by European values in a positive light, calling the twenty cannibals on his steamer crew “men one could work with”, admiring their morality in not eating the whites on board. On the other hand, he is contemptuous towards mentally colonized Africans who ape European values, calling one of the obsequious Africans “a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind legs.”

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