The Horror!

Explicating the Words of Kurtz

Sven Lindqvists text Exterminate All the Brutes: One Mans Odyssey into the Heart of
Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide examines primary source documents,
correspondences Joseph Conrad had with fellow writers and critics of British Imperialism, as he
travels the Saharan desert in his quest to excavate the truth:
Exterminate all the brutes: Why did Kurtz end his report on the civilizing task
of the white man in Africa with these words? What did they mean to Conrad and
his contemporaries? Why did Conrad make them stand out as a summary of all
the high-flown rhetoric on Europes responsibilities to the peoples of other
continents? (Lindqvist ix)

Lindqvist explicates Kurtz famous words (and the title of his book) Exterminate all the brutes:
The Latin extermino means drive over the border, terminus, exile, banish,
exclude. Hence the English exterminate, which means drive over the border to death,
banish from life.
The word brutes of course, reduces the object to its mere animal status. Africans
have been called beasts ever since the very first contacts, when Europeans described them
as rude and beastlie, like to brute beasts, and more brutish than the bests they hunt.
Some years ago, I thought I had found the source of Conrads phrase in the great
liberal philosopher Herbert Spencer. He writes in Social Statics (1850) that imperialism
has served civilization by clearing the inferior races off the eart. The forces which are
working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, taking no account of incidental

suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their wayBe he human or

be he brutethe hindrance must be got rid of.
Here were both the civilizing rhetoric of Kurtz and the two key words exterminate
and brute, and the human being was expressly placed on an equal footing with the animal
as an object for extermination.
I thought I had made a neat little scholarly discovery, worthy of being taken up
one day as a footnote in the history of literature, Kirtzs sentence explained by
Spencers fantasies of annihilation. (Lindqvist 8, 9)