Anthony Bourdain Goes into THE HEART OF DARKNESS, and Does Not Come Out

Anthony Bourdain, one of the finest minds of his generation killed himself in a Paris room, at the age of 61.

“Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head….Edwin Arlington Robinson.”

The news was presented to this Blogger by an old friend, Meg; she had known this Blogger since his days at San Francisco State getting his Masters in Creative Writing. During those days, he had been inveigled into working with a Suicide Prevention Group. That involvement was a total misapplication of concern, for this Blogger was knee deep in his Existentialist Period, in which he comprehended, influenced by Camus, Zola, Lermontov and Babel, that the natural rhythm of life was brutality, to  your fellow man.

This Blogger  lasted two weeks in his role as preserver of life for he could not take the responsibility of having someone kill themselves after listening to his pitch for maintenance of Life.

This Blogger’s pitch was that no one is entitled to commit suicide unless they have seen Paris, mankind’s great achievement to life.

Meg announced Mr. Bourdain’s suicide by saying this:” Gerry, he killed himself in Paris….was he entitled?”

On December 2, 2013, this Blogger wrote about Mr. Bourdain’s crowning achievement, his television program on the Congo. What amazed this Blogger is that he had read  Joseph Conrad’s tale of the Congo, THE HEART OF DARKNESS before going, and had applied Conrad to his show. Brilliant……enduring brilliance.

The following is excerpted from that Blog: Best TV Program of 2013-ANTHONY BOURDAIN PARTS UNKNOWN : The Congo, Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS

This Blogger usually watches CNN programs, particularly those involving their name brands, for comic relief; those programs are the most extravagant selfies extant.  When Williams Graduate Erin Burnett goes traveling to exotic places, she goes to show off how cute and sexy she looks in a burhka, or hajib. When Yale man Anderson Cooper goes to exotic places, he wears tight black T shirts, showing off his guns, dazzling the Arab boys who have read Paul Bowles or Andre Gide.

Anthony Bourdain dropped out of college; he is a chef, a cook. 

Yet he seems to be the only CNN name brand that is literate or erudite. His program, PARTS UNKNOWN is the best nonfiction series on television, and his program on the CONGO was the best show of that best series.

Bourdain went to the Congo not to show off, or pose; he went because he had read Joseph Conrad’s HEART OF DARKNESS.

My generation went to Spain because we had read Hemingway; went up the Amazon because we had read Teddy Roosevelt; went to China because we had read Malroux, went to Arabia because we had read T.E. Lawrence, went to Russia because we had read Solzhenitsyn.

We read and then we went.

Bourdain went to the Congo for the most honorable of reasons; he had read HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad.

Conrad was a Polish adventurer, who wrote in English.

My generation is not afraid of zombies or witches, or vampires or werewolves because we have all read HEART OF DARKNESS, and we know from it, that the greatest threat to man is from other men.

HEART OF DARKNESS is about men in the service of King Leopold of Belgium “civilizing” the indigenous peoples of the Congo by rape, murder, genocide, slaughter, theft, mutilation, and betrayal.

The following is excerpted from PARTS UNKNOWN- 11-28-2013:   

“ANTHONY BOURDAIN, HOST: After nine days of threats of imprisonment, confiscation of footage and what was the most chaotic, difficult, yet amazing trip of my life, the last thing that stands between us and our flight home is the reason we came. The Congo River itself. ….Welcome to the jungle. 

Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted to see the Congo. And for my sins, they let me. In "Heart of Darkness" Joseph Conrad writes of his alter ego, "When I was a little chap, I had a passion for maps. At that time there were many blank spaces on earth. But there was one yet, the biggest, the most blank, that I had a hankering after."

This then is the Congo. The size of all western Europe combined. It should be Africa's wealthiest nation. The people forget, or never even knew, that the 20th century's first holocaust happened here when Belgium's King Leopold managed to bamboozle the world into giving him personal title to the Congo.

Leopold's agents of whom the mythical Kurtz was one, raided, slaughtered, mutilated and pressed into forced labor much of the population, in a bloodthirsty quest for first ivory and then rubber. When independence finally came, the Belgians trashed what they could and left behind a completely unprepared, tribally divided and largely ungovernable land mass, filled with stuff that everybody in the world wanted. And things pretty much went downhill from there….

Welcome to Goma. A city of one million, the significant number of whom are IDPs, internally displaced people, sitting, rather inconveniently, at the base of Mt. Nyiragongo. A still smoldering volcano. Its current street level is about 12 feet above where it was in January 2002 when it last erupted. Lava everywhere, which explains the less than smooth ride.

…The Congo was a place I've dreamed of visiting since before I ever thought I'd get the chance to travel the world. Actually being here, I'm not so sure.

…Recently the largely Tutsi Rwandan backed M-23 has been active in the area around Goma, but the mostly Hutu FDLR is also here. The Mai-Mai can refer to either somewhat generic local self-defense groups or specific entities like APCLS or Checka. Some groups like the FRPI are principally defending a stake and a resource like gold, and others like the Raia Mutomboki are mainly interested in fighting with a particular enemy, in their case they have a beef with the FDLR.

…Lifting off from Goma, we head out over the shores of Lake Kivu before circling back north-northeast. Our destination, what Conrad referred to in "Heart of Darkness" as the inner station. Here surrounded by dense jungle lies our rendezvous with the Congo River, a waterway response for both building this country and helping to destroy it.

… Two hours out of Goma, we land at Kisangani. This was once Stanleyville, and the second largest city in the country before war and neglect cut it off from the rest of the Congo and the world.

Stanleyville, known in "Heart of Darkness" as the inner station.

The Congo River stretches across the country's middle. Conrad describes it as a twisting snake with its head in the Atlantic Ocean and its tail buried deep in Africa's heart. To Europeans, it was a natural route to transport slaves, ivory, rubber, minerals. The commodities upon which modern-day Brussels and Antwerp are built.

 The Wagenia tribe made what was in retrospect the mistake of allowing Stanley to pass. The famous explorer, of course, pretty much shot and raided his way along the historic route to the coast before effectively jump-starting the colonial period. Using Stanley as administrator King Leopold of Belgium claimed the Congo as his personal property.

Under Leopold's reign, men women and children were tagged with numbers, separated into groups, given production quotas. If they fell short, they were whipped with … their hands cut off, hanged. An estimated 10 million Congolese were either starved, worked to death, executed or just killed where they stood, all in just over 20 years. By the end, half the population of the country was gone.

Have you ever thought about all those years ago if your people had just killed Stanley?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Someone else would have come.

BOURDAIN: “Somebody else would have come. PARTS UNKNOWN”

“Somebody else would have come “

….A few years ago, there was this Internet video railing against an African war lord, Joseph Kony. Everyone on the web had a conniption fit and signed a petition to get Kony; well Kony was not gotten. Kony is a low grade monster without skill save jungle hiding; King Leopold was a very skilled monster.

He outsmarted the world, and got the world to give him the Congo as a personal fief, not as a territory of Belgium but as his PERSONAL fief. Leopold OWNED the CONGO not as a King, not as the agent of a State, but as a Man. He personally owned the Congo. It was an amazing achievement.

Henry Stanley was born poor in England, immigrated to America to follow the American Dream. He became a famous reporter. In darkest Africa, a righteous man of the Cross, David Livingston had become lost to civilization.  Stanley’s newspaper sent him on an expedition to “find” Livingstone.

He did, making his first lines to Livingston immortal, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

When Hollywood did the film of the search and encounter, it employed Spencer Tracy as Stanley, with  ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS as the soundtrack, ending the film with Stanley being redeemed by Livingstone's goodness. 

However, Leopold the Monster saw something in Stanley which was not Christian. Leopold recognized in Stanley a greedy, articulate, ruthless, vicious, cunning, able, dangerous, resourceful, upward mobile cad. Leopold saw in Stanley a 19^th Century version of Cortes, an intellectual destroyer who could get any job done, someone as smart as Goebbels and as organizationally vicious as Himmler in the same person.

Leopold, shrewd as he was, appointed Stanley as his personal agent to conquer and civilize the Congo.

What Stanley did to the Congo  is the HEART OF DARKNESS.

What cannot be described in Stanley’s trek in the Congo can be memorialized in one incident, a micro incident in the macro defilement.  One of Stanley’s conquistadores was the heir to an Irish whiskey fortune, James Jameson. Jameson “ bought an 11-year-old natïve girl and offered her to cannibals to document and sketch how she was cooked and eaten.”

The following is excerpted from PARTS UNKNOWN, the CONGO:

“After Leopold, the Belgian government took over and pretty much continued as before. An apartheid-like system of what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine. By the '50s, there was a beautiful modern infrastructure built. Railroads, hotels, sports clubs, schools. The envy of Africa. 

Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn were here while filming "The African Queen." They stayed at the luxury hotel the Pourquoi Pas. This is the Pourquoi Pas now. Like everything else of that time a hollow ruin inhabited by squatters or simply eaten by the jungle.

But none of this was ever for the Congolese. They weren't allowed in many of these buildings, except as help. Not even allowed to walk their own streets after dark. …

In "Heart of Darkness" Conrad writes about the greed of the Belgian colonizers. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale. And after 75 years, the Congolese had had enough. 

But independence came quickly. When the new country managed to inaugurate their first democratically elected leader, Patrice Lumumba, the CIA and the British working through the Belgian, had him killed. We helped to install this miserable bastard in his place -- Joseph Mobutu. He stole billions of dollars from his people and pretty much became the template for despotism in Africa.

Needless to say, this situation deteriorated over the 30 odd years. And by the time Mobutu is done the Congo was mired in a series of civil wars, the government was no longer paying its bills, and the trains basically stopped running.

This is Kisangani station. There's one short run left. Service once a week, when operational, which isn't often, I'm guessing. Abandoned by the Belgians, shot up and stripped by rebels in the '90s. The station, the engines, the ancient passenger cars, and the tracks themselves have slowly receded into the jungle.

And yet all these years later, with hardly any resources, Monsieur Alub Emile (ph), the railway administrator and a staff of clerks, conductors, mechanics and engineers, show up at work and do what they can in an attempt to keep things in working order.

…BOURDAIN: How many employees still work here?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When it is running well we are above 500 people. But these days we are about 200.

BOURDAIN: So at one time you could dispatch a freight to South Africa?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, we could leave here and travel to South Africa, with connections, of course. …

UNIDENTIFIED MALE:…. Almost everything is broken. If we could only receive modern technical support again we could really move forward.

BOURDAIN: And this is one of the few things here that's working today. A feature of great pride to the staff. The railway employees, I'm told, do not get paid, yet they continue to show up and work.

It is said of the building of the country's once vast rail network, one Congolese died for every single tie. Like many Congolese we meet, they are, all these years later and in spite of everything that's happened, ready and waiting for the situation to improve.

BOURDAIN: You lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, until you thought yourself bewitched and cut off forever from everything you had known once. So Conrad described the Congo after piloting steamships in the early days of Belgian colonialism.

I've had something of a multi-decade obsession with the Congo. It's been kind of a personal dream, if you will, to travel the Congo River. And now, for better or worse, I get that chance.

….Our trip downriver will take us some 120 kilometers, even deeper into the jungle, but instead of Kurtz and its ivory hoard, a crumbling Belgian research center with a shadowy past awaits us at our destination.

… It is written that I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice. I think I now understand what that means.

….
BOURDAIN: Deep in the jungle and miles from anywhere, this was once the Institute for Agricultural Studies of Congo. Construction began in the 1930s, the complex was once staffed by hundreds of Belgian researchers, doctors and engineers until they left hurriedly in 1960.

With independence began a rapid decline. The eventual cessation of funding. Of the hundreds of structures built here, what used to be housing, laboratories, hospitals and research facilities, the vast complex's library is clearly the most important to those who remain.

Though crumbling like everything else, the grass is cut and grounds maintained. It swept and kept clean, and yet most incredibly this man, Kasongo Bertan (ph), still fights a daily battle to stave off further decay to the thousands of volumes of books and research materials contained on these shelves.

BOURDAIN: Independence comes. What happens here?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The whites left and many of them realized they shouldn't come back. As the institute was still operations in Rwanda and Burundi many of them crossed to the other side.

BOURDAIN: So unless I'm mistaken, the gentleman just said that cutting-edge research moved to Burundi and elsewhere. The Congolese who remain, their mission all these years later has been to preserve the patrimony that existed. All this was state of the art back in the '50s when the library was built. But for 20 years there hasn't been electricity to run the dehumidifiers to keep out the damp.

Through so many wars, through all of these difficulties, he has maintained this facility to an extraordinary degree. Why?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They call me the mayor because if I'm not here, nothing works. And I'm the one who knows the truth.

BOURDAIN: Staff still show up to work and organize. Catalog and write requests for funding. Perhaps to Kinshasa or a central office where someone may or may not ever respond.

He was here pre-independence, yes? Does he remember the Belgian rule?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He remember -- remembers the period of colonialism.

BOURDAIN: Right.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And that was the good -- the best time that they were living.

BOURDAIN: What do you say to someone who suggests that Belgian colonialism might have been the good times?  PARTS UNKNOWN, 11-28-2013 “

What can be more dystopian than a black Congolese yearning for the good old days of Belgian colonialism?                               

Is this a precursor of THINGS TO COME in the 21st Century?  That the victims of rape yearn for the orderliness of the rapist?....GERRY MAXEY.”

Anthony Bourdain, R.I.P., we hardly knew ye.

The next Blog will also be on suicide.

Anthony Bourdain on location in the Congo