European colonialists have historically used this idea to justify their actions. Therefore, Marlow suggests that the so-called primitive lands can also develop through the invasion of the so-called civilized countries.
Before starting to tell his story, Marlow says that when the first ancient Roman soldiers arrived in Britain, it was “one of the dark places of the earth”. In his critique of Heart of Darkness, Attridge (2018) indicates that “giving Thames as the setting allows Conrad to foreshadow one of the novel’s central conceits: the lack of any absolute, essential difference between so-called civilized societies and so called primitive ones”. After four months, Conrad returned to England and wrote Heart of Darkness in which he reflected about his traumatic experiences in Congo and reported on the way Europeans treated indigenous peoples in the colonies. During that time, Congo’s official name was Congo Free State and it served as King Leopold II of Belgium's private colony. Indeed, in 1890 Conrad sailed to Congo on a steamboat. His novels are mostly based on his personal experiences and adventures at sea and Heart of Darkness is not an exception. He was able to realize this dream after immigrating to England. Since his childhood, he was interested in sailing and discovering foreign lands so much that he said: “It was in 1868, when nine years old or thereabouts, that while looking at a map of Africa at the time and putting my finger on the blank space, I said to myself: ‘When I grow up I shall go there’” (Norton, p. English was his third language and he first encountered it at the age of eight while watching his father translate Shakespeare’s works in order to make a living. Conrad was born into a Polish family in Ukraine.
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