One Hundred Years of Darkness: A Photographic Journey into the Heart of Congo [Hardcover]

Marcus Bleasdale has produced a sensitive but by no means sentimental portrait of an extraordinary nation and its thwarted people.

Marcus Bleasdale has clearly felt the "continued vibration" of Conrad’s words… his photographs also attest to the remarkable spirit of the Congolese people.

The raw beauty of Marcus Bleasdale¹s photographs vividly illustrates the daily human struggle for survival along the mighty Congo River in Africa’s darkest region.

Published to mark the centenary of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" this large format book of black and white photographs of contemporary Congo combines haunting images by Marcus Bleasdale with an essay by Jon Swain of London's Sunday Times. Each photograph is accompanied by a quote from the
classic novel and extended captions detail life today in the former Belgian colony. This book is based on Marcus Bleasdale's travels throughout Congo
between 2000 and 2002. 82 tri-tone photographs. 290mm wide x 245mm deep.

Twenty years after first reading Heart of Darkness, I found myself sitting on the banks of the Congo River revisiting Conrad’s words. Waiting in Brazzaville for my first ferry to Kinshasa, I looked up from the page.
Drunken police and soldiers were whipping travellers who strayed out of line with the chicotte, a legacy of Belgian colonial rule; rifle butts found a home in the backs and temples of a group of suspected looters, later hauled screaming to jail. Chickens squawked and polio victims shouted as they dragged themselves along the ground toward the ferry and their free trip to
Kinshasa, their capital of Hell.

A few months later I found myself an inmate in a different Congo jail, watching the sad and the destitute slumped against walls. We were hungry, fed rice only three times a week. We huddled together with shadows of Kurtz cast by light from the one small window in the filthy cell door. The treatment by the guards was brutal, inflicting constant beatings, humiliation and abuse. Pairs of eyes stared at me in the darkness and I felt I was watching "the complete deathlike indifference of unhappy savages" that Conrad must have seen first-hand as a riverboat captain before he wrote
his novel.

During that first trip up the river I was struck by the enduring accuracy of the images Conrad described. With every step I took and boat I travelled on I could hear his words. It was in these shadows of riverbanks, hospitals and cells where I began to witness Congo’s true horror: the Congolese leaders have assumed the guises of their colonial predecessors and, life for the Congolese people is as desperate and as dire as it was in the time of Kurtz. Now I have spent two years following, not Conrad, but the Congolese. Seeing their shadows as he first saw them, recording with each frame their anonymous lives, witnessing through the lens of Conrad, the imprint of one hundred years of darkness.

Marcus Bleasdale is a freelance photojournalist based in London. His work has appeared in the Sunday Times Magazine, El Pais, The Telegraph Magazine, Vrij Nederland and National Geographic. He was awarded the Sunday Times/Nikon Ian Parry Photojournalist of the Year award in 2000. Bleasdale has worked throughout Africa and also in the Balkans, US, Canada, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the UK. Marcus Bleasdale is represented by Independent Photographers Group, London.

Jon Swain has reported on the politics of Congo for over twenty years and the world has seen its history unfold in his dispatches for London’s Sunday Times. He first became acquainted with Congo in 1978 when he reported on the Shaba wars and has returned many times since. River of Time is his compelling account of life as a correspondent in Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1970s. Swain continues to explore life on the borders of death in conflict zones around the world for the Sunday Times.