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Reality in Africa echoes Joseph Conrad's fiction

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From: Sun-Journal Lewiston, Me.
Date: 20080701
Author:

If you had met him, you might think he "had kicked himself loose of the earth" and "knew no restraint, no faith and no fear." He was once perceived as "remarkable" and a man of great promise, but had descended into unspeakable madness in the heart of Africa.

That's how the novelist Joseph Conrad describes Kurtz, the white man who leaps into lunacy in the Congo and becomes the focus of "Heart of Darkness," the novel Conrad wrote at the end of the 19th century. His horrific descriptions, I discovered when I recently read the book again, fit Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

The black man who ...

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