WHITE is the colour of evil in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The horror is ivory. The coveted material fires the greed and stokes the chaos of the entire sprawling colonial project depicted in the novella. The lust for tusks has overtaken the Africans and their European colonisers.

The tale’s narrator, Charles Marlow, is hired on as a steamboat captain by a Belgian ivory trading company. At the farthest upriver outpost, he will encounter Kurtz, gone rogue but still claimed by company executives and agents in the field to be their most successful ivory producer.

On the journey inland, Marlow’s boat stops at the company’s central station. There he sees “men strolling aimlessly about in the sunshine of the yard. The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse.”