The Empire and the Empire

The central connection between Heart of Darkness and Waiting for the Barbarians is that both deal with the relationship between “civilization” and “barbarians.” The attitudes of both Coetzee and Conrad are quite similar to each other regarding the uncaring greed of the dominant civilization; while ivory was on the lips of nearly everyone in the Heart of Darkness, on the frontier the empire and its newer officers care equally for dominance over the land. The differences in thought between the two civilizations are a product of time only, and mostly superficial: the core of both Conrad's and Coetzee's colonial and imperial machines remain the same.

It's harder to see Kurtz and the Magistrate as two sides of the same coin, though. While Kurtz is a genius, as many people claim him to be, the magistrate is a more down-to-earth character, preferring to distract himself with his hobbies rather than intellectualize the situation he finds himself in. However, a key point in both novels connect the two: Kurtz's hastily written “Kill all the brutes!” and the Magistrate's wish, however fleeting, that he could kill all the barbarians. Both betray a certain selfishness on the part of both characters: Kurtz wants to kill the Africans to be rid of their barbarous ways, however much he dislikes returning to his society of origin, and the Magistrate wants to kill all the barbarians so he doesn't have to deal with their problems.

Like Marlow, Kurtz is implied to have been sympathetic to the Africans at one point. It seems that his descent into madness is caused by nothing other than the corruption of the true face of civilization. What happens to the magistrate when he encounters the “true face” of the empire? He doesn't incite infighting among the barbarians, as Kurtz does to the Africans, but he does something arguably worse: nothing. He assists the boy whose father is killed and the barbarian woman, but these are only two people: Against the empire's campaign against the barbarians, these actions have essentially no effect. He becomes complacent by fooling himself into thinking that his almost nonexistent humanitarian action is enough, and so can ignore the plight of the other barbarians, such as those penned up in the square, with relatively good conscience. The excuse of retaliation by the empire isn't an excuse: it happened anyway. Both Kurtz and the Magistrate effectively damn their respective “barbarians” through either action or non-action.