An Outpost of Progress — Joseph Conrad and the Station That Loses Its Claim to Civilisation

It takes a long time to make a city or sustain the ordinary life of one. Most of what makes living there possible was made by people who arrived before us.

What happens to the people who depend on those arrangements when the arrangements are no longer there? Conrad gives that question to men who have been told they are carrying civilisation with them.

What Happens at the Edge of the Trading Network?

An Outpost of Progress puts the question inside a remote trading station in colonial Africa. What the company claims to be doing and what the station actually does are both visible from there.

Kayerts and Carlier, two European employees, are sent to work at the station. Neither seems equipped for the responsibility that the language of the civilising mission has assigned him.

Kayerts hopes to put money aside for his daughter. Carlier has served in the army. Their predecessor died of fever. Much of the practical work falls to Makola, an African employee also known as Henry Price.

The newcomers pass time reading books they find at the post. The books bring them the language of an orderly world. The men seem to admire it without knowing how to make an order of their own.

The arrangement breaks down after Makola trades the station’s workers for ivory. Relations with nearby people worsen, and the steamer fails to come. The two men fight over sugar. Kayerts shoots Carlier and later takes his own life.

What “Progress” Means at the Station

The story makes it hard to hear the word progress in the way the company expects. Conrad follows men who think the title of their work is evidence of what they are.

Their dependence becomes visible as the routine breaks apart. They are meant to direct a station that they scarcely understand and can hardly sustain without the people whose work they dismiss.

That is also a criticism of empire. The men were sent to extend a system whose real business comes into view precisely because they are so poor at disguising it.

Three Things Conrad Makes Work Together

Conrad helped shape the fiction that came to be called modernist. Several qualities associated with his work are already visible in this short story.

1. Narration — the men are left with the words they inherited and little help from the world when those words stop explaining what is happening.
2. The grotesque — grand claims of progress and the petty fight over sugar are allowed to stand in the same story without reconciling them.
3. Imperialism — Kayerts and Carlier are diminished by the system they serve. The workers traded for ivory bear a more direct cost. The post exists to turn the labour and resources of a colonised place into profit elsewhere.

The story first appeared in 1897. Its assumptions and vocabulary belong to a period in which European empire could be treated as an ordinary part of public life. That setting is part of what the irony depends on.

What remains is a short story about the distance between a civilising claim and the work done in its name.

An Outpost of Progress

• Author — Joseph Conrad
• First published — 1897