, with closed eyelids- a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and, with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of teeth. Was smiling continuously at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber (Conrad 132-133).Kurtz murdered these people to demonstrate his power over the whole group and then placed their heads on posts as a symbol of his supremacy. The power and destruction of the white man is accounted in Thomas Pakenham’s book about the conquest of Africa by an actual native. “We said to the white man: ‘We are not enough people how to do what you want of us. Our country has not many people in it and the people are dying fast. We are killed by the work you make us do…”’(599). Since the natives are stripped of their humanity they are not seen as having human worth, they have no human rights. Denial of one’s human rights exemplifies man’s inhumanity to man, which in this case is in direct correlation to racism. In the novel we see the natives portrayed as inferior- as beasts. Once the whites strip the natives of their humanity, it not only makes it easier for the whites to torture the natives, it also becomes easier to indiscriminately kill them.Pakenham quotes another African native who experienced this dehumanization: “We got no pay. We got nothing…Our village got cloth and little salt…we were always in the forest…to go without food, and our women had to give up cultivating the fields and gardens. Then we starved. Wild-beasts- the leopards- killed some of us while we were working away in the forest and others got lost of died from exposure or starvation and we begged the white men to leave us alone…but the white men and their soldiers said: You are only beasts yourselves. You are only Nyama [meat]. We tried going further into the forest, and when we failed…the soldiers came to our towns and killed us. ...
