Joseph Conrad is an extraordinary figure, not least because he wrote his novels in his second language. His novella Heart of Darkness is justly famous for its depiction of the evil of the human heart in the context of the 'scramble for Africa'. It has been variously described as a 'colonialist' and a 'postcolonialist' novella. While there is no dispute that the expansion of the European powers into Africa is its contemporary context, and there is a critique of colonialism in the text, we dismiss it as reductive to see Conrad's work solely in that light.