2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(2) in the final sentence of this quote? Arendt’s reference to the ‘heart of Africa’ is strange, because her argument in ch 9 is that it is the toxic blending of the question of human rights with the question of national emancipation that produces an excess of non-humans at a time when the nation-state system is beginning to cover the entire globe. What exactly is the connection between this political production of the rightless non-human by European nation-states, on the one hand, and the ‘heart of Africa’, on the other? To address this question, I will make a brief detour through ch 7, ‘Race and Bureaucracy’, in which the terms ‘savages’ and ‘barbarians’ make their initial appearance. Arendt argues in ch 7 that two of the elements of totalitarianism, ‘race as a principle of the body politic’ 39 and ‘bureaucracy as a principle of foreign domination’, 40 originate in European imperialism. Arendt writes: Both discoveries were actually made on the Dark Continent. Race was the emergency explanation of human beings whom no European or civilized man could understand and whose humanity so frightened and humiliated the immigrants that they no longer cared to belong to the same human species. 41 This quote raises the question why Arendt refers to Africa with the cliché, ‘the Dark Continent’, which she keeps repeating in the pages that follow. In those pages, Arendt repeatedly uses metaphors of light and darkness, for instance when she refers to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as ‘the most illuminating work on actual race experience in Africa’, 42 or when she writes that Leopold II of Belgium was ‘responsible for one of the blackest pages in the history of Africa’.43 One possible answer is that what Arendt is trying to do in these pages is understand the minds of the Europeans in Africa in this period by engaging with a work of fiction in a rhetorically intricate way. Consider, for instance, the following passage, which is similar to the previous passage: The world of native savages was a perfect setting for [European] men who had escaped the reality of civilization. Under a merciless sun, surrounded by an entirely hostile nature, they were confronted with human beings who, living without the future of a purpose and the past of an accomplishment, were as incomprehensible as the inmates of a madhouse. 44 Indeed, this passage is immediately followed by a longer quote from Heart of Darkness. According to this interpretation, Arendt is using free indirect speech in order to try to understand a mindset that is by no means her own. 45 In fact, proponents of this interpretation might insist, her repeated use of the cliché of ‘the Dark Continent’ and her references to ‘savages’ — ‘Wilden’, in her German translation 46 — is ironic and signals the distance between her own position and 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 ibid 185. ibid. ibid. ibid n 1, citing Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (William Blackwood and Sons 1899). Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (n 1) 185. ibid 190. Cf Anne Norton’s argument that: ‘Arendt’s defenders have argued that she speaks, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, not in her own voice, but in the voice of the Boers’. According to Norton, ‘this reading bears witness to the generosity of Arendt’s readers, and the loyalty of her friends, but one would be hard put to reconcile this reading with the text’. Norton (n 4) 253. See Hannah Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft, Band II: Imperialismus (Ullstein 1975). 202