When Sven Lindqvist was a boy, he saw a photograph of what
British troops found in Buchenwald. "The heaps of naked bodies,
people who obviously had been starving and worked to death,
burned in one's eyes," he says. A few years later, aged 17, he
read Heart of Darkness. In a shady grove, Marlow discovers black
Africans worked shamelessly by white colonialists lying "in all
the attitudes of pain, abandonment and despair … They were dying
slowly - it was very clear." "These two pictures moved into each
other for me," says Lindqvist. "I saw them as one image of
extermination." When he first read Heart of Darkness, Lindqvist
took Conrad to be prophesying what was coming rather than
writing about what he had seen. But later he became convinced
that the kind of racist extermination Conrad witnessed
prefigured that of Hitler. In the Swede's favourite and perhaps
best book, Exterminate All the Brutes, first published in 1992,
Lindqvist writes that "the Germans have been made sole
scapegoats of extermination that are a