“I had no idea of the conditions, he said: these heads were the heads of rebels. I shocked him excessively by laughing. Rebels! What would be the next definition I was to hear. There had been enemies, criminals, workers – and these were – rebels. Those rebellious heads looked very subdued to me on their sticks.” Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1898) / Surrounding Kurtz’s compound, much to the “horror” of Marlow, is a stockade impaling native heads. Marlow, Conrad’s less-than-reliable narrator in Heart of Darkness, had been brought to the site by Kurtz’s “admirer,” the ship’s-log-reading Russian harlequin. The exchange between the two disparately attired and differently attached, albeit interest-sharing, pursuers of Kurtz exposes, however, the lurking possibilities in the situation itself for a mobilized, organized African resistance against the European imperial project: “I had no idea of the conditions, he [Kurtz’s admirer] said: these heads were the heads of rebels.” And Marlow responds: “I shocked him excessively by laughing. Rebels! What would be the next definition I was to hear. There had been enemies, criminals, workers – and these were – rebels. Those rebellious heads looked very subdued to me on their sticks.” Subdued perhaps, even dead, impaled on sticks surrounding the compound of the nineteenth-century imperial representative feared to have “gone native,” but representing nonetheless the momentous makings of twentieth-century protest and organized resistance to come: enemies, yes; criminals, depending on whose law and order; workers, indeed. Rebels. Whether the recent history of the African novel as geopolitical genre is itself a narrative of protest and resistance remains a matter of debate.