As these passages help illustrate, the majority of the Congolese's communication within Heart of Darkness is represented as screaming or wailing bestowal of the European upon the Congolese. These people scream perhaps because of the fact that their living condition is very similar to an animal. Their dependence depends on the colonists. These Congolese are devastated because they are losing their freedom to the Europeans' hands and their abilities to self-defense.
Another way in which the Native people of Africa and their black African bodies are depicted as the Other in the novel is in animalistic, bestial terms. The Congolese are often described in relation to their movements, which are characterized as wild and irrational. While he is in the jungle, Marlow discovers a death pit literally an open grove where local people go to die. He describes the men there saying: "Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees, leaning against the trunks nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation" (Conrad 18). This portrayal shows the natives as "shadows" and unearthly "creatures," not as dying men. The men are not individuals, but rather formless shapes with no humanizing characteristic to distinguish one man from another. None of the men are shown personally and so it is difficult to discern where a person ends and the next one begin. This creates the effect that the men are nothing more than elements of a vague form. Marlow's depictions originate from a stereotype that says all Africans are made of the same, non-descript characteristics, unlike the descriptions of Europeans who are expressed in great detail. Furthermore, the way in which the man crawls on hands and knees to the river to drink is animal-like and degrading. .
Not only are the Africans indistinguishable from each other they are also all inhuman. Marlow compares the Africans to animals in describing one of the workers on the ship.