Edited sentence: By and large, the current poverty and disintegration of middle Africa is largely due to misplaced anti-civilization sentiments to which Conrad's fiction was much to blame.Conrad's day was an age in which 'civilization' was being frowned upon with intellectuals having Utopian dreams which embraced what they called, the Nobel Savage.Sadly, readers had taken his novel to a journalistic and truthful account.The book is a personal interpretation at best and a distortion at worst.These dreams were far removed from reality and as the twentieth unfolded, civilization became blamed for the Great War resulting in Westerners preferring fiction to fact and treating novels as if fact