People of Interest
A Rebel and a Traitor
Roger Casement was an Irish revolutionary who exposed colonial atrocities in the Congo and the Amazon, and was hanged for treason in 1916. A new biography by Rory Carroll asks whether he deserves to be better remembered.
Roger Casement's life was so varied, so violently contradictory, and so thoroughly catastrophic in its final act that it is something of a puzzle that he has not lodged more firmly in the public imagination. He was a man who served the British Empire as a celebrated humanitarian diplomat, was knighted for exposing atrocities that the empire's commercial arrangements had made possible, and was then hanged as a traitor for trying to bring German arms to Ireland to assist a rebellion. In the sixteen years between his knighthood and his execution, his diaries were used against him in a manner that was either a cynical government operation to destroy his reputation or a genuine revelation of a life of compulsive homosexual encounters — or, most probably, both of those things operating simultaneously in the strange grey zone where private life and political convenience overlap.
Rory Carroll — Irish journalist, former Guardian correspondent in West Africa and Latin America, and therefore someone who has had professional cause to think about the legacies of both Belgian colonialism and South American extractivism — is an appropriate biographer for this particular life. He brings to Casement the same quality that characterised his best reporting: an ability to hold the large historical frame and the human detail in focus at the same time, without letting either flatten the other.
He was the Empire's own conscience — a man decorated for seeing clearly what the Empire had done, who eventually decided that seeing clearly was not enough. — from the feature
The story begins in County Antrim in 1864 and moves quickly to Africa, where Casement arrives in 1884 as part of Henry Morton Stanley's Congo expedition — the one that would provide the foundation for King Leopold II's Congo Free State, the most rapacious colonial enterprise in a century full of stiff competition. By the early 1900s, Casement was the British consul in the Congo, and what he found there — systematic mutilation, forced labour, the severing of hands as proof of execution quotas, an entire population ground into the machinery of rubber extraction — moved him in a way that distinguished him from almost every other British official in the region. He wrote it down. He filed reports. He persuaded the British government to commission an investigation, and when his report was published in 1904 it caused a sensation that contributed, eventually, to international pressure on Leopold to relinquish personal control of the Congo.
Then he went to Peru. The Peruvian Amazon Company — a British-registered operation — was doing much the same thing to the indigenous peoples of the Putumayo region as Leopold had done to the Congolese. Casement went, looked, wrote. His Putumayo report, published in 1912, documented slavery, torture, and murder on a scale that was by then, given what he had already witnessed, not entirely surprising to him, though it was to most of his readers. The knighthood followed in 1911, awarded in recognition of this extraordinary run of humanitarian service to the principle that colonial economies should not, technically, be allowed to flay their workforces to death.
The trajectory from there to the gallows in Pentonville Prison on 3 August 1916 is, once you understand Casement's background, not as surprising as it might appear. He was Irish. He had watched the mechanism by which the British state justified its colonial enterprises, from the inside, for thirty years. He had also watched those mechanisms deployed in Ireland — a more polished version of the same essential apparatus. When the Irish Volunteers began organising in 1913, Casement became a supporter. When the First World War began, he went to Germany to seek arms and assistance for an Irish uprising. The arms never arrived in time. He was captured on a Kerry beach in April 1916, three days before the Easter Rising, tried for treason, and hanged.
The "Black Diaries" — which described, in considerable detail and consistent with Casement's travels, sexual encounters with men throughout his adult life — were shown to figures of influence in the days before his execution. Their purpose was to ensure that no significant clemency campaign could gain traction. For decades, Irish nationalists insisted the diaries were forgeries, a British government fabrication designed to destroy the reputation of a martyr. Carroll's biography addresses this question carefully. The current scholarly consensus, following forensic analysis, is that the diaries are genuine. What that means for Casement's legacy — and for the specific use to which they were put — is one of the book's most nuanced passages. The diaries did not make him guilty of treason. They were deployed in a particular way at a particular moment, and whatever they reveal about Casement's private life, they were used as a tool of political assassination as surely as anything more physical.
Carroll's achievement is to hold all of this in a single life without reaching for the simplifications that would make it tidier. Casement was not simply a hero who was destroyed by empire, though that is part of the story. He was also a man of his time in ways that complicate any simple narrative of progressive virtue: his early work in Africa was done in service of an empire he had not yet turned against, and the transition from servant to critic to revolutionary was gradual, contested, and human. The biography Carroll has written is commensurate with its subject — large, generous, forensic, and troubled by the right questions.
Whether Casement "deserves to be better remembered" is perhaps the wrong frame. He is remembered in Ireland, where he was reinterred in Glasnevin Cemetery with full state honours in 1965, half a century after his execution. What he perhaps deserves is a wider audience for the full complexity of what he saw and did — a story that is, in its way, a compressed history of the entire imperial project, told from the perspective of someone who served it faithfully until he couldn't any longer, and then drew the obvious conclusion.