A one-man human rights campaign
The case of Roger Casement
Before I get to the fascinating story of human rights defender Roger Casement, let me admit that yes, I did create a new name for my newsletter: “Rights in Time.” I plan to expand beyond my recent publications (plug here: The Bond Trilogy and Righting Wrongs: 20 human rights heroes around the world) and include timely topics that intersect with rights.
“Rights in Time” will focus on human rights, the people who envisioned and fought for them, and how we come to think about rights, including through the lens of speculative fiction. I hope you find the newsletter interesting!
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Onto Roger Casement!
The people at the core of defending and advancing human rights are the ones who experience abuses. Centuries before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948, people argued and often died for the rights they aspired to claim.
At the same time, key battles—over slavery, the Conquest, and the death penalty, to name a few—had champions who could never be subjected to those abuses. White Quakers, for example, were a central part of the campaign to end the slave trade (as laid out in Adam Hochschild’s magnificent Bury the Chains: Prophets and rebels in the fight to free an empire’s slaves). Enlightenment thinkers like Italy’s Cesare Beccaria—by all accounts, a law-abiding nobleman and philosopher who never spent a day in jail—condemned both the death penalty and torture.
To that company of privileged people who commit themselves to the rights of others, I’ll add the fascinating figure of Casement. In Ireland, where Casement was born in 1864, he’s best known as a revolutionary who fought (and died) for his country’s independence from England.
But in Africa and Latin America, Casement’s fame is rooted in his passionate defense of people that were completely foreign to him. His defense of Congolese and Amazonian Indigenous people laid a road map for how we can wage human rights campaigns. One person really can change the world.
In the words of one writer, Roger Casement was “a one-man precursor of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.”
As a young man, Casement worked for explorer Henry Morton Stanley and the African International Association (AIA). Yes, that’s the guy who supposedly said, “Dr. Livingston, I presume.” In 1884, Casement traveled to the Belgian Congo fully believing that European colonization would bring moral and social progress to the continent and free its inhabitants “from slavery, paganism and other barbarities.”
In that, he wasn’t alone. In Africa, Casement befriended Joseph Conrad, a Polish sailor. Like Casement, Conrad came to deeply regret his involvement in Europe’s imperial power grabs. His masterpiece, Heart of Darkness, remains a contested, yet powerful critique of imperialism and colonialism. As a measure of its relevance, Conrad’s masterpiece continues to be a template for artists, from Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” (set in Vietnam during the US-led war there) to the more recent science fiction epic, “Ad Astra.”
Casement soon learned that the AIA was a part of King Leopold II of Belgium’s plan to seize the so-called Congo Free State and extract rubber using indentured and slave labor. All of this enriched the company and King Leopold himself while devastating the native population.
After joining the British Colonial Service as a diplomat, Casement wrote one of the first official governmental human rights reports about these atrocities. Known as the Casement Report and published in 1904, the report documented how the Belgian king had set up his own private army to wage a war of terror against natives who were often forced to harvest rubber and other resources. Casement personally collected testimony from workers, managers, and others. The litany of abuses retains its fresh horror. One common punishment was to chop off the hands and feet of Congolese, including children.
Other nations took action on Casement’s report, forcing the Belgian king to set up an independent commission of inquiry. Later, some parts of the trade were reformed (certainly not enough to end all abuses or repair the immense damage, but progress was made).
As one writer noted, Casement was perenially on both sides of the colonial fence. He was an Irish Protestant born outside of Dublin; he once held a memorial service in the Congo Free State to commemorate the death of Queen Victoria; he was knighted by King George V for his humanitarian campaigns; and he later retired on a pension that financed his turn to Irish nationalism.
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Indeed, it was only in the Congo that Casement, in his own words, became Irish—and an opponent of British imperialism, including in arguably their first conquest, Ireland. Casement wrote that he’d believed that “British rule was to be extended at all costs, because it was the best for everyone under the sun.” Then “in those lonely Congo forests … I found also myself, the incorrigible Irishman.”
The Congo convinced him that both the Congolese and the Irish had been the target of similar injustices: having their lands, natural resources, and even bodies seized and abused by rapacious empires.
Still a British diplomat, Casement transferred to Brazil. He was soon faced with a reality all too familiar from his time in the Belgian Congo. Abuses related to the trade in natural rubber were rampant. He joined another commission investigating the British-led Peruvian Amazon Company (PAC).
Casement focused on the Putumayo. This is both a river and a region shared by modern-day Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador. It’s best understood not by national boundaries but by the vast Amazonian rainforest and the rivers, including the Putumayo, that join in Brazil to form the Amazon.
Among the Indigenous groups that populate the Putumayo are the Muráis, Ingas, Quechuas, Pastos, Awas, Paeces, Emberá, Siona, Muinanes, Yanakonas, Kamentzá, Koreguajes, and Kofanes.
This is an area I’ve visited as part of my work for Human Rights Watch. When I worked there, the resource being violently extracted was coca leaves, used to make the cocaine consumed in the United States and Europe.
In the early part of the twentieth century, the PAC forced Indigenous people to extract rubber, subjecting them to starvation, beatings, rape, and murder. Irish writer Fintan O’Toole described Casement's report on the Putumayo as a "brilliant piece of journalism" that wove together first-person accounts by both "victims and perpetrators of atrocities...Never before had distant colonial subjects been given such personal voices in an official document."
Whole families ... were imprisoned – fathers, mothers, and children, and many cases were reported of parents dying thus, either from starvation or from wounds caused by flogging, while their offspring were attached alongside of them to watch in misery themselves the dying agonies of their parents.
Again, his reports forced some change. The rubber business collapsed, in part because of the controversy and also because of competition from Asia and the eventual creation of synthetic rubber.
In 1911, Casement was knighted for his efforts on behalf of the Amazonian Indians. By then, though, accolades from an imperial power had lost their appeal. At almost fifty, Casement turned his energies to the cause of an independent Ireland. In 1914, Casement went to Britain’s enemy, Germany, to recruit Irish prisoners of war and buy weapons to stoke revolution. Two years later—less than a week before the Easter Rising began and at the height of World War I—Casement returned to Ireland in a German U-boat carrying weapons. His timing was, to put it mildly, a disaster.
His plan failed spectacularly. The submarine sank with its cargo and the police arrested him.
Casement’s trial for high treason became a huge problem for the British. Casement was a high-profile humanitarian with connections across the globe. His arrest elevated the cause of Irish independence, putting Britain in the same spotlight as the abusive Belgians and Peruvians. In this short video, Professor Angus Mitchell explains how the Crown used Casement’s own journals, known as “The Black Diaries,” to cast a shadow on his fame and legacy of advocating for others.
Casement was gay, something his British colleagues likely knew and ignored. But the Black Diaries and his supposed sexual deviance were used to quash any campaign for clemency. Although the United States Senate passed a motion calling for clemency for Casement, President Woodrow Wilson, given some of Casement’s more graphic writings, declined to intervene.
One of Casement’s supporters, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, asked the British government for mercy arguing that Casement’s dangerous journeys and repeated encounters with evil had left him mentally and physically depleted.
Casement was hanged on August 3, 1916, then thrown naked into a hole on the prison grounds. It was only in 1965 that the Irishman’s bones were returned home. He’s buried in Dublin’s Glasnevin cemetery, a compromise. He’d asked to be buried in Northern Ireland, to this day too controversial given his Republican notoriety.
Resources
If you wish to learn more, here are some resources:
Dudgeon, Jeffrey. Roger Casement: The Black Diaries. Belfast : Belfast Press, 2002.
Mitchell, Angus. Roger Casement. 16 Lives . Dublin: O’Brien, 2013.
Murray, Sabina. Valiant Gentlemen. Grove/Atlantic, 2016. An historical novel based on Casement's life.
Síocháin, Séamas Ó. Roger Casement : Imperialist, Rebel, Revolutionary, a biography. Dublin, Ireland : Lilliput, 2008.
Vargas, Mario. The Dream of the Celt. Translated by Edith Grossman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. An historical novel based on Casement's life.
Roger Casement: The Compassionate Revolutionary is a Biographics production available on Youtube.
Grant, Kevin. “Roger Casement: Gay Irish Martyr or Victim of a British Forgery?” The Guardian, September 28, 2016. Grant, a historian, delves into the controversy of the “Black Diaries” and explains how Casement became a symbol in the campaign for gay rights in Ireland.
I’ve been reading
I am a huge fan of Philip Reeve’s “Mortal Engines” series. The series envisions a post-apocalyptic Europe where cities are no longer stationary, but move—and eat—other cities. Here’s the fabulous first line of Book 1:
It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.
Reeve’s two heroes are a nerdy boy, Tom, and a deeply damaged girl, Hester. The movie version is pretty good, too!
I recently finished Book 2, Predator’s Gold, and continue to adore the series and Reeve’s unique and compelling world.
I’ve been watching
A friend recommended “AJ and the Queen” (see how that works!) and I’ve really enjoyed it (on Netflix). The show features RuPaul as Robert, a drag queen (shocker) who performs as Ruby Red. In the first episode, Robert is betrayed by a lover and has to go on the road to recoup the cash he needs to open his own club. To his surprise, Robert finds a stow-away on his RV, a tough young girl called AJ who’s been abandoned by her troubled mother.
The show is very sweet without being cloying and has a knack for dealing with really hard issues in a humane and often funny way. There are several great cameos, including by Mario Cantone, Mary Kay Place, and the glorious Adrienne Barbeau.
If you’re a fan of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” a total of 22 former contestants appear throughout the series.
Thanks for reading!
Great article!