Britain knighted Roger Casement for exposing atrocities, then hanged him for treason
Roger Casement's reports on the Congo and the Peruvian Amazon made him a hero of human rights and earned him a knighthood in 1911. Five years later the same government executed him for seeking German help for the Easter Rising, stripping his honours and circulating diaries that are still disputed.
Casement was born in Dublin on 1 September 1864. Orphaned young, he lived on relatives' charity in County Antrim, left school at 16 and became a clerk for the Liverpool shipping firm Elder Dempster. By 1884 he was in the Congo working for Henry Morton Stanley's African International Association, a front for King Leopold II of Belgium, surveying routes and supervising a railway around the river's impassable cataracts. He learned African languages and, in 1890, met Joseph Conrad, who found him intelligent and sympathetic.
Both men had believed colonisation would bring progress; both learned otherwise. As British consul at Boma, Casement was ordered in 1903 to investigate Leopold's private colony, where the Force Publique extracted rubber through terror. He travelled for weeks through the upper Congo interviewing workers, overseers and mercenaries, and his 1904 report documented enslavement, mutilation and torture. Business interests and his old employer Alfred Lewis Jones rejected it, but it spurred E. D. Morel's Congo Reform Association, a Belgian inquiry confirmed its essentials in 1905, and on 15 November 1908 Belgium took the territory from Leopold.
Sent to Brazil from 1906, he joined an inquiry into the British-registered Peruvian Amazon Company after the magazine Truth called its operation a British-owned Congo. Because Barbadian workers counted as British subjects, London had grounds to intervene, and Casement's findings on the abuse of indigenous rubber gatherers brought his knighthood. He has been called the father of twentieth-century human rights investigations.
Witnessing colonial cruelty and the Boer War left him distrustful of empire. After retiring in 1913 he turned to Irish republicanism, and during the First World War sought German arms for the 1916 rising. Convicted of high treason, he was hanged on 3 August 1916. Officials showed influential people typescripts said to be his diaries describing homosexual activity, undermining calls for clemency. A 2002 handwriting study judged them genuine, a conclusion several scholars reject. Conrad, by then British, later dismissed his old acquaintance as all emotion and vanity.
Source: Roger Casement
