Roger Casement. Report from His Majesty’s Consul at Boma Respecting the Administration of the Independent State of the Congo. 1904, Project Gutenberg, 29 Nov. 2015, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50573/. Accessed 18 Feb. 2021.
———. Some Poems of Roger Casement. 1918, Ed. Gertrude Parry, Project Gutenberg, 28 Sep. 2016, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/53162/. Accessed 18 Feb. 2021.
The title of Report from His Majesty’s Consul at Boma sounds like the title of a government document, and that is exactly what it is. Those interested in some background on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness might find it helpful. This is a detailed account by a British consul on what he observed and testimonies he collected while visiting the Congo Free State (later the Belgian Congo).
The Congo was a unique instance of imperialism. It was established by treaty as a private possession of King Leopold of Belgium. Other colonial laws did not apply, and it appears from this document that licensed trading companies—there were only a few—were a law unto themselves. Consul Casement reported his observations and testimonies of native people about the abuses they were subject to by the Belgian concessionaires.
Unlike Heart of Darkness, the product that the Belgian traders were mostly interested in was rubber (caoutchouc). Traders acting on behalf of Belgian authorities demanded taxes in rubber from villages along the Congo River and some of its tributaries. If the demands were not met, people were arrested, sometimes killed, and often had their hands cut off. Casement tells us that as a result, villagers often fled to the interior or to neighboring countries to avoid these horrors. Casement himself was a consul to the neighboring French Congo who heard testimonies of refugees and visited the Congo Free State more than once and noted the depopulation.
At one point, farther inland, he quotes another traveler who noted that on the Belgian side of a tributary that formed a border with Sudan, villages on the British (Sudan) side were active and flourishing. The Belgian side of the river appeared uninhabited.
One reason for Belgian rule was to put an end to the slave trade, still practiced by Arab traders in the region. Still, at one point Casement recorded three wagons full of slaves, of whom a dozen were chained and guarded by soldiers. They had been found guilty of some crimes and were being punished by working on a literal chain gang in the provincial capital. The description, though written in French, sounds like it could have come directly from Conrad—or, should I say, Charlie Marlow:
Six black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends behind waggled to and fro like tails. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain whose bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking. (Heart of Darkness, ch. 1)
The report noted there were officers not just from Belgium but from Italy, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. One is reminded of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. It is said “all Europe” contributed to him.
The Casement report tries to be fair. It includes testimony which suggests that at least one young man of fifteen who lost a hand at around age eight may have lost it to a wild boar rather than to the machete of a soldier. It also notes that some African tribes are semi-nomadic and that Belgian administration was effectively putting an end to cannibalism.
Still, Casement had visited many of the same places in 1887 that he would revisit in 1903. Everywhere, he was struck by the change, especially the poverty and reduced population. Many people were missing hands and otherwise had sustained injuries and loss of neighbors and relatives at the hands of the Belgian authorities.
He does note that in parts of the Eastern Congo, ivory trade made a similar impact as rubber in the West. This is what Marlow saw in Heart of Darkness. Large canoes have disappeared, and few native people gain livelihood from the river. The hard work and industry he had observed in 1887 had largely disappeared. A Belgian excuse for this was that the native people were lazy and “unaccustomed to work.” Many villages were “inhabited by only a remnant” of the former population. Sometimes he saw people running away from him because they assumed he was a Belgian.
Many similar details accumulate so that can feel oppressed. To be fair, Casement includes Belgian documents that show at least a few of the people who shot and mutilated others over rubber were tried and punished, but the conclusion of this English report was that such amends were too little and too late. Even as of 1904, Belgium was extracting far more exports (mostly rubber) than it was paying for.
When I say Belgium here, though, I mean the traders and people working for the king. This, after all, was a “free” state with no real government. Laws on bodily harm and killing as well as importing firearms were largely ignored. The British Member of Parliament overseeing the report, Lord Landsdowne, would recommend altering the treaty of Berlin which established the Congo Free State. That eventually would happen.
Because this is a collection of legal documents and testimonies, it is a little dry in places. It also helps to know French. Most French portions were translated into English, but not all. For those doing background on the conditions in the Congo at the time when Conrad was there and later when he wrote Heart of Darkness, the most accessible book to read on the subject is Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Crime of the Congo.
There are a few other reasons to check out this collection of documents. Conrad had met Casement when he was in the Congo. At the time both were young and believed that European culture would help to positively alter the character of the native people. Both would become disillusioned, if not cynical. Beginning in 1906, Casement would be deployed to South America and report on the abuses of native Putumayo people at the hands of the government of Peru.
Heart of Darkness describes Kurtz in this way:
‘…He would have been a splendid leader of an extreme party.’
‘What party?’ I asked.
‘Any party,’ answered the other. ‘He was an—an—extremist.’
In 1913 Casement would retire from the consular service and return to his homeland of Ireland. There he once again identified with the exploited subjects of an imperial power, in this case, his fellow Irishmen. He identified with the Irish Volunteers, a nationalist group more extreme than Sinn Féin. He helped smuggle guns from Germany to Irish nationalists and would eventually be hanged at the age of 51 for taking part in the Easter Rebellion of 1916.
There certainly were differences between Kurtz and Casement, but we can see how Conrad could have been inspired by Casement in various ways. Conrad would say that he “thinks, speaks well, most intelligent and very sympathetic.” Later, reflecting on his execution, Conrad would say “Already in Africa, I judged he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don’t mean stupid. I mean that he was all emotion. By emotional force (Putumayo, Congo report, etc.) he made his way, and sheer temperament—a truly tragic figure.”1 Not unlike Mr. Kurtz?
At one point in Heart of Darkness, we are told that Kurtz not only was well spoken but had written some effective poetry. The Russian tells Marlow:
‘…Ah! I’ll never, never meet such a man again. You ought to have heard him recite poetry—his own, too, it was, he told me. Poetry!’ He rolled his eyes at the recollection of these delights. ‘Oh, he enlarged my mind!’
It turns out that Casement wrote some poetry, too. Fifteen of his poems were compiled by his cousin Gertrude Parry, also an Irish nationalist, into Some Poems of Roger Casement. They are interesting to read. While no one would confuse his work with Yeats, some of the poems are not bad. A few tend to be didactic, but one related to the subject of Irish nationalism, “The Triumph of Hugh O’Neill,” ends with a patriotic flourish:
Our flag no longer drooping, each fold shall now reveal
And wave for God and Erin and our darling Hugh O’Neill.
I am reminded of Francis Orrery Ticknor’s “A Battle Ballad” about General J. E. Johnston at the First Battle of Bull Run, a hero of another lost cause.
There is a tender, if somewhat generic, poem of lost love:
Oh! what cares Love for a wounded breast?
Love shows his own with a broader scar:
‘Tis only those who have loved the best
Can say where the wounds of loving are.
Not surprisingly, a few poems decry some injustice. One speaks of returning the Elgin Marbles to Greece:
Give back the Elgin marbles; let them lie
Unsullied, pure beneath an Attic sky.
And perhaps with a sense of lost youth or wasted years, there is the hope of all having meaning in God’s purpose. Echoing Colossians 3:3b (KJV), he writes:
So though the sun shines not in such a blue,
Nor have the stars the meaning youth deviced,
The heavens are nigher, and a light shines through
The brightness that nor sun nor stars sufficed;
And on this lonely waste we find it true
Lost youth and love, not lost, are hid with Christ.
Maybe his poetry could enlarge one’s mind a little bit anyhow…
If for no other reason than being an inspiration of sorts for Heart of Darkness and for Irish independence, some readers might appreciate a little more of Roger Casement. These primary sources are probably the places to start.
1 Quotations from Conrad are found at “Roger Casement.” Wikipedia, 16 Apr. 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Casement. Accessed 19 Apr. 2021.