Porters carried the soldiers' supplies. "We ... marched ... through native clearings, where the trunks of large trees lay by hundreds across our path. Over these we had to climb, the trail seeming to lead to the top of every high ant-hill within range. The carriers had an especially hard time, for many of them were chained together by the neck.... They carried our boxes slung on poles, and when one fell he usually brought down all his companions on the same chain. Many of the poor wretches became so exhausted by this kind of marching that they could be urged forward only by blows from the butt-ends of the rifles. Some had their shoulders so chafed by the poles that they literally shrieked with pain."
From a military post far in the interior, Canisius's troops searched the jungle for rebels, and when they captured them, worked them to death: "All were compelled to carry heavy loads, each of which had previously required two men to transport ... until they finally succumbed to starvation and smallpox."
As the fighting grew worse, the troops took to killing their prisoners, in one case thirty of them at a time. By the time the campaign was over, "we had undergone six weeks of painful marching and had killed over nine hundred natives, men, women, and children." The incentive, and the cause of the deaths, was the potential of "adding fully twenty tons of rubber to the monthly crop."
***
By 1903, after several years of hard work, Morel and his allies in Parliament and the humanitarian societies had succeeded in putting the "Congo Question" on the British public agenda more prominently than it had ever been. In May, following a major debate, the House of Commons unanimously passed a resolution urging that Congo "natives should be governed with humanity." The resolution also protested Leopold's failure to live up to his promises about free trade. Morel was proving a shrewd lobbyist. Behind the scenes he fed information to the speakers who supported the resolution; he would do so during many parliamentary debates on the Congo yet to come.
Leopold was alarmed. Britain was the superpower of the day and the most prominent colonial power in Africa. If it turned the full force of its influence against the Congo state, his profits would be at risk. Was a journalist like Morel capable of initiating this? Morel had been able to launch a barrage of criticism in print and to inspire a parliamentary resolution, but getting a reluctant British government to put pressure on a friendly monarch was surely something else. Leopold and his entourage were well aware of the difference: a Belgian newspaper editor had once shrewdly remarked that Lord Salisbury, the long-time British prime minister, "is not a man to care much about the fate of the blacks, any more than that of the Armenians or the Bulgarians."
Leopold's rule had been thoroughly exposed for what it was, but it remained in place. For the moment, he and Morel were at a stalemate. Neither knew that it would soon be broken by a man who, the very day after the British parliamentary debate ended, had embarked on a steamboat journey up the Congo River.
13. BREAKING INTO THE THIEVES' KITCHEN
WHEN MOREL'S ALLIES in Parliament got the Congo protest resolution passed in May of 1903, the Foreign Office sent a telegram to His Majesty's consul in the Congo, ordering him "to go to interior as soon as possible, and to send reports soon."
The consul who received this telegram was an Irishman named Roger Casement, a veteran of twenty years in Africa. The first time we catch a glimpse of him in connection with the Congo, in fact, is in a photograph from some two decades earlier. It shows a group of four young friends who went to work in the territory in the very early days of King Leopold's regime. They wear coats, ties, and high, starched collars. Three have bluff, hearty British faces, faces from a thousand other posed group photos of army cadets or rugby players. But the fourth man, with a handsome black beard, black hair, and heavy brows, has a quizzical tilt of the head and a pensive look that sets him apart from the other three. "Figure and face," wrote the Irish writer Stephen Gwynn, who knew Casement only later, "he seemed to me one of the finest-looking creatures I had ever seen; and his countenance had charm and distinction and a high chivalry. Knight errant he was."
It was back in 1883 that the nineteen-year-old Roger Casement first made the long voyage out to the Congo, working, as it happened, as a purser on an Elder Dempster ship. He returned the following year and remained in the territory through the rest of the 1880s. He ran the supply base for the ill-fated Sanford Exploring Expedition and worked for the surveyors charting the course for the railway around the rapids. He became, he claimed, the first white man who ever swam across the crocodile-infested Inkisi River. When he served as the lay business manager of a Baptist mission station, he drew some gentle disapproval from his employer, who thought he didn't bargain hard enough at buying food. "He is very good to the natives, too good, too generous, too ready to give away. He would never make money as a trader."
When Stanley slogged through the Congo on his Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, Casement accompanied him for a week. "A good specimen of the capable Englishman," noted the explorer in his journal, not noticing that Casement was Irish. Casement was a better judge of Stanley, for although the explorer remained something of a hero to him, Casement recognized Stanley's sadistic streak. A dog-lover himself, Casement later learned, to his horror, that Stanley had cut off his own dog's tail, cooked it, and fed it to the dog to eat.
Casement saw much more brutality on the part of other white men in Africa. It is hard to tell whether there was a particular moral turning point for him, as there would be for E. D. Morel when he made his discoveries in Antwerp and Brussels. One such moment for Casement may have been in 1887, when he traveled up the Congo River on a steamboat that also carried a Force Publique officer named Guillaume Van Kerckhoven. Van Kerckhoven was a hot-headed, notoriously aggressive commander with a rakish grin and waxed-tip mustache, one of whose expeditions even the Congo's governor general called "a hurricane which passed through the countryside leaving nothing but devastation behind it." Casement listened, aghast, as Van Kerckhoven cheerfully explained how he paid his black soldiers "5 brass rods (2½ d.) per human head they brought him during the course of any military operations he conducted. He said it was to stimulate their prowess in the face of the enemy."
In 1890, when Joseph Conrad arrived at Matadi, he jotted in his diary: "Made the acquaintance of Mr. Roger Casement, which I should consider as a great pleasure under any circumstances.... Thinks, speaks well, most intelligent and very sympathetic." The rough-and-ready Matadi, a hot, humid collection of corrugated sheet-iron buildings spread on a hillside overlooking the Congo River, was filled with drunken sailors, African prostitutes, and young European and American adventurers hoping to get rich quickly off the ivory boom. Both Casement and Conrad felt alienated from this gold rush atmosphere; they shared a room for some ten days while Conrad waited to go inland, and together visited nearby villages.
Everyone found Casement an impressive talker. "His greatest charm was his voice, which was very musical," a colleague remembered. "Casement doesn't talk to you," another person said. "He purrs at you." Talking or purring, Casement had a fund of stories that seems to have darkened Conrad's vision of colonialism in Africa. As he was leaving the Congo at the end of his six months there, Conrad saw Casement once more. The two men met again at a dinner in London, later in the decade, and according to Conrad, "went away from there together to the Sports club and talked there till 3 in the morning." The novelist wrote to a friend: "He could tell you things! Things I have tried to forget, things I never did know." One of those things—another possible source of Kurtz and his palisade of human skulls—may well have been the story about Van Kerckhoven, the collector of African heads.
In 1892, Roger Casement went to work for the British colonial administration in what is today Nigeria. He was developing an eye for injustice, however, even though he was employed by the leading colonial power of the day. His first recorded public protest, in an outraged letter he wrote in 1894 to the Aborigines Protection Society, was against a hanging. The twenty-seven victims were African conscri
pt soldiers and their wives in the German colony of the Cameroons; the men had mutinied after the women were flogged. "I trust you may do something to raise a protesting voice in England," Casement wrote, "against the atrocious conduct of the Germans. Altho' the men were their soldiers we all on earth have a commission and a right to defend the weak against the strong, and to protest against brutality in any shape or form."
Casement soon transferred to the British consular service; after serving in several posts in southern Africa, in 1900 he was assigned to set up the first British consulate in the État Indépendant du Congo. When he passed through Brussels on his way to taking up the new job, King Leopold, with a keen eye for anyone in a position to help his cause, invited him to lunch. The lowly consul found himself eating at the Royal Palace with the King, Queen Marie-Henriette, their daughter Princess Clementine, and Prince Victor Napoleon of France.*
Leopold invited Casement to come again the next day, and he did so, listening to the king ramble on for an hour and a half about the civilizing, uplifting work he was doing in the Congo. Although Leopold granted that some of his agents might be guilty of excesses, Casement reported, the king also claimed that "it was impossible to have always the best men in Africa; and indeed the African climate seemed frequently to cause deterioration in the character." As ever, the king tried to make sure that if any damaging information turned up, he would be the first to hear. "His Majesty, in bidding me farewell," Casement wrote, "asked me to write him privately at any time, and to write frankly, should there be anything of interest I could, unofficially, advise him of." Unlike most visitors, Casement appears not to have been charmed by Leopold. He had already seen too much of the Congo.
At his post as consul, Casement remained fascinated by Africa, but it was a restless time in his life. He was approaching forty and seemed stuck in a backwater job that did not use his talents. The consular corps was the poor stepchild of the British diplomatic service. Beyond that, being responsible for the Congo was a far cry from being British consul in Paris or Berlin, a post far more likely to go to someone from a well-connected family in England than from a middle-class one in Ireland. Casement felt he was always at the bottom of the list. His everyday life was one long battle against leaky roofs, mosquitoes, dysentery, and the boredom of inglorious work—"sometimes being even compelled to rise from bed when ill, to listen to a drunken sailor's complaint."
Casement had other frustrations as well. His indignation at the wrongs of colonial rule had no room for expression in his work as a consul. He had a vague interest in Irish history but could not pursue this in the tropics. He had ambitions as a writer but no outlets except long-winded reports that left the Foreign Office staff in London amused; few other consuls routinely sent twenty-page dispatches from West African ports. He wrote large quantities of mediocre verse but managed to publish almost none.
Other white men in the Congo considered the new British consul an eccentric. When traveling for the first time as consul from Matadi to Leopoldville, for instance, Casement did not take the new railway; he walked more than two hundred miles—in protest against high railway fares. On later trips he did use the railway, one baffled Congo state official reported back to Brussels, but "he always traveled second class. In all his movements he is always accompanied by a big bulldog with large jaws."
At the back of his mind was something further, which Casement could not share even with close friends or relatives, although several had their suspicions. He was a homosexual. In a poem that could never be published in his lifetime he wrote:
I sought by love alone to go
Where God had writ an awful no
....
I only know I cannot die
And leave this love God made, not I.
Casement lived in a time when to be found out meant disgrace or worse. It was in 1895 that Oscar Wilde, a fellow Irishman, was sentenced to two years at hard labor for "committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons." In the spring of 1903, as Casement was returning to the Congo from home leave in Europe, another case captured the headlines, that of Major General Sir Hector Macdonald, among the most decorated British soldiers of his time. Exposed as a homosexual and scheduled for court-martial, he killed himself in a Paris hotel room.
"News of Sir Hector Macdonald's suicide in Paris!" Casement wrote in his diary on April 17, 1903. "The reasons given are pitiably sad. The most distressing case this surely of its kind." Two days later, he added, "Very sorry at Hector Macdonald's terrible end." Eleven days after that, in the Congo port of Banana, thoughts of Macdonald pursued Casement through a sleepless night: "A dreadful room at Hotel. Sandflies. Did not close my eyes. Hector Macdonald's death very sad."
Casement must have known that if he ever acquired powerful enemies, he would be open to blackmail. Yet with a touch of unconscious self-destructiveness, he kept a meticulous diary of his assignations, almost all of which were paid for. On that same voyage from England to the Congo, he taunted fate by recording all his sexual encounters along the way. Madeira: "Agostinho kissed many times. 4 dollars." Las Palmas: "No offers." Shipboard: "Down and oh! oh! quick, about 18." Boma: "Tall, 'How much money?'" If the diary were discovered by someone who wished him ill, he would be destroyed. Until then, it was a time bomb, with a fuse of unknown length.
In May 1903, the month following his diary entries about Macdonald's suicide, Casement found something to be happy about; moreover, it was something that promised a big advance in his career. For two years, he had been sending reports to the Foreign Office about the brutal conditions in Leopold's Congo. Now that the Congo protest resolution had been unanimously passed by the House of Commons, the British government had to make a high-profile move in response.
The previous year, Casement had cabled London proposing that he make an investigative trip to the rubber-producing areas of the interior. He was given permission, but home leave in England and Ireland delayed the trip. The parliamentary debate immediately put it back on the agenda, and soon after returning to the Congo, Casement was under way.
He knew the journey would be arduous; writing to a friend later, Casement quoted an African proverb: "A man doesn't go among thorns unless a snake's after him—or he's after a snake." He added, "I'm after a snake and please God I'll scotch it."
***
To carry out his investigation, Casement could have taken the new railway up to Stanley Pool and spent a few weeks touring areas within easy reach of the comfortable brick house where he stayed there. He didn't. Instead, he spent more than three and a half months in the interior. In order not to depend on the authorities for his transportation—a key hold they had over many visitors—he rented a narrow, iron, single-decker steamboat from some American missionaries and traveled far up the Congo River. He spent seventeen days at Lake Tumba, where the state ran its rubber slavery operations with no intermediaries; he visited concession-company territory; he directed his steamer up side rivers and walked when the rivers gave out; he counted the exact number of people held hostage in a village that had not delivered its rubber quota; he canoed across a river and walked several miles through a flooded forest to meet one victim and inspect his injuries in person.
Sometimes Casement stayed overnight at a mission station; sometimes he camped in a riverside clearing or on an island. ("Hippo downstream. Saw three pelicans feeding, close to us. Also saw a beautiful Egyptian ibis, black body, white wings; a lovely fellow in full flight over us.") He was traveling, as always, with his beloved bulldog, John, and he brought with him as cook and helper an otherwise unidentified man who appears in his diary only as Hairy Bill. "Poor old Hairy Bill. A queer life." Hairy Bill's repertoire as chef seems to have been limited to three dishes: chicken, custard, and something known as boiled or stewed sugar. "Chicken, chicken, custard, custard ... every day.... Goddam," writes Casement. Sometimes he turns sarcastic: "We had boiled sugar again for change, also custard." Or: "Stewed sugar and custard again twice daily for a month and beats me hollow."
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Casement sent a ceaseless flow of dispatches to the Foreign Office. "They'll curse me at F.O.," he noted with satisfaction. Surely others cursed him too. He penned a torrent of letters to Congo state officials condemning specific atrocities and, most undiplomatically, the entire way the colony was run. "That system, Monsieur le Gouverneur-Général, is wrong—hopelessly and entirely wrong.... Instead of lifting up the native populations submitted to and suffering from it, it can, if persisted in, lead only to their final extinction and the universal condemnation of civilized mankind." Small wonder that word filtered back to a worried Leopold that his regime would not be treated kindly in the British consul's report. Similar rumors also reached E. D. Morel, who eagerly waited for Casement's return. To the British foreign secretary, Casement exulted, in a most unconsular manner, that he had "broken into the thieves' kitchen."
He was a man possessed. His anger at what he saw had a dramatic effect on many of the other Europeans he encountered; it was as if his visible outrage gave them permission to act on stifled feelings of their own. Two missionaries Casement visited were so inspired by his example that they promptly set off on their own investigative trips; one began writing critical letters to the governor general. Casement, heading downriver, met the steamer of the veteran British missionary George Grenfell heading up, and the two men stopped and talked. After listening to Casement, Grenfell promptly resigned from Leopold's sham Commission for the Protection of the Natives. (A fruitless gesture, incidentally: the king had let the commission's mandate expire a few months earlier, without informing any of its members.) The Italian consul in the Congo, disturbed by what Casement told him, abandoned plans for a European holiday and made an investigative journey of his own that confirmed Casement's findings.