The Traitor Roger Casement
Casement
My readers are aware that Sherlock Holmes was based on my esteemed mentor Dr Joseph Bell, but not many of you realise that Sherlock’s brother Mycroft was based on my good friend Lord Theodore Bycroft, although he often said that my attempt to disguise his identity was at most, half-hearted. Lord Bycroft is indeed endowed with an incredible brain, which is why Lord Salisbury relied so much on him. Now that most people featuring in this memoir are dead, I can reveal that he was a Uranian, a fact he was not ashamed of, although he wasn’t keen to become embroiled with the law, but his love for Roger Casement was his ruling passion. One of them anyway. When the latter was facing the death penalty, Teddy was in a state of torment that I had never witnessed before. Because of his governmental responsibilities, he could not take any official stance in the affair, which is why, he came to me.
‘Ignatius,’ he said, he never called me anything else as he thought that it was a funny name, ‘we need to save Roger from the gallows.’ I was shocked.
‘You’re being over dramatic, Teddy,’ I said, ‘no one will dare anything of the sort. Roger may have erred, no family in Ireland has such patriotic credentials as the Casements. They have been staunch supporters of Protestant Church. They gave him a knighthood, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Trust me Ignatius, I’ve got my ears to the ground. The pious establishment is up in arms, the fellow is a queer and they want his neck, for that if anything else.’ I was to discover later that this was very much part of the equation.
***
I remember very clearly one evening my newly installed telephone rang, and it was Teddy Bycroft. He normally spoke in a loud self-assured voice which was at the same time mellifluous and musical, but he was speaking in hushed tones. It’s a matter of life and death, Ignatius, he said. Teddy and his jokes, I thought. And he asked if he could bring a dear friend of his to me later tonight. I would never deny Teddy anything, but I did ask why was it so urgent. Time is of the essence my dear fellow, he said in a whisper. Shortly after midnight that same day, a Lanchester 10 phut-phutted along my driveway at Undershaw (in Hindhead), and Bycroft followed by a handsome bearded, tanned man came out of the motorcar. He had Hero of the British Empire written all over him, his appearance, his demeanour as well as in the way he moved.
He introduced his companion to me, he was Roger Casement, and I welcomed them into my parlour. I was surprised to see a man who almost had the colour of a Hindoo, and Teddy, who as I said was quick to read people’s minds understood my unasked question.
‘Roger has worked and lived in central Africa andSouth America these last few years,’ he explained. My dear Louisa, although not enjoying the best of health, had insisted on making a soup to go with a steak and kidney pie which we always store in a cool box for just such an emergency. The soup pot was kept next to the hearth to keep it warm, and I was well able to warm the pies in the cast iron pan by myself. My visitors were grateful for a glass of cider to quench the thirst arising from their three hours’ driving, and we sat down to our soup and pie.
It was two in the morning before we were able to sit in the lounge and talk, after I had stoked the fire and added more logs.
‘We need your campaigning skills, Sir Roger has a sad tale to tell you, Ignatius, are you willing to hear it?’
‘Why me, Teddy?’ I asked, although I could not hide that I was flattered by his trust in my capacity. Our visitor took over.
‘Well Ignatius_’
‘Oh drop this nonsense, call me Doyle, or Arthur if you prefer.’
‘Well Arthur, it is well-known that nobody in Great Britain is more willing to use his influence to make a stand for victims, of the authority or the rabble.’
‘Roger was specially moved by your defence of that poor Parsi doctor.’
‘It’s incredible how people would immediately assume the good doctor was the one blinding horses just because he was different,’ opined Casement, ‘you did a marvellous job proving his innocence. Being different is quite the sin these days.’
‘Oh, aye, poor George Edaji. I’m glad I could be of help.’ There’s no hiding the fact that I was inordinately proud of my effort.
***
Roger was born in Dublin into a prominent Protestant, union-jack waving family, his father being a captain of the Dragoons. Never quite able to entirely shed my belief in the occult, I am fascinated by coincidences, and was therefore struck by the fact that he grew up in Doyle’s Cottage. Did that mean that our paths were bound to cross?
Although he left school at sixteen, he somehow managed to join the civil service where he impressed his superiors by his flair for the job, and after a number of positions of increasing responsibility, was appointed a British consul to Belgian Congo.
He explained to me that he had an upbringing where christianity and empire were held very high, the captain would not have it otherwise. As a lad he had no time for the uneducated peasants who tried to promulgate Irish nationalism. Why could Irish people not rejoice in their Britishness?
He never questioned the necessity or right of the British to seize foreign territories and colonise them. For their own good, he was convinced. Although he was not a dyed-in-the-wool christian, he attended mass and believed in the bible. As such he was ready to accept the wisdom that claimed that other religions and practices were at least misguided. He believed that colonisation brought benefits to all sides. If it enriched the colonising power, it also brought many benefits to the subjugated races. But above everything, he hated slavery, and thought that only the white man could help end the practice, until he realised that the European’s stance was that it was wrong for the Arab slavers to have cornered the market.
At first he readily espoused the white man’s belief that what Africans did, cultivate their land, raise their cattle, barter what they produced, was not work. The work ethics had to be inculcated in them, for their own advancement. Work had to be redefined and the civilised meaning was, working for the white man. As his servant, obeying his orders. And in order to force them to accept the new thinking they had to be taxed. Before the introduction of his currency_ brass wire_ the tax was so many hours labour, so many chickens and goats or cattle. In return the black man would get catechism. If one accepted the notion of collecting tax from the population, that was not unfair.
Africans were almost universally looked down upon as being ugly and black, therefore hardly of a higher status than gorillas or chimpanzees. But Roger Casement was struck by the beauty and form of the black man. No one else had a shapelier head. The sun shone on his smooth lustrous skin filling one (him) with the desire to touch it, feel it, caress it. Not wanting to offend me, he said, he would refrain from describing the effect the sight of their sculpted buttocks produced on him. Yes, Casement was a homosexual. Like his fellow Uranian, Teddy Bycroft. This attraction was probably what made him reset his evaluation of the black man. His first axioms were (i) Perhaps he is not as endowed as us in some respects, but he isn’t too different from the white man. (ii) There are many areas where the black man does much better than us, e.g. he knows how to survive in the forest whereas the white man would surely die. (iii) They may be more quarrelsome, but their family and tribal bonds are stronger than death. It would not take him long to arrive at his definite position: the black man may not have picked up the things taught in white man’s schools, but he has developed alternative skills not available to us. They have the same sensibilities as us. Like us some are more honest than others. The black man is not lazier than his white counterpart when he is working on something that interests him.
Thank you Roger, I said, as he began expounding his ethnical views. Yes, as I was a doctor who knows the most intimate things about his patients, he would trust me with the fact that he had indulged in sexual practices with some of the most desirable men on the planet. He had learnt to respect and love these people. Which is why his soul revolted at the ignominies they were subjected to by King Leopold’s men.
In his position as British consul to the Congo State, he embarked on a journey, visiting various areas, and one of his first stop was at Bolobo. He was already aware that the natives of the region were forcibly enrolled by their Belgian masters, to maintain law and order among their own people. The so-called Force Publique. None of them had accepted this willingly, but the white man had limitless powers, and employed all manners of tactics to compel them. This often involved setting fire to their crops and destroying their huts so they ended up with no choice. These reluctant law enforcers had the task to ensure that the rest of the village delivered in an orderly fashion so many tons of kwanga_
‘What’s kwanga?’ I asked
Bread made of cassava, Casement explained. This was to feed their native staff and soldiers, their staple diet. Worse was the levy of goats, pigs and chicken for the mundele, the white man. The demand was more often than not more than the poor fellows could provide, in which case, they were dragged to the white man’s HQ, and a white officer would order a uniformed Bolobo gendarme to beat him to a pulp. Or what the natives feared most, whipped by the chicotte. Obviously this regime did nothing to increase productivity, except that it generated more and more brutality and disorder. When you fear retribution, you often had recourse to theft to fulfil your quota. Roger heard reliable accounts of men dying under the regime.
Casement was given the official task of visiting certain areas and tribes with a view to reporting on several aspects of life in the Congo state, and he thought it best to revisit places that he had been to in his previous posting some years back. In a village which had then been a thriving happy place in the past, with craftsmen, artisans, hunters, fishermen, carpenters, brass workers, where the folks assembled on certain days to sing and dance and drink palm wine, he was shocked to find that the population seemed to have dwindled to about a quarter of what it had been. He soon learnt that the people had either died of the sleeping sickness, or had of their own volition left to move deeper into the forest. Why? he had asked. And he was shocked by what he heard. The dreaded White men had reached them. They began by levying all manners of taxes on the population. What for? they had wanted to know. We will educate you in schools, we will look after your health, build hospitals for you, roads. And they gave out their orders. They wanted the men to fell so many trees to build houses for the mundele, to build fences, piers on the water. Why should we do all that? It’s your civic duty. In any case, we are not begging you, the white men said, we’re giving you orders. And if you disobey them you’ll rue the day you were born. Again they were required to pay for these non-existent services with more chicken or pigs than they could raise.
Then a new calamity arrived in the shape of the tree which wept white tears: rubber latex. The natives were required to collect so many basketfuls of latex, and given a pittance, a few inches of brass wire with which they could buy a few things. Those who refused, preferring to work on their plantations, saw the white man setting fire to their crops and huts in order to force them. So, many of them took the decision to leave, to be safe from the impossible demands of king Leopold’s soldiers. Many crossed the river to the French Congo. As a result the available work forces shrunk to levels the Belgians found intolerable.
With more and more cars being produced, the demand for rubber became bigger and bigger, increasing the profits of Leopold and his business associates. As demand could not be met, the order from Belgium was to find ways and means of forcing the latex gatherers to work harder. Then they came with one incentive: The workers were told, bring so many baskets by the end of the day, or you’ll see what’s gonna happen to you. At first it was the chicotte, which the natives were in dread of. Whipping is for animals, they thought that their dignity was being trampled on. It was then that the practise of amputation was introduced. As even the fastest workers were unable to fulfil the quota, it was obvious that once the whole crew had a hand amputated, this would make matters worse, so a number of “slackers” were chosen at random and they underwent the amputation of one hand.
The foremen who supervised the natives were themselves berated for the poor performance of their teams, and as a result, their morale began to dip. It was decided that they needed divertissements in order to keep them happy, and someone came up with a new game. Most young Belgian soldiers were recruits who had never left their towns or villages. Most of them could hardly read or write. They were encouraged to partake of beer from home, which kept them happy and unquestioning. Surrounded by forests, and having been issued with their own Mle rifles, they quickly adopted the custom of gathering in small parties to go hunting together, often after Sunday mass; they were staunchly Catholic. The new game invented to keep them in high spirits was man-hunting, although there were many children and women among the quary. Soldiers would burst in unsuspecting villages and at gun point force out whoever they found there, and these unfortunate people would then be force-marched to the edge of the forest. In the spirit of fairness, they were then given the time it took to smoke a cigarette to hide in the bush, after which they would be chased and shot like game.
It was not a universal practice, but Casement believed that there must have been over a thousand victims, and when good King Leopold got to hear about it he ordered it to be stopped. As he did the practice of hand amputation. You want to increase productivity, he is said to have shouted at a factor, and completely logically you aim to achieve this by disabling valid workers! Is that Belgian logic.
I stopped my visitor, and demanded some clarification, and he elaborated. His friend Morel with whom he had founded the Congo Reform Association, dedicated to the welfare and protection of the natives, believed that as a result of King Leopold’s actions in the Congo, over ten million Congolese men, women and children had met their deaths. Casement thought that this was an overestimate, but suggested that he thought that the figure was considerably above the minimal one and a half million some experts quoted. Conceivably half the number was due to sleeping sickness, leaving about half to a mixture of wilful killing by King Leopold’s Force Publique, and diseases introduced by the white man, like syphilis, gonorrhoea, cholera or meningitis. It was not a systematic plot to exterminate specific tribes, but the numbers wilfully killed were astronomical.
But why are you facing arrest now? I asked. Why are you threatened with hanging for treason? Is it because you exposed the crimes of the king of Belgium?
Casement laughed. The irony, he said, is that I carried out my report into these criminal practices at the behest of the British government.
But why are they reacting like this now? I wanted to know. Casement explained:
He was supposed to produce a report in which the fellow coloniser would be mildly reproached for being excessive. The sort of failings deserving of a rap on the fingers. But when his findings were revealed, it made a big blot not on Belgian practices, but on the evil of wholesale colonisation.
‘The British_ I am Irish_ felt the finger was pointed at them. I had become a threat to the Empire. But I am not denying that I have been negotiating with the Germans who are keen to supply arms to the Irish patriots. My defence is that as an Irishman I cannot be considered as a traitor to the British empire.’
Our worst fears were realised. Casement was duly arrested and charged with treason.
I was determined to be part of the campaign to defend him, but it was to no avail. He was found guilty and hanged.
