Street roots,
10
Nov. 23, 2012
f V i
Words
and
deeds
Mario Vargas Llosa explores the
extraordinary lessons o f Roger Casement,
from knighthood to revolutionary
BY JOE MARTIN
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
oger Casement was born a middle-
class Protestant in Dublin, Ireland, in
1864. As a youth he dreamed of
adventure and exotic places, and his
extraordinary life took on truly panoramic
dimensions. His first taste of Africa came in
1883. Casement worked for a Liverpool
shipping line that sent him to a port close to
the mouth of the Congo River. By the time
he was 30, Casement had spent most of his
adult life on what many then called the Dark
Continent. Eventually he was appointed
British consul, initially in Bomo, Congo.
R
The Dream of the
Celt by Mario
Vargas Llosa
In 1903, at the behest of the government,
Casement journeyed to the innermost
reaches of the Congo, at that time the
domain of King Leopold II of Belgium. In
the depths of that equatorial region,
Casement investigated the malicious
treatment of the Congolese, whose forced
labor extracted tons of rubber from the
wilderness. A few years later, again at the
government’s request, Casement traveled to
the fetid jungles of the Amazon to
investigate torture and oppression on
Peruvian rubber plantations where Native
Americans were enslaved.
The Peruvian Nobel Prize winner Mario
Vargas Llosa has brought the spectacular
saga of Casement to life in his stunning new
novel “The Dream of the Celt.” It is an artful
working of Casement’s outer and inner
existence exquisitely painted on a historical
canvas.
Casement’s writings about execrable
abuses in the Congo and the Amazon
reverberated around the world. Civilized
readers everywhere were horrified by
atrocities casually meted out to native
Africans and indigenous people of South
America. Casement was acknowledged
internationally as an intrepid advocate for
human rights and was made a Knight of the
British Empire. Unbeknownst to English
officials, Casement was becoming a
revolutionary resentful of the oppression of
his own people: “There in the Congo, living
with injustice and violence, he had
discovered the great lie of colonialism and
begun to feel more ‘Irish,’ that is, like the
citizen of a country occupied and exploited
by the Empire that had bled and weakened
Ireland.” And he had another secret: He was
gay.
Llosa depicts the young consul, who was
still unaware of the terrible toll borne by the
Congolese: “[Casement] resumed his
tedious consular tasks: making note of the
ships that arrived and departed, the goods
the merchant ships unloaded — rifles,
munitions, chicote whips, wine, holy
pictures, crucifixes, colored glass beads —
and the ones they carried to Europe, the
immense stacks of rubber, ivory, and animal
skins. This was the exchange that in his
youthful imagination was going to save the
Congolese from cannibalism and from the
Arab merchants of Zanzibar who controlled
the slave trade, and open the doors of
civilization to them!”
But it is not long before the Irishman has
doubts about Europe’s incursion into Africa.
Casement is told by famed explorer Henry
Morton Stanley, himself a party to the
mayhem exterminating black Africans,
“They’ll be taught how to dress, how to pray
to the true God, how to speak like a
Christian and not use those monkey
dialects.... Their children and grandchildren
will thank us. And it wouldn’t surprise me if
in a little while they begin to worship
Leopold the Second the way they worship
their fetishes and hideous objects.”
Casement, who once adulated Stanley,
comes to despise him and begins to discern
that his naïve notion of “Christianity,
civilization and commerce” was disastrous
for Africa.
Later, near the Putumayo River in the
Amazon, Casement again encounters what
greed can do to humans and contemplates
the arrogant attitude of the venal
oppressors: “For them the Amazonian
indigenous people were not, strictly
speaking, human beings, but an inferior,
contemptible form of existence, closer to
animals than civilized people. That’s why it
was legitimate to exploit them, whip them,
abduct them, take them to the rubber
plantations or, if they resisted, kill them like
rabid dogs.” His report on the sadistic
treatment of native people would bring down
the Peruvian Amazon Company.
On completing his work in Peru,
Casement plunged into revolutionary Irish
politics. He would go to Germany — then at
war with Britain — and try unsuccessfully to
raise an Irish Brigade of Irish prisoners
fighting in Britain’s army. Shortly before the
Easter rebellion exploded in Dublin,
Casement was taken by submarine back to
Ireland. Arriving exhausted on a beach in
Kerry, he was arrested and soon
incarcerated in the Tower of London, a once-
celebrated knight now condemned as an
Irish traitor.
It was during his sensational trial that
British officials allowed Casement’s personal
diaries to be made public. Some entries
were graphic depictions of homosexual
encounters. Over the years there has been
considerable discussion as to their
authenticity. It is now accepted that
Casement was gay, whether or not all of his
diaries’ contents were his own or forgeries.
On Aug. 3, 1916, Casement was hanged in
Pentonville Prison and ignominiously buried
there. In 1965 his body was finally
repatriated to Ireland, where he was given
the state funeral due a hero.
In Llosa s grim, sprawling and electrifying
tale, Casement’s story is told in sublime
prose in which he is duly recognized as a
compassionate man of conviction, a
dauntless crusader for decency and the
dignity of all human beings.
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