The word imperialism is tired now and no longer reverberates with the power of emperors and conquests and fantasies of a superior way of life spreading across the globe, but in Casement’s day it still had the capacity to stir. Queen Victoria had been declared Empress of India in 1876, and by the early twentieth century a few European superpowers controlled much of the rest of the world and asserted that this was a good and an inevitable thing. Imperialism most obviously meant the conquest and control of other nations for economic and strategic reasons. It also meant that the conquerors themselves regarded and instructed their imperial subjects to regard the colonized countries as the outskirts rather than the center of the world, literally marginalized them as poor imitations, provincials, barbarians, back yards, outbacks. The consequences of this relocation and devaluation of regional identities are still being felt, perpetuated by the traditional beneficiaries, dissected by outsider scholars, reversed by the postcolonial nationalisms and nativisms which have sometimes liberated former colonies and sometimes created new regimes of authoritarianism in them. A nationalist movement or an independence movement is an assertion by its promulgators that theirs is a center, not a periphery.
In 1900 Casement was stationed in the Congo again, where he performed the investigation that made his first, heroic reputation. Leopold II of Belgium had played the French and English against each other so cleverly that he was able to annex a huge region around the Congo river, not for Belgium, but for himself, so that he was not a king reigning over citizens with all the traditions of mystical duty and connection that still meant, but a propertyowner administering tenants. He never visited the Congo Free State that Europe recognized as his own; it seems to have been nothing more to him than an intangible from which the abstraction of wealth could be wrung. By the time Casement returned to the Congo, the place was famous in some circles for the brutal means by which the native population was made to turn Leopold’s profit, and in 1903 Casement was able to convince his superiors to let him investigate the situation.
Casement’s report on the Congo was published in 1904 as a Blue Book, an official government document, after the names and places he gave were removed, lessening its impact. It is still a devastating tract. The whole region of some 900,000 square miles was being administered as a work camp with such brutality that it was rapidly being depopulated. The natives who weren’t killed outright were being starved, beaten, tortured, and worked to death. A bureaucracy had been set up by Leopold’s officials which was permitted to levy a tax on the natives, usually of raw rubber. One such worker told Casement, “It used to take ten days to get the twenty baskets of rubber—we were always in the forest to find the rubber vines, [we had] to go without food, and our women had to give up cultivating the fields and gardens. Then we starved. Wild beasts—the leopards killed some of us while we were working away in the forest and others got lost or died from exposure and starvation and we begged the white men to leave us alone, saying we could get no more rubber, but the white men and their soldiers said: ‘Go. You are only beasts yourselves, you are only nyama [meat].’ We tried, always going further into the forest, and when we failed and our rubber was short, the soldiers came to our towns and killed us. Many were shot, some had their ears cut off; others were tied up with ropes round their necks and bodies and taken away.”
Casement’s report is numbingly repetitive, always in close-up on the suffering and death inflicted, with mutilation and murder on almost every page. There are stories of how hands were cut off as a means of proving that a punishment or death had taken place, and soldiers came in with baskets full of hands. The soldiers who administered these crimes were often Africans themselves, but the orders came from the Europeans at the top. It is still sometimes said that Leopold’s administration did a good thing in doing away with the Arab slave trade in the region, but the conditions under which the people there lived seem far worse than slavery, for a slave is at least a valuable possession, while the inhabitants of the Congo were being exterminated profligately. As an economic strategy, abusing the population to mass death was bizarre, and yet it was not ideological in any way that has been identified.
Elaine Scarry, in her study of the functions of pain, writes, “Brutal, savage, and barbaric torture self-consciously and explicitly announces its own nature as an undoing of civilization, acts out the uncreating of the created contents of consciousness.” Which is to say, the Belgians were, in her terms, undoing the Africans’ consciousness and culture while announcing that these Africans had never possessed such things. Torture, pain, injury, captivity, hunger, and fear in their immediate effects so fill the mind that they crowd out the ability to think of other things, to remember; in their longer consequences they destroy the ability of people to perpetuate their culture by the generation of sustenance, transmission of stories, practice of traditions, and raising of children. It could also be said that Leopold’s administrators were losing their own culture in their attempts to destroy that of others or revealing the undersides and limits of that culture. They seemed to be trying to brutalize Africa into their image of it, as chaotic, full of bestial, idiotic, lost people in need of an order that could only come from outside. They were ultimately producing another first-world fantasy: the uninhabited “virgin” wilderness that still exists in many wildlife and nature documentaries about the former colonies from Africa to the Arctic and in the fantasies of would-be discoverers then and now. Casement himself noticed how drastically the population had diminished since his early travels along the Congo; he estimated the regime killed three million people; later estimates reach as high as six million, the size of the Jewish holocaust under the Nazis.
Leopold had written in 1897, “The task which the State agents have to accomplish in the Congo is noble and elevated. It is incumbent upon them to carry on the work of the civilization of Equatorial Africa . . . Civilized society attaches to human life a value unknown among savage peoples.” It was Casement’s novel task to restore voices to those who were being rendered voiceless, to give an authority to their experience that would undo the legitimacy of the authority of imperialism itself, and to do so by making the private and individual and local pain of their bodies a public, political issue thousands of miles away in Europe and America. Casement’s report seems to have been one of those watersheds, like Auschwitz or Vietnam, which force self-doubt upon those who conceive of themselves or their culture as civilized. Although his information was not wholly new, it was given for the first time with an exhaustive detail and a credibility that could not be ignored. It seems to have been Casement more than any other figure before the First World War who delivered the first blows to the fulsome self-confidence that had spurred the Victorians to swarm over the globe. The doubts and schisms that so marked his own life would become hallmarks of the coming century, and the Congo report is one of its earliest milestones.
Casement’s reports, which made him an internationally famous hero, also complicated the position of his superiors, who were not entirely enthusiastic about his work. He himself realized that they were not profoundly different from Leopold and his minions in the Congo and that their interest in his report was in its potential to compromise the Belgian ruler and increase their own power, rather than to champion human rights. His own position as a consul seems to have been a situation of convenience rather than conviction for him, a good place from which to operate, for a while. Leopold challenged his report, and some saw it as Protestant Britain’s attack on Catholics—an Irish-American newspaper was among the accusers. But the independent commission Leopold appointed to exonerate him instead corroborated Casement. In 1908 Leopold was forced to hand over his private empire to the state of Belgium. The Belgian Congo achieved independence in 1960 and is now Zaïre; since 1965 it has been ruled by President Mobutu, a US-supported dictator who has exploited the tropical land and people so effectively that he has become one of the richest men in the world. The Congo river remains the principal means of transportation in this count
ry a quarter the size of the US and still short on roads.
A few years ago, my friend Hilary traveled down the route that Conrad and Casement had traveled up, and the Congo she encountered still seemed infested with the practices unloosed by the Belgians. It was an incredibly lush, violent, backward country, she told me, and the river transport was simply a string of barges lashed together with about three thousand people on board. She had reserved a cabin with some other travelers she met, but when they went in, the floor was covered in maggots, so they used it to store their baggage and slept in the corridors like everyone else. There was an abundance of life, life everywhere, crocodiles in the river as Conrad described them, and the jungle overtaking the colonial city that had been Stanleyville and is now Kisangani. At the second village, a huge shipment of bales of smoked monkeys was taken aboard, the fur still on them and their faces frozen in grimaces. I asked if smoked money was a delicacy or a staple there, and she said that food is a delicacy in Zaïre. The army was everywhere. One day she and the other foreigners were sunbathing on deck when some of the soldiers on the ship struck up a conversation with them: they remarked that the travelers were lying in what was a favorite torture position of theirs. Where did you learn how to torture, asked Hilary, and they answered, In the United States. Whatever Casement accomplished, he built no eternal bulwarks against inhumanity, and in the long run nationalism has not always proven to be kinder than imperialism.
After his Congo report, Casement became a new kind of hero, marching as of old into the jungles of empire, not to expand Europe’s hold on them but to contract and reform it. He thought of quitting the foreign service, took time off to recover his health, and traveled in Ireland. It was then his nationalist consciousness began to awaken, partly because of his growing friendship with the writer Alice Stopford Green, herself an ardent nationalist and historian. Casement decided that despite his mixed ancestry, his lot and his loyalty lay with Ireland, not England. The Gaelic Revival, an endeavor which began as an effort to save the native language of the island from extinction and ended as the revolution Casement would join, was in full swing. The tenor of the time appears in James Joyce’s “The Dead,” in which a young woman rebukes the story’s protagonist for taking his vacations abroad when he could be learning Irish in the west; nationalism both political and cultural was coming into its own. Among Casement’s papers from this time is an acerbic note from his bank asking him to please not correspond in Irish.
For Casement, Ireland seems to have functioned more as an ideal home, a ground for identity, than as a place that could contain him; for all his nationalism, he continued to spend most of his time far away, and some of his remarks suggest that it was in Africa that he felt most at ease, perhaps because colonial Africa was itself as between definitions as he was. Unable to find other work, he returned to active duty in the foreign service, was posted to South America, and found his own way to the Putumayo, a region of what was then Peru and is now the Peru/Columbia border, named after the Amazon tributary river of the same name.
The Putumayo, where Casement caught the butterfly I came across in the Natural History Museum, was essentially a rerun of the Congo, though the results of his Putumayo report weren’t as dramatic. Like the Congo, it was a rubber-tapping region turned into a private slave-labor camp. His 1910 journal of the expedition is an odd mix of subjects jotted down casually. “September 30th . . . the new method of torture being to hold them under water while they wash the rubber, to terrify them! Also floggings and putting in guns and flogging with machetes across the back . . . then sent for Francisco and will interrogate later tonight. I bathed in the river, delightful, and Andokes came down and caught butterflies for Barnes and I. Then a Capitan embraced us laying his head against our breasts, I never saw so touching a thing, poor soul, he felt we were their friends. Gielgud must be told to stop calling me Casement, it is infernal cheek. Not well. No dinner.” On October 6 he noted splendid Emperor butterflies, and on the next day, “magnificent display of butterflies; beats anything I’ve seen yet.” On October 27 he caught three butterflies on the road, and an expanded diary notes, “. . . to relieve our feelings we began an elaborate butterfly chase there & then on the sandy bank of the river. They were certainly magnificent specimens & the soil was aflame with glowing wings—black & yellow of extraordinary size—the glorious blue & white, and swarms of reddish orange, yellow-ochre, gamboge & sulphur.”
One of his biographers says that the butterfly expeditions were a way to hear evidence out of reach of the overseers. The butterflies, the annoying traveling companions, unavoidable dinners with murderers, his own ailments, his many swims, his admiring looks at nearly nude natives: none of this is part of the official report. Like the other, it is a relentlessly detailed account of the varieties, locales, and inflicters of torture, the political information sifted out of all the range of his interest in the jungle. Like the Congo report, this one portrayed a brutality that was supposed to enforce an economic program of rubber harvesting, but was in fact eliminating its workforce—“I said to this man that under the actual regime I feared the entire Indian population would be gone in ten years, and he answered, ‘I give it six . . .’ ” Casement considered its horror surpassed anything he had seen in Africa.
Picture the enormous weight of Casement’s responsibility to his government, his conscience, the Putumayan people his heart went out to all around him, the weight of suffering and death; picture the tropical leaves, the mud and the humid air, a world in which gravity must have pressed down like that of some vast, strange planet, and amidst it all the weightless airy rambles of the butterflies. Theodor Adorno once said that after Auschwitz there could be no poetry; should there be butterflies amidst atrocities? A perennial question for revolutionaries and activists is whether they should themselves enjoy the pleasant fruits they are trying to secure for others. Casement’s answer is affirmative; there should be sapphire and sulphur-colored butterflies to chase and rivers to swim in and journals to keep, for the interminable task of fighting for justice demands its moments of reprieve. When Adorno spoke, his generation imagined the holocaust inflicted upon Jews—and Gypsies, homosexuals, and dissidents, among others—as unique, having already forgotten. Cromwell in Ireland, the Turks in Armenia, and Casement’s reports and not foreseeing the Cambodias, Guatemalas and Rwandas that lay ahead. There were poets in Auschwitz, writers like Primo Levi, who could quote Dante inside the camps and who survived to write his own lyric, damning books. Casement’s butterflies seem to propose the complexity, the irreducibility of experience even at such terrible moments. When T. F. Meagher, a leader of Young Ireland’s 1848 revolt, thought of its momentary triumph afterward, in his exile, he found it impossible not to recall as well the hair of the women in the hilltop crowds of supporters, “disordered, drenched, and tangled, streaming in the roaring wind of voices.” Maybe butterflies and atrocities, like victories and streaming hair, are inseparable in memory and experience, however sifted out by reason.
In 1910, Casement was in his midforties, accelerating in action, in sense of purpose. In 1911, the government that would kill him five years later knighted him for his efforts on behalf of human rights, an honor he seems to have regarded dubiously. He was already separating himself from England, as was much of Ireland. In 1912, Irish Home Rule was introduced into the British Parliament for the third time since Parnell had unsuccessfully first raised the possibility of dissolving the political union made in 1800. The reaction in the north, fanned by the demagogue Edward Carson, was extreme. The Protestants who had come there generations before as colonizing economic and religious refugees and who in Wolfe Tone’s time had been the strongest advocates of independence, began to organize as unionists. They began collecting weapons and forming a volunteer militia, which soon numbered more than a hundred thousand men. They were in the peculiar position of threatening armed struggle against the government should it cease to govern them. Afterwards, in the south, the National Volunteers were founded
as a counterforce, though they had a much harder time getting arms into the country. As tension increased in Ireland, incidents of police brutality began to rouse public sentiment against the government.
By the time the First World War broke out in August of 1914, Casement was already in the United States, trying to tap the vast immigrant Irish population for funds for guns. Casement essentially failed at his labors on behalf of the revolt; the Americans did not give nearly what he hoped for, and he spent the year and a half before the Easter Rising as a self-appointed envoy in Germany miserably trying to recruit Irish prisoners of war for a liberation army and to wring support out of the indifferent German government. Often sick, sometimes paranoid, and conscious of his futility by the end, Casement had made a huge mistake when he presumed that his enemy’s enemy would be a friend. Sadly disillusioned, he managed at least to get a shipment of weapons (sunk off the Irish coast) and submarine transport for himself to return to Ireland on Good Friday 1916, the eve of the Easter Rising. He hoped to tell them the support they hoped for would not arrive and therefore to postpone the uprising.
For the teacher and Gaelic revivalist Patrick Pearse, who was the kingpin of the rising, the meaning and power of the event was to be more symbolic than literal, an Easter bloodshed that would launch Ireland’s resurrection—by capturing not Dublin itself but the imaginations of the Irish. The imagery is steeped in Christianity—what else can you call an Easter Rising?—and blood sacrifice is part of the redemption. The proclamation Pearse read from the steps of the General Post Office is as much a part of the poets’ community it grew out of as the Declaration of Independence is Enlightenment literature. Ireland “summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom,” as though the rebels were only carrying out a mystical mandate generated elsewhere, by Ireland itself, an island possessed of gender and intent. The embodiment of Ireland as a woman, young, ancient, or maternal, has a long and often sentimental history, but its appearance in the opening sentence of a revolutionary document is noteworthy. It calls attention to nationalism as a cause rising out of a common grounding in tales and ballads, and it suggests how much this revolution had originated as mythology and poetry and sentiment itself: the Gaelic Revival. It was a revolution made on poets’ desks, in summer language schools, in painstaking research into old bards and older myths, a revolution of the imagination which laid the groundwork for independence when it reinvented Ireland as a proud and distinct country, not a poor dependent British isle.
A Book of Migrations Page 6