King Leopold's Ghost

by Adam Hochschild

  But Casement had to earn a living. By 1906, he was once again serving as British consul in a remote spot, this time Santos, Brazil, where the consulate was an empty, whitewashed room in a coffee warehouse. He wore a dress uniform for ceremonial occasions (white gloves, gold braid on collar and cuffs, a sword, and a hat with a cockade), but his daily work was anything but glamorous. Exasperatedly summing up his entire consular career, Casement later wrote, "My predecessor in Santos had a wire netting up to the ceiling to prevent ... distressed British subjects throwing things at him.... At Delagoa Bay [in Mozambique] I could not afford a secretary or clerk. I had to sit in my office for two years and open the door to everyone who came in. I was bottle washer and everything else.... I have known ladies to come in and ask me for their cab fare. I have been asked to pronounce a divorce and been upbraided for not doing it. Once a woman came into my office in Delagoa Bay and fainted on the sofa, and that woman remained in the house for a week."

  When he was not bailing drunken sailors out of jail or performing other consular duties, Casement was becoming ever more involved with his native Ireland. On home leave he met members of the movement to revive what he called the "lovely, glorious language" of Gaelic and, with it, the roots of Irish culture. He visited the movement's language school at Cloghaneely, where he was photographed, arms crossed tightly on his stomach, as if holding in some anxiety, his tall frame seated awkwardly amid solemn Gaelic League members in long Victorian cutaways and vests.

  "In those lonely Congo forests where I found Leopold," he wrote to a friend, "I found also myself, the incorrigible Irishman." To another, he said that "it was only because I was an Irishman that I could understand fully, I think, the whole scheme of wrongdoing at work on the Congo." He had come to feel that Ireland, like the Congo, was a colony, and that there, too, the core injustice was the way the colonial conquerors had taken the land. "I realised that I was looking at this tragedy [in the Congo] with the eyes of another race of people once hunted themselves."

  True enough, but was the "race of people once hunted themselves" only the Irish? Being a gay man in an unforgiving age, Casement surely felt hunted every day of his adult life. That was a cause too dangerous to openly take on, but embracing Irish nationalism was possible, and Casement did so with characteristic passion. Although he never fully mastered the language, he sometimes used the Gaelic form of his name, Ruari MacAsmund, and tried Gaelic in his letters. On his way to take up his post in Brazil, his baggage stuffed with books on Ireland, he wrote to a friend, "Remember my address is Consulate of Great Britain and Ireland, Santos—not British Consulate!!" He had special stationery printed to emphasize this. From Brazil, he wrote home, "Send me news of Congo and Ireland—nothing else counts."

  On one trip home, his ship anchored at Rio de Janeiro. "Casement came ashore and we talked for a time before going back to his liner for lunch," the British vice consul later recalled. "Half-way out to the ship, the villainous Brazilian boatmen who were rowing us out suddenly rested on their oars and, as was often their wont, tried to hold us up for more money than the price already agreed on. But by then Casement was launched on a tremendous monologue about Irish Home Rule and nothing could stem the flood. For a while the boatmen tried to shout him down, but it was impossible. Finally they gave up in disgust and we continued on our way, with Casement still going strong on Ireland."

  Generous as always (he helped support a ne'er-do-well brother for some years) and frequently in debt, Casement somehow managed to contribute more than £85 in "Payments to Irish Causes in 1907" out of his salary. More and more, he came to see the world in terms of colonizers and colonized. His letters are filled with discomfort at working for the biggest colonizer of them all, and he gently chided his friend E. D. Morel for believing England to be morally superior to the other colonial powers: "I have no use for your British government.... You are one of the few, my dear Bulldog, who do not realise the national characteristics—and it is for that I love you. When I think what J.B. [John Bull] has done to Ireland I literally weep to think I must still serve—instead of fight.... I do not agree with you that England and America are the two great humanitarian powers.... [They are] materialistic first and humanitarian only a century after."

  Morel advised Casement not to sacrifice his pension rights by prematurely leaving the consular service. He understood Casement's frustrations, but was wise enough to know that some of them came from the man, not the job. "You are a difficult man to help," he once wrote to Casement. "You are very proud, for which I admire you, in the first place. Also, forgive me for saying so, it is a little difficult sometimes to know exactly anything [that] could be done that would fall in with your exact wishes."

  Casement worried about Morel's welfare as much as Morel did about his. He knew that Morel, having poured all his energy into Congo reform, had not been able to put aside any money for his old age. In London on leave, Casement began collecting funds for this purpose, contributing £50 himself. "My hope now," he wrote to William A. Cadbury, the Quaker chocolate manufacturer, "is that we may raise from £10,000 to £15,000 possibly & with this sum ... invested for the wife and children the besetting fear and dread that weighs on his mind may be removed forever, & his whole personality released for greater good and more work for Africa, or elsewhere where such a fearless soul as his is needed." Casement followed this with a blizzard of letters and personal visits to other Congo reform supporters. He fell short of his target, but he succeeded in gathering several thousand pounds. He, and Morel even more so, were skilled at something essential to political crusades: fund-raising.

  Suddenly an opportunity arose for Casement to repeat his famous Congo investigative journey, this time in another part of the world. Reports filtering back to England described atrocities committed against Indians in the remote Putumayo region of the Amazon River basin by officials of the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company. British humanitarians, labor unions, and church groups were demanding action. The firm was incorporated in London, and some of the mistreated workers were British subjects, contract laborers from Barbados. The Foreign Office sent Casement to investigate.

  For Casement, the Putumayo was the Congo all over again, from the long, dreary journeys on crowded steamboats to the swarms of rain forest mosquitoes to the shootings, shackles, beheadings, mutilations, and kidnappings of a slave-labor system driven by Europe's insatiable demand for wild rubber. Casement weighed and tried to carry the Indians' rubber loads. He measured the stocks into which people were locked to be flogged with a tapir-hide whip, which resembled the chicotte.

  In reporting to the Foreign Office, Casement knew everything had to be precise and well documented. But his other writings from this time show a romantic idealization of the oppressed. The Irish, he felt, were "white Indians"; poverty-stricken Galway was the "Irish Putumayo." In a magazine article, he argued that the Putumayo Indians were morally superior to their white overlords; the Indian was "a Socialist by temperament, habit, and possibly, an age-long memory of Inca and pre-Inca precept." (Some of the smaller peoples crushed by their armies might not have seen the Incas so benignly.)

  Despite succumbing to his own version of the Noble Savage myth, Casement got the job done. As with the Congo, he was not content just to carry out his Foreign Office assignment; he wrote voluminous letters to influential people, raised money, and fed pages of suggested questions to sympathetic members of Parliament. In the middle of this work, he received a startling piece of news: on recommendation of the foreign secretary, he was to be knighted. He agonized for days over whether to refuse the knighthood, feeling, as he explained to a friend, that "until Ireland is safe and her outlook happy no Irishman has any right to be accepting honours." Finally he said yes, but when it came to the day of the actual ceremony—which would have required him to kneel before the British king—he pled ill.

  While in the Putumayo, Casement's life had been all work, as in the Congo, with scarcely a thought for anything else. But on the long voyages to and fr
om South America he filled his diary again with a record of assignations. On shipboard: "Captain's steward, an Indian boy of 19, broad face." In Para, Brazil: "Shall I see Joao, dear old soul! I'll get up early.... To Cemetery and lo! Joao coming along, blushed to roots of hair with joy." He seemed to become more heedless in his meetings. Passing through Para again: "Dinner at 8 P.M. and out to cemetery and met Friend.... Police passing behind paling—but he laughed.... $10." Still undiscovered, the time bomb's fuse burned on.

  ***

  One evening in 1910, a year after King Leopold died, London theatergoers attending a new play, based on the Sherlock Holmes story The Speckled Band, noticed a trio of men in the audience: the famous journalist E. D. Morel, with his trademark mustache; the black-bearded Sir Roger Casement, deeply tanned from his time in the Putumayo; and the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, host of the other two.

  Conan Doyle was Morel's most important new recruit to the cause of Congo reform. His help was eagerly welcomed by Morel, whose job had been made more difficult by the Belgian takeover of the Congo and Leopold's death the following year. Morel had suffered the worst setback that can happen to a crusader: he had lost his villain. It is always tempting to believe that a bad system is the fault of one bad man. Morel never gave in to that temptation, but he feared that his supporters would. For the Congo reformers, being able to demonize Leopold had been a double-edged sword. With the king now gone, the movement could easily falter, so Conan Doyle's influential support had come at just the right time.

  In 1909 the novelist had spoken side by side with Morel to huge crowds: 2800 in Edinburgh, 3000 in Plymouth, 5000 in Liverpool. He wrote an introduction to Morel's newest book and also published a book of his own based on Morel's vast store of material, The Crime of the Congo, which sold twenty-five thousand copies a week when it first appeared and was immediately translated into several languages. With all the fervor of a late convert, he was one of the few people in Europe whose denunciations were even more impassioned than Morel's. He called the exploitation of the Congo "the greatest crime which has ever been committed in the history of the world."

  Morel considered the Belgian takeover of the Congo only "a partial victory." He knew that the system Leopold had set up would not be quickly dismantled; it was too profitable. The same men who had been district commissioners and station chiefs for Leopold would now simply get their paychecks from a different source. The Force Publique didn't even bother to change its name. The new Belgian minister of colonies was a former official of a company that had used thousands of forced laborers to build railways in the eastern Congo. The head of the Belgian Senate committee that approved the new colonial budget—which increased "taxes in kind" on Africans, Morel pointed out—was a shareholder in the notorious rubber concession company, A.B.I.R. As long as there was big money to be made from rubber, white men, with the help of the gun and the chicotte, would force black men to gather it. Coached by Morel, Conan Doyle wrote, in one of many letters to the editor he sent to various British newspapers, "So long as in any report of Congo reforms, such a sentence occurs as 'Adult natives will be compelled to work,' there can be no true reform whatever."

  Morel now concentrated on trying to make the Foreign Office demand that the Belgian government eliminate the hated Leopoldian "System" of forced labor and confiscation of the products of the land. The final picture in the Congo Reform Association slide show was of a British warship—which Morel urged be sent to Boma to block the Congo River. Earl Grey, the foreign secretary, refused, limiting his pressure on Belgium to withholding British recognition of the Belgian Congo. Morel threw himself into his organizing with more intensity than ever, turning out another book and an undiminished stream of pamphlets, articles, and issues of the Congo Reform Association's magazine. He packed the Royal Albert Hall to the highest balconies with a huge Congo protest meeting, endorsed by 20 bishops and 140 members of Parliament.

  Change seemed to be on its way in the Congo. The new Belgian king, Albert I, who had actually visited the territory just before taking the throne and seen people without hands, let it be known that he thought forced labor a scandal and lobbied for major reforms. (He would lose his youthful idealism later in life, unfortunately.) Morel was delighted, but such news made it hard to keep his followers fired up. By 1910, the American Congo Reform Association had faded away. "Americans..." Morel wrote to one of his hundreds of correspondents, "have not got very much staying-power."

  Morel tried valiantly to keep his followers focused on the issue of land ownership, so much more important but so much less dramatic than Leopold's personal villainy had been. He had long believed that "the root of the evil [will remain] untouched ... till the native of the Congo becomes once more owner of his land and of the produce which it yields."

  Although Morel never intended it to be, his vocal insistence on African land rights was taken by many people, particularly in the Foreign Office, as implicitly threatening not just to Belgian but to British practice in Africa. "The Native question is not so simple as he thinks," the foreign secretary wrote to Lord Cromer, a Morel supporter. "We do not, in our own Colonies, say that all the land and produce of the soil belongs to the Natives." In believing that Congo land did belong to the Africans, Morel was inherently more radical than almost all of those he worked with. Once again, Morel the crusader for justice was in unspoken tension with Morel the British patriot, whose newest celebrity ally, Conan Doyle, had once been president of the Boys' Empire League. In Morel's writing of this period, we can begin to see signs of how his involvement with the Congo had changed and deepened him. In 1909, decades ahead of his time and in stark contrast to the self-congratulatory mood around him, he wrote a trenchant warning of the "far-reaching consequences over the wider destiny, not only of South Africa, but of all Negro Africa" that would flow from the fact that Britain had set up the new, independent Union of South Africa with an all-white legislature.

  All did not look bleak to Morel, however. In the fall of 1909, the Belgian colonial minister announced major reforms, to be phased in over three years. Morel strongly protested that the transition period was too long. But over this time letters from his missionary correspondents turned hopeful. Similarly encouraging news came from inspection tours by British consuls. Reports of atrocities against rubber workers slowed to a trickle. In 1912, Alice and John Harris—now running the newly merged Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society—returned from a trip to the Congo and reported "immense improvement."

  Morel was locked in a double race against time: against the inevitable British recognition of the Congo as a Belgian colony, which finally came in 1913, and against the waning fervor of his supporters. Even Casement felt that "the break-up of the pirate's stronghold [was] nearly accomplished" and urged Morel to declare the campaign over. Despite some doubts voiced in his private correspondence, Morel decided to publicly claim victory. "I do not wish to paint the present in roseate hues. The wounds of the Congo will take generations to heal. But ... the atrocities have disappeared.... The revenues are no longer supplied by forced or slave labour. The rubber tax has gone. The native is free to gather the produce of his soil.... A responsible Government has replaced an irresponsible despotism." The one major goal not achieved, he acknowledged, was African ownership of land.

  On June 16, 1913, the Congo Reform Association held its final meeting, at the Westminster Palace Hotel in London. Many of the principal British supporters of the cause were together for the last time: John and Alice Harris, the Archbishop of Canterbury, explorers, missionaries, editors, M.P.s. Sir Roger Casement, William Cadbury, John Holt, Emile Vandervelde, Pierre Mille, and the writer John Galsworthy sent letters or telegrams of support that were read aloud. As the organization he founded, which had roiled the political waters of several countries for nearly a decade, officially went out of business, E. D. Morel was only thirty-nine years old.

  A series of distinguished speakers praised him. Morel seldom liked sharing too much o
f the limelight, but when he replied on this occasion, he gave the greatest credit to someone else: "While I was listening to all that was being said, I had a vision. The vision of a small steamer ploughing its way up the Congo just ten years ago this month, and on its decks a man that some of you know; a man of great heart ... Roger Casement." The meeting marked the end of the first major international human rights movement of the twentieth century. "We have struck a blow for human justice," Morel told the assembled dignitaries, "that cannot and will not pass away." It would take another generation to judge whether this was true.

  18. VICTORY?

  BOTH IN Africa and Europe, Leopold's death had promised to mark the end of an era. Many Belgians felt relieved; at last they would be rid of the multiple embarrassments of his youthful mistress, his unseemly quarrels with his daughters, and the sheer nakedness of his greed. But it was soon clear that Leopold's ghost would not vanish so easily. The king who had died while in possession of one of Europe's largest fortunes had tried to take it with him. After a fashion, he had succeeded.

  Not long before his death, it turned out, Leopold had surreptitiously ordered the establishment of a foundation, based in Germany, to which he transferred some twenty-five million francs' worth of paintings, silverware, crystal, jewelry, furniture and the like, plus another twenty million francs in securities. Some of the foundation's income was to be reinvested, its charter said, and the remainder was to be spent—"according to the directions left by the Founder"—on the grand, showy projects he loved: palaces, monuments, and public buildings. He was afraid that future small-minded Belgian governments would not spend money in such ways, and he was also trying, as always, to keep his wealth from going to Louise, Stephanie, and Clementine. "The king has but two dreams," a former Cabinet minister reportedly said during Leopold's last years; "to die a billionaire, and to disinherit his daughters."