Newspaper Clippings re Roger Casement

Page 1

Memories of Roger Casement by BULMER HOBSON MY friendship with Roger Casement began in the summer of 1904, when we were both guests in a charming old house at Cushendun in the Glens of Antrim. He had recently become famous for his exposure of the brutal treatment of the native populations in the Congo. When various European Powers parcelled out of exploitation the vast, rich and defenceless lands of Africa, the Congo fell to the lot of Belgium. In many areas the defenceless native people of the Congo — men, women and even quite small children — were ordered to bring in, every month, a specified quota of raw rubber from the forest. The quota was so heavy that they had no time to do anything else. If they brought the full quota, they were paid with trinkets and trifles, when they were paid at all. If they did not bring in the full quota they were brutally flogged, tortured and often muttlated; persistent defaulters would have a hand or a foot cut off. If they ran away they were hunted with dogs and guns, and when caught were frequently murdered. This taught the native peoples of the Congo they could not trifle with white civilisation. Presently news of these events began to leak out and an agitation blew up in England led by public spirited men like E. D. Morell, and they raised such a row that the Government was driven to take action. The British Government was to a degree implicated because they had helped Belgium to acquire the Congo. British Consul CASEMENT was a Consul in the employment of what was then the United Kingdom of Gt. Britain and Ireland, and the Foreign Office asked him to investigate and report on conditions in the Congo. He had been in Africa for many years and had explored large areas then almost unknown to Europeans. He was a very unusual explorer. He was not prospecting for minerals or oil or interested in exploiting either the land or the people. He did not want to found colonies or annex territories to enlarge the Empire. He just wanted to see those vast unknown lands and to study the ways of life of strange and unknown peoples. He did not organise expeditions with equipment that needed long trains of bearers and armed guards. Instead he went off alone, often for months at a time, his only companions two builders and his only weapon a walking stick. A fearless man HE was quite fearless and when he wandered among some remote people, who perhaps had never seen a white man, he did not need arms. His commanding appearance, his quiet self-confidence and his complete and unaffected friendliness were protection enough. When Casement was asked to report on conditions in the Congo, he could have gone officially as a British Consul and the Belgian authorities would have tided things up and shown him room and he would have seen nothing that they did not wish him to see. Instead he went in alone and unannounced and saw everything before the Belgian authorities realised what was happening. The evidence he collected of brutal ill treatmen…