A century after Roger Casement’s epic voyage to South America, his life is the subject of a major new novel by the acclaimed Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa
A HUNDRED YEARS ago this week the Irish-born British diplomat Roger Casement arrived in the Peruvian Amazon on a mission to investigate allegations of atrocities being committed by local rubber traders. His subsequent report on the genocide of local Indians, carried out by suppliers of rubber to such household names as Dunlop and Ford, secures his place in the pantheon of human-rights pioneers, while what he saw and heard deep in the South American rainforest was crucial in turning him from a servant of the British empire into an Irish revolutionary.
Such was his international reputation after his investigations in Peru, and previously in Congo, that as the British prepared to hang him for his role in the 1916 Rising they felt the need to undermine his moral standing by circulating among his establishment supporters the notorious “Black Diaries”, Casement’s alleged secret record of his promiscuous sexual activities with teenage boys.
The diaries have cast a shadow over his legacy in Ireland ever since, with the debate over their veracity still a source of fierce disagreement. Meanwhile, in Congo and the Amazon, few today remember the lanky Irishman who had a profound impact on the history of both regions.
Now, a century after that voyage, his life is the subject of a major new novel by the acclaimed Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. Titled El Sueño del Celta("The Dream of the Celt"), it will be published in Spanish this November, after four years of research that included trips to Congo and Banna Strand, in Co Kerry, where Casement was arrested in 1916.
“He is a fascinating historical character, and not just for a novelist but for a historian, for a social scientist, for anyone who is interested in this transition from the positive view of colonialism to the radical questioning of it that came later,” Vargas Llosa says, speaking on the phone from his home in Madrid.
“He was a pioneer. He was one of the first Europeans who understood really what colonialism meant for Africa, for the Third World. He was one of the first Europeans involved in attacking and destroying the mythology built around the idea of colonialism as an instrument of civilisation.”
As one of Latin America’s most widely read novelists, Vargas Llosa is set to reintroduce Casement to an audience with no collective memory of his involvement in a crucial moment in the region’s history, says Laura Izarra, WB Yeats professor of Irish studies at the University of São Paulo, in Brazil.
As part of efforts to “to recover his historical memory and his importance to the history of the Atlantic World”, Izarra, along with Casement expert Angus Mitchell, of the University of Limerick, last month organised a symposium to mark the centenary of his Amazon investigation, in the Brazilian city of Manaus.
In 1910 the river port was the centre of the Amazon’s rubber boom, fuelled by the insatiable appetite for the commodity in Europe and North America after the invention of the pneumatic wheel, bicycles and motor cars. The only source of this newly vital input for industrialised economies was the wild rubber trees in the tropical forests of South America and Central Africa. Casement passed through Manaus on his way to the Putumayo region to investigate claims that a Peruvian company listed on the London stock exchange was carrying out atrocities against employees involved in collecting wild rubber.
Even after his experiences in Congo, what he discovered shocked him. The overseers of the Peruvian Amazon Company forced whole indigenous communities to gather the precious commodity from trees in the forest. Those who failed to meet their quota were whipped. Deserters were hunted down and beheaded. There were massacres and starvation. Casement estimated that three-quarters of Putumayo’s 40,000 indigenous peoples had been wiped out to extract 4,000 tonnes of rubber in what was nothing less than a revival of slavery. “The system is one of sheer piracy and terrorisation – and if you lift the lash, you stopped the supply of rubber,” he wrote.
For Casement the trip was a turning point. “The Fordist production line was seen as this great new departure in terms of industrialisation and efficiency. Yet it had desperate repercussions in other parts of the world which weren’t quite as shiny and clean as we would like to think,” says Mitchell, who has edited two volumes of Casement’s Amazon writings.
“Through the Putumayo trip he really moves into another level of questioning the world system of that time. His own vision of empire had been seriously compromised by what he had seen in the Congo. But in the Putumayo he really sees a systemic problem that he feels cannot continue without immense and deep destruction of both environment and people.”
The outcry when Casement’s report on Putumayo was published, in 1912, was crucially different from that which followed his Congo findings, which implicated the Belgian monarch, Leopold II. This time the guilty party was a UK-listed company with respected society figures on its board of directors. These British directors simply tried to duck responsibility by claiming they had been kept in the dark by its main shareholder, a Peruvian rubber baron named Julio César Arana, about how the company operated in the jungle.
But Casement astutely noted that “none of them should have been ignorant” and that they were too willing to take the word of the man paying their handsome directorship fees. It is the beginning of the battle to impose corporate responsibility, which still continues today.
Casement would grow disillusioned with the efforts to bring those responsible for the atrocities in Peru to account for their actions – and, in the case of the British directors, inaction. Despite the outcry, Arana continued to supply rubber to British factories, and efforts to pass new laws making British directors responsible for the crimes of their agents around the world were forgotten with the outbreak of the first World War, from which Arana profited handsomely.
In the end, what brought an end to the horror in Putumayo and saved the remaining Indians from complete annihilation was the collapse of the Amazon’s rubber economy. Investment dried up after the publication of Casement’s report, going instead to the new rubber plantations in Asia, which the British had planted with trees grown from seeds smuggled out of Brazil.
Despite the scandal caused by Casement’s report and the crisis it provoked in the City of London, something comparable still occurs in our modern economy. “You can see a similar kind of model today to the one Casement exposed,” says Mitchell.
“Coltan [a metallic mineral] in the Congo is the obvious one, which has led to the most desperate wars in central Africa in the last decade or so. No one is really aware that every time they buy a new piece of technology it is more likely than not that in there is some component made from coltan – and that has come at a huge cost.”
For the tribes in Putumayo that survived Arana, the global economy’s thirst for commodities brought renewed problems in the 1960s, when western companies came looking for crude oil. Their lands were appropriated and polluted, a fate still suffered by indigenous peoples across the globe.
“Casement’s reports are a forgotten history lesson. A century later, British companies are still abusing indigenous people’s rights, and British-based investors are still supporting other companies doing the same,” says Stephen Corry, director of Survival International, the campaign group that fights for indigenous people’s rights.
Today the Indians of Putumayo face a new threat. The region, now part of Colombia, is engulfed in that country’s interminable wars, with indigenous communities caught between guerrillas, paramilitaries and the army, and often targeted by all sides.
“Cocaine is funding wars, and these wars are killing Indians and pushing Indians aside. It would be nice to make people aware in rich societies that, to get this white powder, many things happen and many people are hurt and have their rights violated,” says Juan Alvaro Echeverri, an anthropologist at the University of Colombia, who has recorded tribes’ attempts to come to terms with the Putumayo genocide.
Such ongoing abuses make Casement's legacy as a campaigner for human rights and for an end to the evils of colonialism as relevant today as a century ago – unlike the question of whether the "Black Diaries" were forged by British intelligence, says Jordan Goodman, author of The Devil and Mr Casement,a history of his involvement in the Amazon.
“The ‘Black Diaries’ question is like a pebble on a huge beach compared to the wider human-rights question. Going after this pebble is a typical ploy to obscure the bigger picture and is what has been happening with Roger Casement since he died,” says Goodman. “You see him struggling to find a language that describes the horror of what he found in the Amazon. Eventually he came up with a term with which we are now sadly all too familiar: ‘crimes against humanity’.”
Casement was no saint, just a hero who was human
Despite the doubts of historians such as Angus Mitchell and Jordan Goodman about the authenticity of the "Black Diaries", the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosasays researching his new novel based on Casement's life leaves him inclined to believe that they are the work of Casement's own hand but do not recount actual experiences.
“My impression about the big controversy is that probably Roger Casement wrote the ‘Black Diaries’. But that does not mean that he really lived everything that he told in his diaries. My impression is at least a good part, if not all, of what he told in his diaries he did not experience. It was impossible. There was such exaggeration, particularly in the sexual dimension.
“You must remember the kind of times in which he lived. Victorian morals were alive, so it was absolutely impossible that he did everything that he wrote in his diaries. Probably he wrote it because it was the only way in which he could believe in these kinds of experiences.
“It was a very symbolic way of having the liberty to do things that in the real world it was impossible for a British diplomat to do.
“I think [in Ireland] Casement is not still totally accepted or understood as he was. I think he does not fit into the stereotypical image of a hero. “He was not perfect or a saint. He is a hero who is a human being.”
