Biography/Declan Kiberd: 'It is easy to pelt a man who can't reply or who is gone," wrote Roger Casement during his last days in prison. "But remember no story is told till we've heard all of it."
Nobody has done more to fill out the details of that story than Angus Mitchell, an Oxbridge graduate in anthropology whose interest in Brazilian peoples led inexorably to a study of the man still called a saviour by one Amazonian tribe.
In the past six years, Mitchell has published The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement (1997) and Sir Roger Casement's Heart of Darkness (2003). This biography, though brief, draws valuably on all that research, presenting an original and vivid profile of a great but enigmatic man. For Casement had the sort of personality calculated to disrupt all the settled codes with which it came into contact, whether the codes were high imperial, Irish nationalist or, more recently, those favoured by academic historians.
The orphaned child of a mixed marriage, Casement early felt obliged, like so many Irish modernists, to invent himself - and this he did by wide and curious reading. The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper, instilled a respect for the folk ways of native peoples; and the poetry of James Clarence Mangan turned him towards the Irish past. During an early sojourn in Africa he shared a room with the writer Joseph Conrad, whose Heart of Darkness would expose just the sort of contradiction between imperial idealism and low plunder which would be the subject of Casement's own indictment of Belgian rule in the Congo. Another friend was Irish historian Alice Stopford Green, who argued that unless Africans were treated better, they would become homeless, unhappy refugees - an amazing prophecy of what has transpired in more recent years along the edges of Fortress Europe.
Discipline on the rubber plantations was maintained by amputating the hands of dissidents, a "reign of terror" which cried out for justice. The British authorities admired Casement for his documented allegations against the Belgian agents of King Leopold, but were less comfortable when he came to criticise their own colonial officials: yet Mitchell shows that, rather like Bernard Shaw and other radicals, Casement learned "how to use the system to investigate the system", deploying the arsenal of official statistics against the government itself. His training in Africa - gathering intelligence, securing and moving munitions, penning anonymous articles - proved the perfect apprenticeship for his eventual role as Irish rebel.
As early as 1907, Casement could spell out the connection to Stopford Green in a retrospect on the Boer War: "It gave me qualms at the end - the concentration camps bigger ones - and finally when up in those lonely Congo forests where I found Leopold - I also found myself, the incorrigible Irishman . . . I realised then that I was looking at this tragedy with the eyes of another race - of a people once hunted themselves . . ."
On return visits to Ireland, he became an ardent Gaelic Leaguer. When a Co Antrim landlord refused permission for a hurling match on his land, Casement himself cut the weeds of another field to facilitate the players. By 1905, he was questioning whether Irishmen should join the British army: "When the Irish had lost their freedom, they were used to destroy the freedom of others." He must have been well aware of the long-term implications of that statement for an imperial servant such as himself, yet he went to South America to run the British Consulate in Pará. There he wrote reports on those very issues which Mitchell reminds us are the concerns of today's aid agencies, "deforestation, tourism, food shortages and how to combat famine".
Back again in Ireland, he was incensed to discover that the RDS would not stock Stopford Green's nationalist history in its library and so he wrote a positive review in the Freeman's Journal. He castigated historians as "latter-day Pigottists" employed to misrepresent Ireland as "barbaric". (He would be amused to note that more recent professional historians have had as little time for him and his like as he had for them: the previous major biography of Casement, like the more recent monumental studies of Collins and de Valera, being the work of an intrepid journalist.)
A knighthood in 1911 led to fame, which he used to impress on world leaders the need to close down "the slave pits of the earth". A free Ireland would not only benefit the Irish people but would also benefit England, he said, enabling the Empire to update itself into a more democratic form as a "commonwealth". In that, too, his thinking was prophetic and it wouldn't be fanciful to connect such a progressive intellectual with the denizens of Bloomsbury, who also took a global view of human rights in the years before the first World War blew such hopes away. It's a matter of record that among those leading artists who called for clemency for Casement in 1916 would be Dora Carrington, Duncan Grant, Leonard Woolf and Lytton Strachey.
Perhaps an anthropologist is better fitted to write this story than a historian, for at the root of Casement's critique of imperial Europe was a cultural distinction made between the "savage" and the "civilised" man. Thinking of Cooper's Mohicans as he traversed the US in 1912 to raise support for Irish nationalists, he wrote "The savage is - the white man has. The one lives and moves to be; the other toils and dies to have". This is uncannily close to a famous formulation made by Karl Marx in his economic and social manuscripts: "The less you have the more you are - it is accumulation that robs you of being". And it is also an amazing anticipation of Erich Fromm's manifesto To Have or to Be.
Casement's view of politics was at bottom ethical. He couldn't help seeing the invasion of Belgium in 1914 as "a repayment" for the cruelty of Leopold's men. His knighthood merely gave added authority to his attacks on the dirty tricks wing of British propaganda, which he called "the far-extended baleful power of the lie".
It was inevitable that the spooks would have their revenge, yet even in his final chapter Casement disrupted all their codes. The British correctly saw him as a prime mover behind the 1916 Rising but left themselves open to a charge of inconsistency by affording him an open trial before a civil jury (a liberty not given to the other rebel leaders executed). The tactic was to turn Irish people against Casement: hence the praise heaped upon those Co Kerry people who (allegedly) turned him over to the authorities. For his part, Casement argued that his imperial service had been given not to England but to Ireland as part of the Empire, "since neither my example or appeal was addressed to Englishmen, can I rightfully be tried by them?"
He would have been gratified that in a much happier period of Anglo-Irish relations his bodily remains would be returned in the 1960s - but concerned, I suspect, that his diaries were not similarly repatriated. Clearly, the British establishment, whose agents claimed that every line therein was Casement's handiwork, still felt that it had a real stake in them. Elsewhere, Mitchell has indicated his own conviction that the British did indeed forge passages, a view that has no more to be said for it than you will hear from "the latter-day Pigottists". After all, if Casement's private life really had been as his detractors claimed, how was it that his Belgian and other enemies hadn't used such information to discredit a man whose work was so damaging to them?
With admirable restraint, Mitchell only raises the question of Casement's sexuality at the end of the book, on this occasion leaving open the matter of whether the diary entries were forged or not. His reasons for this are impeccable. The truth about the diaries remains conjectural. Mitchell wishes to establish what can be known with absolute certainty, that Casement was one of the inventors of those ideas of human rights for which today many enlightened activists are working in yet another noble but precarious stand in the face of the latest imperium.
Declan Kiberd's most recent book, Irish Classics, won the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism in 2002. He teaches at University College, Dublin
Casement By Angus Mitchell Haus Publishing, 186pp. £8.99