He Could Tell You Things

Jeffrey Dudgeon

Roger Casement: Imperialist,Rebel, Revolutionary, by Seamas O’Siochain, Lilliput Press, 656 pp, ISBN: 978-1843510215

Seamas O’Siochain has become one of the select band to have written two or more books on Roger Casement. He joins Roger Sawyer, the doyen of Casement authors, and Angus Mitchell in that pantheon,along with Herbert Mackey, the 1950s sanctifier. He, however, was more of a pamphleteer.

Such frequency illustrates the abiding fascination that Casement excites. Perhaps it is that he covers so much ground Africa, the First World War, the Amazon and the Easter Rising, not to mention slavery, treason, and homosexuality. That range of subjects has made him the most written about Irish revolutionary.

Or perhaps it is because he was volatile,contrary, someone who changed his opinion Seamus held contradictory views all those traits which make people memorable and dynamic and are often the mark of great men and women.

Overview

Drawing on a trove of official and personal sources, O Siochain shows how what began as an ordinary career in the British consular service became a singular crusade, on three continents, against exploitation, cruelty and injustice.

Roger Casement served in the Niger, Mozambique, Angola, and, most momentously, in the Congo, where he witnessed the appalling crimes under Belgian colonial rule and was a key player in the humanitarian campaign that exposed them, forcing King Leopold II to surrender his personal control of the colony.

Casement later levelled the same moral compass at the depressingly similar exploitation of natives of the Putumayo, where, as in the Congo, outsiders’ hunger for rubber created misery for an indigenous people. His growing interest and involvement in Irish affairs, culminating in his attempts to aid the 1916 Rising and his execution for treason, is narrated here.

In an epilogue, O Siochain examines the question that has dominated Casement’s afterlife: whether his black diaries, detailing homosexual adventures, were forged by the British in order to discredit him at his trial for treason and effect a judicial assassination.