KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST

King Leopold's Ghost



King Leopold's Ghost

Casement was initially a willing participant in the colonial project. When he got a job with the Elder Dempster shipping line in Liverpool he did not like the idea of being an office-bound clerk. He persuaded the company to let him go as a purser on one of its ships to Boma in the Congo and once there at the age of 20 joined the unpaid volunteers who were working for Henry Morton Stanley, the man who achieved fame by “finding” David Livingstone.

 Stanley's project of opening up the unmapped regions of Central Africa had attracted  King Leopold II of Belgium. However, the King could not arouse the interest of his subjects in colonial ventures and decided to look for financial support outside Belgium. An International African Association was set up with Leopold as its chairman. He stated that his sole ambition was 'to open up to civilisation the only area of our globe to which it has not yet penetrated'.

 Leopold was tall and striking in appearance but inspired neither the affection nor respect of his own people nor the friendship of his royal cousins. Leopold was first cousin to Queen Victoria, but her son, the future Edward VII , detested him. He founded the Congo Free State, which covered the entire area of the present day Democratic Republic of the Congo, which he ran as a personal fiefdom and business venture.

 After the break-up of Stanley's team, Casement was recruited to the British diplomatic service and served as consul in a number of African locations.

 Poultney Bigelow was one of the best-known American foreign correspondents of the time. He saw Casement as the sort of man depicted in Jules Verne's novels, “the man who is everlastingly exploring and extricating himself from every imaginable difficulty by superhuman tact, wit and strength.”

 In 1890 at Matadi, Casement met young Captain Korzeniowski, who found Casement “most intelligent and sympathetic”.   The captain recalled that Casement had “a touch of the conquistador in  him too; for I've seen him start into an unspeakable wilderness swinging a crook-handled stick for all weapons, with two bulldogs Paddy (white) and Biddy, (brindle) at his heels, and a Loanda boy carrying a bundle for all company. A few months afterwards it so happened that I saw him come out again, a little leaner, a little browner, with his stick, dogs and Loanda boy, and quietly serene as though he had been for a stroll in a park.”

 The Captain later became Joseph Conrad and transmuted his Upper Congo experience into Heart of Darkness.

 Casement was intelligent and sensitive enough to appreciate that there was an underbelly to  the colonial enterprise. He was a published poet. One of his poems, in the style of Thomas Davis, writer of the Irish rebel song 'A Nation Once Again', included the lines:

 'Prate not of England's valour in the field

Her heart is sick with lust.

The gold she wins is red with blood, nor can it shield

Her name from tainted league ...