'The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating down the door'
- W.B. Yeats
Sir Roger Casement CMG, the last of the 1916 conspirators to be executed, hung for treason in London, on this day, 1916.
Casement is an exceptionally interesting character, even though he spent many years in service of the British Empire, he spent his final few as a pioneering, committed, humanitarian and anti-imperialist.
His travels and experiences were the inspiration for Arthur Conan-Doyle's 'The Lost World' and Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' (whom he met in Congo in 1890).
He was an unlikely Irish nationalist. Sir Roger was of anglo-Irish descent and grew up in Antrim in a staunch Protestant and unionist family. He was a clerk in the British Colonial service and later a Consul in the British Foreign Office. He was a committed servant of King and empire.
While a Consul he was sent to investigate human rights abuses in the Congo. What he found was systematic slavery employed by Belgian King Leopold and upheld by torture and murder. He also found himself....
'Up in those lonely Congo forests, I found myself, the incorrigible Irishman!'
His experiences made him an internationally famous campaigning humanitarian, a Mary Robinson of his day, and a committed anti-imperialist fighting against the abuses of "an infamous, shameful, system' in Africa, Brazil, and Peru.
He reviled how slavery and oppression in service of trade could wipe whole cultures from history. He noted what had occurred in Congo, in terms of cultural imperialism, was also happening in Ireland. He said the difference was, '..in 100 years Africa will be Africa, but Ireland will not continue to be Ireland....'.
In 1914 Casement sailed to Germany, now at war with Britain, to seek arms for an Irish rebellion.
In April 1916 he was captured at Banna Strand after landing there from a German submarine, the 20,000 rifles and 10 machine guns he had organised from the Germans were intercepted and were scuttled in Cork harbour. Casement was captured and brought to Britain after the Kerry brigade IRA didn't act to free him.
He stood trial for treason under a piece of legislation from the 14th century, in which the trial hinged on the placement of a comma in the original document, which would define whether treason could technically be committed against the King in a territory outside of Britain.
He was sentenced to death on that piece of syntax, dismissed as a smudge, inspiring the epigram, 'Hanged on a comma'.
His speech in the Old Bailey was called 'the greatest of all' by former UK Chancellor Norman Lamont. In it, he argued that he was an Irishman, and thus his loyalty (or treason) could only be judged by the Irish people rather than an English court. He called out the paradox of being asked to fight in Europe for the Irish right of self-government, while it was considered somehow treasonous or unnatural to fight for it at home.
"Where all your rights become only an accumulated wrong; where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to garner the fruits of their own labours—and even while they beg, to see things inexorably withdrawn from them — then surely it is a braver, a saner and a truer thing, to be a rebel in act and deed against such circumstances as these.."
His appeals failed. A strong campaign was raised from powerful friends in the British aristocracy to pardon him from execution, but his diaries (The Black Diaries) were used against him in a smear campaign. His diaries illustrated that he was gay, at the time illegal, and sufficient to quell the campaign for his pardon.
Casement remains perhaps the most intriguing conspirator of 1916. He was a pioneering humanitarian and advocate for the rights of human beings. In the horrors of colonial Africa, he recognised the oppression of Ireland, it was his awakening.
In the construction of any nation, we look toward people who define ourselves or our outlook. In Casement, we have someone who believed in the rights of all people regardless of culture, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. We have someone who actively campaigned for social and economic justice - in doing so, he didn't stand for the powerful but for those who weren't in a position to stand up for themselves.
In defining what it means to be Irish in a contemporary manner, Casement is someone who should be deep in our national consciousness. Someone we should consider when we decide how and why we should help those most in need of rights or refuge.
Sir Roger Casement CMG - hung from the neck in Pentonville Prison, London, August 3, 1916. Executed in the attempt to secure rights for all peoples of Ireland, and rightfully remembered on this day.
"If it be treason to fight against such an unnatural fate as this, then I am proud to be a rebel, and shall cling to my “rebellion” with the last drop of my blood."
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