ABSTRACT
On 20 July 1903, Roger Casement met Rev. A.E. Scrivener at the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS) station mission in Bolobo. At Scrivener’s suggestion, the two walked to Mpoko, a settlement 20 miles to the east. There, with a member of the mission named Nsala serving as translator, Scrivener introduced Casement to hundreds of Basengele (Sengele) refugees from villages on the shores of Lake Leopold II (Mai Ndombe), an area that formed part of the Belgian sovereign’s private Domaine de la Couronne. Scrivener had fi rst encountered these people in September 1902, but they had been in asylum since 1899. Casement conducted interviews with some of the exiled Basengele, including three spokespersons from Bongongo named Moyo, Wankaki, and Nkwabali. The consul learned “of the most atrocious deeds, and of murders of such a wholesale character that it was diffi cult to believe them”, perpetrated on the Basengele at the orders of a Belgian colonialist named “Malu Malu” (Commandant Massard).1 Casement transcribed his interviews and then proceeded on his tour. With a handful of the Basengele as his guides, meanwhile, Scrivener marched into the Domaine de la Couronne. After weeks of walking, he reached a colonial station where he confi rmed the stories of Massard’s brutality (Massard had since been replaced by a more sympathetic offi cial named Dooms). He heard of rubber workers being lined up in a column and shot through by a single bullet and found piles of bones and decapitated skeletons surrounding the station. Scrivener recorded his experiences in a journal, extracts of which were reproduced in a number of key Congo reformist texts, including Casement’s Congo Report.2
