ABSTRACT
In attempting to explain Roger Casement’s commitment to humanitarian campaigns against colonial misrule, biographers and historians have pointed to his underlying concern for his native Ireland. Bernard Porter, for instance, writes that Casement brought to the Congo reform crusade “that hostility to ‘landlordism’ which was the inevitable concomitant of Irish nationalism, and which tied in well both with traditional English Radical prejudices and with Morelism”.1 There is strong evidence to support the claim that Casement’s Irish nationalism prefi gured his denunciation of the Congo, since Casement himself also made it. After his investigative tour of its upper-river territories, he described Leopold’s colony in a letter to the Irish historian Alice Stopford Green as “a tyranny beyond conception save only, perhaps, to an Irish mind alive to the horrors once daily enacted in this land [Ireland]”.2 He pursues the autobiographical reasons for his being “alive to the horrors” in another letter to Green:
At the Boer War time[.] I had been away from Ireland for years-out of touch with everything native to my heart & mind-trying hard to do my duty & every fresh act of duty made me appreciably nearer to the ideal of the Englishman. I had accepted Imperialism-British rule was to be extended at all costs . . . altho’ at heart, underneath all & unsuspected almost by myself I had remained an Irishman . . . [F]inally when in those lonely Congo forests where I found Leopold-I found also myself-the incorrigible Irishman . . . I knew that the F[oreign] O[ffi ce] wouldn’t understand the thing . . . for I realized then that I was looking at this tragedy with the eyes of another race-of a people once hunted themselves . . . And I said to myself, then, far up the Lulanga river, that I would do my part as an Irishman, wherever it might lead me personally.3
