Roger Casement was an Irish diplomat, humanitarian, and revolutionary whose early career was defined by his tireless efforts to expose human rights abuses in Africa and South America. As a British consul in the Congo Free State, he played a crucial role in revealing the brutal exploitation of indigenous peoples under King Leopold II’s rule, leading to international condemnation of Belgian colonial practices.
Later, he uncovered similar atrocities in the Putumayo region of the Amazon. However, his deepening commitment to Irish nationalism saw him shift from imperial service to revolutionary activism. Embracing the cause of Irish independence, he sought German support for the 1916 Easter Rising, a move that led to his arrest, trial, and execution for treason.
In the eyes of many, he became "the wearer of the green" - a martyr for Ireland, immortalized in history and folklore.
Roger Casement was born in Dublin in 1864 and spent his early years in a cottage in Sandycove, a seaside area south of the city. His father, Captain Roger Casement, came from a Belfast family that had once been involved in the shipping business but had fallen on hard times. He had served in the British Army and fought in Afghanistan in the 1840s. He later attempted to join the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 but arrived too late to take part. He was part of the Protestant Ascendency, as was Roger’s mother, Anne Jephson (or Jepson), who came from an Anglican Dublin family.
The Protestant Ascendancy (also known as the Ascendancy) was the sociopolitical and economic domination of Ireland between the 17th and early 20th centuries by a small Anglican ruling class whose members consisted of landowners, barristers, politicians, clergymen, military officers, and other prominent professions. They were either members of the Church of Ireland or the Church of England and wielded disproportionate social, cultural, and political influence in Ireland. The Ascendancy existed as a result of British rule in Ireland, as the Crown awarded land confiscated from the Irish Catholic aristocracy to Protestant settlers from Great Britain. This originated during the Tudor conquest of Ireland in the 16th century.
There were repressive Penal Laws against the Catholics passed by the Irish Parliament. Among many other repressive laws, members of the Ascendancy were forbidden to marry Catholics or convert to Catholicism. The Penal Laws were largely repealed by 1793, but the seeds of hatred had long been sown.
Over the centuries, the British inflicted unspeakable cruelty on the Irish, including the reputed use of portable gallows during the 1798 Irish Rebellion. Many Irish in the Rebellion against Britain were Protestants, including the famous James Napper Tandy.
Roger’s family moved to Wales during his early childhood, which was marked by financial struggles, and when he was nine, his mother died. His father moved the family back to Ireland, settling in County Antrim near relatives. However, just a few years later, his father also passed away, leaving Roger and his siblings to rely on the support of their extended family.
He attended school in Ballymena but left at 16 to start working in Liverpool, England. He obtained a job as a clerk with Elder Dempster, a shipping company.
Roger started working in the Congo in 1884 for an organization linked to the famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley. In 1874, Stanley embarked on an expedition with three other Europeans and over 200 African porters, circumnavigating Lakes Tanganyika and Victoria and confirming that Tanganyika was not the Nile’s source. He then descended the Lualaba River, determining that the Congo, which flowed west and southwest to the Atlantic, was also not the Nile’s origin. Stanley followed the Congo’s 3,000-mile course, losing all three European companions and half his porters to rapids, starvation, disease, attacks, and desertion. The expedition, significantly reduced, reached Boma near the river’s mouth in August 1877.
Returning to England, Stanley sought backing for a plan to bypass the Congo’s rapids with a wagon road and later a railway but found no support. In 1878, after publishing Through the Dark Continent, he attended a Brussels meeting hosted by King Leopold II, where the Committee for Studies of the Upper Congo, was formed to finance an expedition. Stanley was hired to establish trading posts and acquire as much land as possible along the Congo.
Recruiting former porters in Zanzibar, Stanley oversaw the transport of supplies by steamer to the Congo’s mouth, where a flotilla of boats awaited. Over five years, he secured treaties from over 450 tribal chiefs, who, unaware of the implications, ceded land and labour to Leopold in exchange for trinkets.
At the Berlin Conference (1884-1885), European powers and the US divided Africa without African representation. Leopold was granted sole rule over the lands Stanley acquired, forming the Congo Free State. He appointed a Governor General based in Boma at the mouth of the Congo and divided the Free State into 14 districts, each governed by his appointed commissioners.
The Berlin Conference was later discovered to be a cover for Leopold, who had evil intentions.
Roger’s job involved surveying the land to improve transportation and overseeing the construction of a railway to get around the dangerous lower part of the Congo River, which contained rapids. While working there, he also learned some African languages.
In 1890, Roger met the writer Joseph Conrad, who had come to the Congo to work as a ship’s captain. At first, both men believed that European colonisation would bring progress to Africa and end practices like slavery. However, they soon realized how wrong they were. Conrad later wrote Heart of Darkness (1899), a novel criticizing the brutal realities of colonialism.
Roger later joined the British Colonial Service and was stationed in British West Africa. In 1901, he transferred to the Foreign Office and became the British consul in the eastern French Congo. By 1903, he was working in the Congo Free State, which was personally controlled by King Leopold II of the Belgians, pictured below.
Leopold had turned the region into a massive, forced labour camp, using a private army called the Force Publique (FP) to terrorize local people into harvesting rubber. The FP consisted of European officers in command of African soldiers that consisted of slaves numbered in the thousands, captured from Arab slave traders. FP’s members amputated the hands and feet of the indigenous population, including women and children, for trophies and as punishment for not fulfilling their rubber collection quota. Also, human hands were required to be provided to the authorities for each bullet fired by the FP to prove that a person had been killed, and the bullet had not been wasted. When no one had been killed, hands were cut off living Africans as a method of deception. The FP whipped the indigenous population mercilessly using “chicottes,” which were whips made from hippopotamus hide.
In exchange for the rubber, Belgium sent weapons and supplies—mainly used to keep the population under control.
Roger spent weeks traveling through the Congo, gathering firsthand accounts from workers, overseers, and soldiers. His report, published in 1904, detailed the horrific abuses, including slavery, mutilation, and torture. The report sparked international outrage. Many businesses with interests in the Congo denied the claims, but human rights activists, including Edmund Morel, used Roger’s findings to push for reform.
Morel, a French-born British shipping clerk who would later become an anti-slavery campaigner and politician, realised that while the ships from Boma in the Congo carried ivory and rubber sap, those sailing to Boma contained whips, manacles, gunpowder, and shot, and the like. Morel came to realise that the claimed altruistic reasons for the existence of Leopold’s domain were lies. The Free State was a slave labour state and nothing more.
The British Parliament pressured other world powers to revisit the 1885 Berlin Agreement, which had given Leopold control over the Congo. In Belgium, public pressure mounted against the king’s rule. By 1905, an independent investigation confirmed Roger’s findings. Finally, in 1908, the Belgian government took control of the territory, ending Leopold’s personal rule and turning it into the Belgian Congo. Leopold and his underlings had been responsible for the deaths of ten million Africans.
Roger was knighted in 1911 for that outstanding achievement and for similarly highlighting the abuses of indigenous rubber plantation workers in Peru while serving as British Consul General in Rio de Janeiro. He was an eminent human rights activist.
At that time, Ireland was governed by Britain, and Roger was an advocate of “Home Rule”, which would be an Irish Parliament based in Catholic-majority Dublin. That was opposed by the mainly Protestant population in the county of Ulster in the North of Ireland. To prepare against any Catholic insurrection from the predominantly Catholic South of Ireland, the Protestant Ulster Unionists arranged in 1914, shortly before the outbreak of World War I, for the importation into Ireland of 25,000 rifles and three million rounds of ammunition from Germany. The plan was overseen by the anti-Home Rule Irish barrister and politician Sir Edward Carson (Carson), assisted by his close ally, British barrister and politician Frederick Smith (Smith). Both would soon become successive Attorneys General of the UK.
To counteract that, Roger, who had resigned from the consular service in 1913, travelled to Germany in 1916, where he tried unsuccessfully to persuade Irish prisoners of war serving in the British Army to join an Irish Home Rule insurrection. He did, however, arrange for the importation of 20,000 rifles and ten machine guns into Ireland. The British Navy intercepted the firearms, and Roger was subsequently arrested. Although the Irish-Catholic leaders of the “Irish Easter Rebellion” were tried by court-martial and summarily executed, Roger was returned to England to face trial in an effort to justify those summary executions. He was imprisoned in the Tower of London and tried for high treason in the Old Bailey before three senior judges and a carefully selected jury. He was charged with treason, for attempting to import arms into Ireland, and attempting to recruit Irish prisoners of war in Germany, which would normally be outside British jurisdiction.
In the greatest travesty of justice imaginable, the person leading the prosecution was the Attorney General, Frederick Smith, who himself had been involved in the similar importation of German arms into Ulster with his predecessor as Attorney General, Edward Carson. That is referred to legally as a “conflict of interest,” and Smith should have disqualified himself, and Carson should have advised the court of that conflict. Neither occurred, and Smith was determined to have Roger hanged.
Roger was charged under the Treason Act 1351, written in Norman French without commas. The location of a comma was needed to interpret the statute as to whether Roger’s conduct in Germany was triable in England. Smith convinced the judges that the interpretation was against Roger, while today’s consensus is that it was not. He was sentenced to death by hanging and made the remark “A comma is hanging me.”
Roger's appeal to the Court of Criminal Appeal failed, and Smith blocked his subsequent attempt to appeal to the House of Lords, which was the final court of appeal.
Frederick Smith and Edward Carson would be remembered as distinguished barristers. It was Carson who had cross-examined Oscar Wilde in his suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, which led to Wilde's imprisonment.
George Bernard Shaw and others, including Arthur Conan Doyle and G K Chesterton, protested vehemently against the execution. However, Smith turned public sentiment against Roger before the hanging, by publishing Roger’s alleged Black Diaries, which described his supposed homosexual exploits in detail. That disclosure was a shocking breach of legal ethics by Smith.
Roger made a speech from the dock at the end of the trial before being sentenced. Smith walked out of the court before Roger began, displaying sentiment unbecoming to a barrister who was an officer of the court. Smith must have had a premonition of what was to follow, as part of the speech was directed at himself and Carson, among others:
It was not we, the Irish Volunteers, who broke the law, but a British party. The Government had permitted the Ulster Volunteers to be armed by Englishmen, to threaten not merely an English party in its hold on office, but to threaten that party through the lives and blood of Irishmen.
Roger was hanged at Pentonville Prison in London on August 3, 1916, having been stripped of his knighthood shortly before. He converted to Catholicism shortly before his death.
In 2016, on the centenary of Roger’s execution, a vigil was held outside Pentonville Prison by the Easter 1916 Centenary Committee to honour his memory.
As described in the following old Irish patriotic song, Roger was truly a Wearer of the Green.
