Roger Casement’s Heart of Darkness

In the spring of 1899, when Heart of Darkness was serialized in Blackwood’s Magazine, its author, Joseph Conrad, could scarcely have predicted that he had penned one of the most provocative and controversial literary works of the next century. For a hundred years now this short novel has been a window through which Europeans have glimpsed the scramble for Africa by their empire-forging ancestors. Behind Marlow’s river journey in search of Kurtz lie the great conflicts that seethed beneath the jingoism of Empire. The struggles between civilisation and savagery, nature and progress, cannibalism against culture, Christianity versus magic: all these opposites and others battle in the dense undergrowth of the narrative. Heart of Darkness was one of the earliest novels to attack concepts of Western progress and question dubious social Darwinist attitudes that were used to justify many brutal facets of Empire-building.

The debate over Heart of Darkness has grumbled on unabated ever since – to a point where it is now something of a cliché to mention it at all. The theme has attracted and sometimes obsessed the creative mind. Orson Welles adapted the story for radio. Film director Francis Ford Coppola made Apocalypse Now (1974), reinterpreting the weird nightmare to fit the psychedelic madness of American folly in Vietnam. Radical critics of Empire like Edward Saïd and the African writer Chinua Achebe have praised and lambasted the book respectively. A metaphysical dimension to Heart of Darkness makes it a hard book to pin down. The literary debate and the ‘Conrad controversy’ will doubtless continue for another century. Africa still lives in the shadow of horror and the significance of Heart of Darkness has matured with the vintage of the years.

But what worth has Conrad’s imagining of Heart of Darkness for the historian? Was there an historical Heart of Darkness? Can it now be identified in history? Certainly in recent years there has been an effort to try and configure the fiction with fact. A number of African adventurers have been singled out as possible prototypes for ‘the universal genius’ Kurtz, whose great skill in collecting ivory at an up-river station eventually sends him over the edge: he turns from being the ‘civilizer’ into the savage.

The story begins on the banks of the Thames – the Imperial artery of commerce and civilization – but the main arena for the tale is another river altogether – the Congo. The historical framework of the narrative is set within and specifically alludes to the horror that lay beneath the surface of the Belgian King Leopold II’s Congo Free State. Leopold is never mentioned by name in the novel, but he lurks in the shadows nonetheless.

Heart of Darkness appeared at a moment when horror began to take on a new graphic dimension in the European imagination and ideas on slavery demanded redefinition. During the 1890s rumours started to circulate widely that aspects of imperial policy were going terribly wrong. Conrad’s ostensibly imaginative work gave these reports intellectual force. Following its publication new attitudes towards Africa emerged among radical humanitarian thinkers. Some started to wonder just where the flag of Imperial progress was leading.

The opening up of the tropical heart of Africa had been a rapid process. In 1800 Africa’s interior south of the Sahara was unmapped terra incognita. At the Berlin conference in 1884-5 the colonial powers carved up Africa amongst themselves. Much of the territory by then had been traversed. The names of the epic adventurers responsible for opening up the interior: Sir James Bruce, John Hanning Speke, Sir Richard Burton, David Livingstone and Sir Henry Morton Stanley echo through classrooms even today. Their travel writings helped appropriate African territories in the Victorian imagination. Adventure stories sold newspapers. Adventurers, whether soldier-explorers, naval officers, missionaries or entrepreneurs, were the empire’s own superstars.

But during the 1890s it became increasingly clear that the altruistic spirit that justified expansion for the European empire-builders was faltering. Atrocity stories began to percolate back through the ports. It was a horror more often sensed than witnessed. Clearly some aspects of the white man’s administration had gone badly amiss. Imperial expansion had become a cover for ventures that increasingly subverted local life. There was much questionable military behaviour, and occasional military blunders. Some missionaries appeared to be tacit accomplices to the skullduggery, and the evangelising methods of muscular Christianity were also questioned. The leash constraining greed and exploitation was severed. The equation of commerce and Christianity that had helped to abolish the slave trade had given way to a new horror: an unspeakable horror committed by Europeans in the name of civilisation.

In response, 19th century humanitarian endeavour was forced to reform. Traditions of thought condemning slavery and defending tribal lands and rights against foreign invasion – ideas rooted in the sermons of the church fathers Bartolomé de las Casas and Antonio Vieira – found a new voice in Britain and elsewhere in Europe among emerging socialist and radical groups. Two societies had surfaced during the 19th century as self-appointed guardians of the rights of ‘native people’: The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and The Aborigines’ Protection Society. Both had to adapt to the new age of human rights abuse.

The Anti-Slavery Society was founded in the 1820s through the political drive of the ‘Clapham Sect’, Quaker beliefs and the work of a number of politicians including William Wilberforce and, later, Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton. Through a committee including a number of politicians, peers and bishops, it exerted enormous political pressure in both chambers at Westminster and in the corridors of the Foreign Office. In 1900 the future king, Edward VII, was the Society’s patron. Its list of corresponding members included Joaquin Nabuco, the statesman and architect of abolition in Brazil.

Editions of its quarterly publication The Anti-Slavery Reporter at the turn of the century show that while its main centre of interest remained the ‘native question’ in Africa, its effectiveness was diminishing. There were sporadic and brief reports on slavery-related issues such as race relations in the United States, the system of Latin American slavery known as peonage, convict-leasing and Chinese labour. Coverage of countries such as Burma and Fiji showed that slavery was a global problem. Wherever slavery was discussed within the realms of the Empire, such as the desperate abuses against the aborigines of Western Australia, coverage was awkward. An obvious propagandist element clouded the views of the Anti-Slavery Society and is evident in stereotypical coverage of slave labour markets in Muslim lands such as Persia, Morocco, Zanzibar, Egypt or in Portuguese and German Africa.

The more effective outfit, after the abolition of the slave trade, was the Aborigines’ Protection Society. Following the publication of a government Blue Book in 1837 drafted by William Gladstone, the A.P.S. was established in 1838 to stand up to ‘the enormous wrongs inflicted on Aborigines by European colonization’. In its opening report it had targeted ‘the restless spirit of adventure’ and emigration arising from Europe’s ‘superabundant population’ as two of the main reasons for escalating abuses. Again its committee attracted important politicians, churchmen and businessmen. By the late 1890s it had emerged as the most informed voice as a result of the active participation of members such as the radical Liberal politicians Sir Charles Dilke and James Bryce, the philosopher Herbert Spencer, and another rising Liberal, Augustine Birrell. Its asthmatic secretary, H.R. Fox Bourne, appointed in 1889, was prepared to stick his neck out on a number of issues; one of them was the Congo question.

In the aftermath of the Boer War attitudes to the Empire changed. A new humanitarian spirit was born, partly from popular objections to government policy in South Africa, including the use of concentration camps and the burning of Boer farms, partly through the inspiration of anti-imperialist campaigners like Emily Hobhouse. Humanitarian work was still seen as important to the advancement of political careers. Perhaps in an effort to divert attention away from the embarrassing excesses of British conduct in the Boer War, discussion catalysed around the Congo question. The search for a Heart of Darkness evident in fact inspired a series of Marlowesque river journeys by individuals intent on exposing the lie at the heart of the white man’s civilisation. It also helped put the humanitarian movement on a new and more radical ideological footing.

In 1900 the African Society was founded in memory of the writer, ethnographer and traveller, Mary Kingsley, whose travels in West Africa in the 1890s had done much to increase public awareness of the rich cultural traditions of tribal life in the region. The new Society’s honorary secretary, and the moving force behind its establishment, was the historian Alice Stopford Green, wife of J.R. Green, author of the popular History of the English People. The honorary treasurer was George Macmillan, proprietor of the publishing house. Among its committee members was the future Liberal prime minister, Herbert Asquith; Gladstone’s disciple and biographer, John Morley; the anthropologist J.G.Frazer, author of The Golden Bough; and the governor of the Gold Coast, Matthew Nathan. The society’s members were motivated above all to build up ‘respect for native customs’ and change public understanding on Africa and Africans.

In April 1903 a young, crusading journalist, E.D. Morel, began a weekly newspaper, The West African Mail. A founding principle of the paper was to supply ‘reliable and impartial business intelligence’ on West African issues and the inaugural issue ran a large picture of Winston Churchill – a recent convert to Liberalism from the Tories – accompanying a letter from him supporting Morel’s venture. There were further good wishes from the two Liverpool shipping line owners Sir Alfred Jones and John Holt. Alice Stopford Green’s name was also on the paper’s masthead. But beside covering commercial news, Morel’s deeper intention was to improve public awareness of atrocities in the Congo and expose the escalating stories of slavery emerging from the interior.

The Foreign Office decided to act when in March 1903 the House of Commons passed a resolution ‘to abate the evils’ in the Congo. They selected their most capable consul in Africa, Roger Casement, to carry out the investigation on their behalf. Casement had already spent almost twenty years in Africa, ten of them officially connected to the Foreign Office in a series of consular postings. But his consular position was a convenient cover for intelligence work. Early on in his consular career he had undertaken such work for both the War Office Intelligence Department and another department -- whose activities have gone largely unrecorded – Commercial Intelligence, part of the Board of Trade. During the Boer War he had devised an unrealised ‘special mission’ to attack the Boer railway lines.

Casement’s voyage into the interior in several ways mirrored Marlow’s journey. The consul chartered a river boat and spent two months navigating and traversing territories he had travelled through in 1897, compiling evidence from victims and perpetrators of atrocities. On his return to London he met both Morel and Conrad. His report was published in February 1904 in an abridged and edited form and represented the official government line. The national press grabbed at the story. There was an outcry across Britain. Casement himself handed the first cheque for £100 to Morel to set up the Congo Reform Association that over the next decade became the most radical humanitarian force in the Empire. It questioned fundamental principles of Imperial policy and ultimately forced Leopold II to surrender his personal control in the Congo.

Prominent journalists and radical-liberal newspapers and journals began to condemn the horrors that were happening in the name of imperialism across the globe. German atrocities against the Herero and Nama peoples in South West Africa (now Namibia); Japanese actions in Formosa (Taiwan); the hemp-kings of Yucatan and the slavery that had maintained Porfirio Diaz’s long presidency in Mexico; reports about the US treatment of rebels in the Philippines – all built up a picture of global atrocities committed by the so-called civilisers.

The British journalist H.W. Nevinson made an investigation of slavery in Portuguese West Africa (Angola) published as A Modern Slavery (1906). Expensive libel suits by companies defending commercial practices in imperial enclaves attracted leading lawyers such as Rufus Isaacs and Sir Edward Carson. Public indignation was further excited by the contribution of other important literary heavyweights. Mark Twain wrote King Leopold’s Soliloquy. Arthur Conan Doyle penned The Crime of the Congo. Thousands attended Congo Reform rallies across the country.

The publication of Red Rubber by E.D. Morel in 1906 made it clear that the worst atrocities had been committed to meet the spiralling demand for rubber as the burgeoning automobile and bicycle industries moved into top gear. 1906 was the year when Henry Ford started production of his Model T – the first mass-produced motor car. Demand for rubber now began to far outstrip the supply. As a result of both its insulating qualities for electrical wiring and circuitry and its use in the motor car industry, rubber became the defining commodity in imperial policy-making. In those crucial years between 1892 and 1914 when rubber was still tapped from tropical forests, before cultivated plantation rubber became the main supply source, desperate crimes were committed. The story of wild rubber is one of horror on an apocalyptic scale. Manipulation of the rubber market ignited a series of genocidal episodes across the twentieth century. It changed the face of the tropical regions of the world forever. Although in Heart of Darkness Conrad’s character Kurtz’s reputation had been built on his great renown in collecting ivory, it was the collection of wild rubber that led to the greatest tribal and environmental cataclysm of modern times. There were countless Kurtz-like white men imposing rubber tapping on indigenous populations across tropical Africa and the Amazon.

In 1909, in an effort to strengthen the front against abuse in Africa, the Anti-Slavery Society amalgamated with the Aborigines’ Protection Society to produce the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society. A former Baptist missionary who had spent many years in Africa, the Rev. John Harris, was elected as acting secretary. Within months of the merger, the restructured society was involved in a new slavery scandal, this time in the disputed frontier region of the north-west Amazon bordering Colombia, Brazil, Peru, and Ecuador. It was an episode that became known to history as ‘the Putumayo Atrocities’, and, once again it was Casement, by this time British Consul-General in Rio de Janeiro, who was recruited by the Liberal Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, to investigate the matter on an official level. Casement made two voyages to the Amazon in 1910 and 1911, again very much in the manner of Marlow; both journeys were cloaked in official secrecy. He uncovered a horror that paralleled and even exceeded the cruelty he had witnessed in the Congo. Again with press cooperation, the matter occupied newspaper columns around the world for many months.

The humanitarian work and achievements of both Morel and Casement was celebrated during 1911. By then both men were household names throughout the Empire. On May 29th, 1911, a public presentation was made to Morel in the Whitehall Rooms at the Hotel Metropole. Lord Cromer, the famous Imperial pro-consul in Egypt, presided. There were dozens of letters from those unable to attend and rousing speeches from those who were present. The Bishop of Winchester said:

Every candid and well-informed man knows now, and public men of all parties agree, that there had grown up on the Congo, and in its administration, one of those moral monsters which deface history and laugh in the face of the conscience of mankind. It might easily have gone on unknown: and even if dimly known behind the veils of distance and darkness, it might easily, even when known, have gone unattacked, except by some futile words of protest. That it did not do so was due, and due entirely, to Mr Morel. I am not ashamed to believe and say that for a great moral emergency the providence of God gave us the man.

The luncheon brought together a dozen bishops and as many peers and captains of industry. Andrew Carnegie, W.H.Lever, William Cadbury and John Holt were four of the better known industrialists who lent their names to the occasion. It became the defining humanitarian meeting of the age.

A few weeks later Casement received news of his knighthood, and in early August he embarked on a further trip up the Amazon to try and arrest the perpetrators of atrocities. Of Casement’s three Marlowesque river journeys this remains the shadiest voyage of all. As he went up river Casement witnessed the end of the Amazon rubber boom and the collapse of the veneer of civilization built on the back of the rubber economy. Yellow fever had started to attack the three main communities at Belém do Pará, Manaos and Iquitos. Rubber prices had slumped. Those who could afford to were leaving. On his return down-river Casement went to Washington and spent a few days with the British Ambassador, James Bryce, and also had a private meeting with US President William Howard Taft.

The publication of Casement’s Amazon reports in a Blue Book in July 1912 brought the discussion in the newspapers to a height. Prime Minister Herbert Asquith was obliged to establish a Parliamentary Select Committee Enquiry and many of the corrupt practices supporting imperial commerce were exposed. Rome issued a papal encyclical. Two years later legislation was passed by the Commons making British company directors responsible for their company activities abroad.

On the outbreak of war in 1914 many of those who had been united by humanitarian endeavour since the start of the century were divided in views and loyalty. Within hours of the outbreak of hostilities, Morel founded the Union of Democratic Control (UDC) along with James Ramsay MacDonald, Norman Angell and Charles Trevelyan. It became the most effective voice of dissent criticising the British government’s entry into the First World War and attacked the official version of how the war had come about, accusing the Liberal government of deliberately spreading falsehoods. The loudest objections were raised against the practice of secret diplomacy and the control of foreign policy by a narrow clique of political insiders. Among those attracted to this movement was Bertrand Russell, and it says something for its influence that nine of its members became ministers in the first Labour cabinet of 1924.

Casement’s career took a more revolutionary path. After his resignation from the Foreign Office in August 1913 he set about recruiting Irish Volunteers in response to the arming of the Ulster Volunteers by the Unionist leaders, Sir Edward Carson and F.E. Smith. When he left Ireland in July 1914, a month before the outbreak of the First World War, he had an army of over 12,000 volunteers at his disposal. A few days after he reached America the first shipment of guns for those volunteers was landed at Howth by Erskine Childers. The plan for this gun-running exploit had been hatched in the house of Alice Stopford Green in Grosvenor Road in London. In America Casement raised further funds and planned open rebellion against the British Empire. In the autumn of 1914 he returned to Europe in an effort to get German support for the Irish independence movement. But the German high command prevaricated and a propaganda campaign began in the British press to blacken Casement’s reputation in the public mind.

In April 1916, having failed to recruit Irish prisoners of war to join a pro-independence Irish Brigade, Casement returned to Ireland in a German U-boat, but British Naval Intelligence had intercepted a cypher detailing his plans for rebellion. His landing was expected and his capture at an Iron Age fort near Ardfert in County Kerry began the tragic chain of events of Easter week 1916. Many of those who had campaigned alongside Casement and Morel for Congo reform, such as Asquith, Sir Edward Grey, Winston Churchill, Herbert Samuel, and Sir Matthew Nathan, became the figures who now demanded Casement’s execution for treason. Following a state trial Casement was the last of the sixteen Irish rebel leaders to be executed in the wake of the Rising.

In 1917 Morel was imprisoned under the Defence of the Realm Act for his continuing campaign against the war. Imprisonment seriously weakened his health and in November 1924 he died prematurely. The ethical policy that Casement and Morel had forced upon the Foreign Office and which galvanised radical liberal politics before 1914 has since then been conspicuously absent. In 1914 Britain and Belgium were allies in war and the whole matter of Congo reform hung in the air like an embarrassing smell. It was only during the 1980s that the Belgian state archive finally released important source material detailing the scale of the horror in the Congo. In Britain it was as recently as 1995 that the Open Government Initiative allowed proper independent historical examination of a number of aspects of the circumstances surrounding Casement’s extraordinary career as an imperial intelligence operator-turned-humanitarian-turned-revolutionary.

At the end of Heart of Darkness, Marlow returns to Brussels in order to tell Kurtz’s intended bride about his death. But instead of telling her the truth he lies and claims that it was her name that Kurtz had muttered with his dying breath. The humanitarian work that united many intellectual, political and religious figures before 1914 has remained a neglected region of history: a number of aspects of the story have been suppressed until today. Lies were told which survive as part of the historical record.

It is high time that this whole matter was better understood by historians. The ideals and action that gave rise to the anti-slavery movement and the efforts to protect indigenous peoples in the Congo, Amazon and elsewhere became the foundations upon which current humanitarian and human rights organisations, including Amnesty International and Survival International, were founded. Ideas of ethical foreign policy that are currently promoted as a motivating force behind New Labour’s foreign policy can also be traced back to the radical discussions of this period.

The Congo reform movement and the Putumayo atrocities, that together provoked so much public anger between 1903 and 1914, were perceived as the last chapter in the long crusade against slavery, although that chapter is yet to be written up as history. Their significance has been deliberately obscured partly because of Morel’s anti-war stance and his importance in the rise of the British Labour party, but more as a consequence of Casement’s involvement with advanced revolutionary activities. What the story of this period reveals, however, is that Conrad’s fictional narrative Heart of Darkness reflected both a truth and a horror at the core of Empire that some hoped would never be exposed by the facts.

Further Reading:

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, edited by D.D.R.A. Goonetilleke (Broadway Literary Texts, 1995); Frederick Karl and Laurence Davies, The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad (Cambridge University Press); Marvin Swartz, The Union of Democratic Control in British Politics During the First World War (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1971); Wm Roger Louis, ‘The Triumph of the Congo Reform Movement 1905-1908’ in Boston University Papers on Africa; Roger Anstey,’ The Congo Rubber Atrocities – A Case Study’ in African Historical Studies – Vol , IV, 1 (1971).  

Angus Mitchell edited The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement (Anaconda Editions, 1998)