The Dream of the Celt: A Novel Read online

  Roger would always remember two events from the two years he worked for the Sanford Exploring Expedition, between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-four: the months-long transport of the Florida along the caravan route from Banana, the tiny port at the mouth of the Congo River, to Stanley Pool, and the incident with Lieutenant Francqui: for once breaking the serenity of his even temper, joked about by Herbert Ward, he almost threw Francqui into the whirlpools of the Congo River and escaped being shot by the lieutenant only by a miracle.

  The Florida was an imposing ship the SEE brought to Boma to serve as a merchant vessel in the Middle and Upper Congo, that is, on the other side of the Crystal Mountains. Livingstone Falls, the chain of cataracts that separated Boma and Matadi from Leopoldville, ended in a cluster of whirlpools that earned the name Devil’s Cauldron. Starting there and going east, the river was navigable for thousands of miles. But to the west it lost a thousand feet in height as it descended to the ocean, making the river impassable for great distances. In order to be carried by land to Stanley Pool, the Florida was disassembled into hundreds of pieces that, classified and packed, traveled on the shoulders of native porters for the three hundred miles of the caravan route. Roger was entrusted with the largest, heaviest piece: the ship’s hull. He did everything, from supervising the construction of the enormous wagon onto which it was hoisted to recruiting the hundred or so porters and trail cutters who hauled the immense load across the peaks and ravines of the Crystal Mountains, widening the trail with machetes. And constructing embankments and defenses, building camps, treating the sick and those hurt in accidents, suppressing disputes among members of different ethnic groups, and organizing shifts of guard duty, the distribution of food, and hunting and fishing when supplies ran short. It was three months of risk and worry, but also of enthusiasm and the awareness of doing something that signified progress, a successful battle against a hostile nature. And, Roger would often repeat in years to come, without using the chicote or permitting its abuse by those overseers nicknamed “Zanzibarians,” either because they came from Zanzibar, capital of the slave trade, or behaved with the cruelty of traffickers.

  When, in the great fluvial lagoon of Stanley Pool, the Florida was reassembled and ready to sail, Roger traveled in the ship along the Middle and Upper Congo, securing depositories and transport for the goods of the Sanford Exploring Expedition in localities that, years later, he would visit again during his journey to hell in 1903: Bolobo, Lukolela, the region of Irebu, and, finally, the Equator Station, renamed Coquilhatville.

  The incident with Lieutenant Francqui, who, unlike Roger, felt no repugnance at all toward the chicote and used it freely, occurred on his return from a trip to the line of the Equator some thirty miles upriver from Boma, in a wretched, nameless village. Lieutenant Francqui, in command of eight soldiers of the Force Publique, all of them natives, had carried out a punitive expedition on account of the eternal problem of laborers. More were always needed to carry goods for the expeditions that came and went between Boma–Matadi and Leopoldville–Stanley Pool. Since the tribes resisted handing over their people for that exhausting work, from time to time the Force Publique or private concessionaires undertook incursions into refractory villages where, in addition to taking away the able-bodied men tied together in lines, huts were burned, hides, ivory, and animals confiscated, and the chiefs whipped soundly so that in the future they would live up to their contractual obligations.

  When Roger and his small company of five porters and a Zanzi-barian entered the hamlet, the three or four huts were already ashes and the residents had fled. The exception was a boy, almost a child, lying on the ground, his hands and feet tied to stakes, on whose back Lieutenant Francqui was easing his frustration with lashes from his chicote. Whippings were generally administered not by officers but by soldiers. But the lieutenant undoubtedly felt offended by the flight of the entire village and wanted revenge. Red with fury, sweating profusely, he gave a small snort with each lash. His expression did not change when he saw Roger and his group appear. He simply responded to Casement’s greeting with a nod, not interrupting the punishment. The boy must have lost consciousness some time earlier. His back and legs were a bloody mass, and Roger remembered one particular detail: a column of ants marching close to his body.

  “You have no right to do that, Lieutenant Francqui,” he said in French. “That’s enough!”

  The officer, a short man, lowered the chicote and turned to look at Roger’s long silhouette, bearded, unarmed, carrying a staff to test the ground and move aside debris during the march. A little dog scampered between his legs. Surprise made the lieutenant’s round face, with its trimmed mustache and small blinking eyes, pass from bright red to ashen and back to red again.

  “What did you say?” he roared. Roger saw him let go of the chicote, move his right hand to his waist, and fumble with the cartridge belt where the butt of his revolver protruded. He realized instantly that in a fit of temper the officer might shoot him. He reacted quickly. Before the lieutenant could take out his weapon, he had him by the back of the neck and at the same time seized the revolver he had just grasped. Lieutenant Francqui tried to loosen the fingers at the nape of his neck. His eyes bulged like a toad’s.

  The eight soldiers from the Force Publique, who had been watching the punishment as they smoked, had not moved, but Roger supposed that, disconcerted by what had happened, they had their hands on their rifles and were waiting for an order from their leader to take action.

  “My name is Roger Casement, I work for the SEE, and you know me very well, Lieutenant Francqui, because we’ve played poker in Matadi,” he said, letting him go, bending down to pick up the revolver, and returning it to him with an amiable expression. “The way you’re whipping this young boy is a crime, no matter what offense he committed. As an officer of the Force Publique, you know that better than I, because you undoubtedly know the laws of the Congo Free State. If the boy dies because of this lashing, the crime will weigh on your conscience.”

  “When I came to the Congo I took the precaution of leaving my conscience behind in my own country,” the officer said. Now he wore a mocking expression and seemed to be wondering whether Casement was a fool or a madman. His hysteria had dissipated. “Just as well you moved quickly, I was about to put a bullet in you. I would have found myself involved in a nice diplomatic dispute if I had killed an Englishman. In any case, I advise you not to interfere, as you’ve just done, with my colleagues in the Force Publique. They’re bad characters and things could go worse for you with them than with me.”

  His anger had passed and now he seemed depressed. He purred that someone had warned them about his coming. Now he would have to go back to Matadi empty-handed. He said nothing when Roger ordered the troops to untie the boy and put him in a hammock, and having tied this between two sticks, he left with him for Boma. When they arrived two days later, in spite of his wounds and the blood he had lost, the boy was still alive. Roger left him at the dispensary. He went to court to register a complaint against Lieutenant Francqui for abuse of authority. In the following weeks he was called twice to make a deposition, and during the judge’s long, stupid interrogations, he realized his accusation would be filed away and the officer not even admonished.

  By the time the judge finally ruled, throwing out the complaint for lack of evidence and because the victim refused to offer corroboration, Roger had resigned his post on the Expedition and was working once more for Henry Morton Stanley—whom the Kikongos of the region had now nicknamed “Bula Matadi” (Rock Breaker)—on the railroad being constructed parallel to the caravan route, from Boma and Matadi to Leopoldville–Stanley Pool. The boy who had been mistreated stayed on to work with Roger and from then on was his servant, assistant, and traveling companion through Africa. Since he never could say what his name was, Casement baptized him Charlie. He had been with him sixteen years.

  Roger’s resignation from the Sanford expedition was due to an incident with one of th
e company directors. He didn’t regret it, for working with Stanley on the railroad, though it demanded an enormous physical effort, gave him back the illusion he’d had when he came to Africa. Opening the jungle and dynamiting mountains to lay down track for the railroad was the pioneering work he had dreamed of. The hours he spent outdoors, burning in the sun or drenched by downpours, directing the laborers and trail cutters, giving orders to the Zanzibarians, making certain the crews did their work well, packing down, leveling, reinforcing the ground where the crossties would be laid and clearing away dense branches, meant hours of concentration and the sense he was doing work that would be of equal benefit to Europeans and Africans, the colonizers and the colonized. Herbert Ward said to him one day: “When I met you, I thought you were only an adventurer. Now I know you’re a mystic.”

  What Roger liked less was leaving the countryside for the villages to negotiate the assignment of porters and trail cutters to the railroad. The lack of laborers had become the primary problem as the Congo Free State grew. In spite of having signed the “treaties,” the chiefs, now that they understood what was involved, were reluctant to allow their people to leave to open roads, build stations and depositories, or harvest rubber. When Roger worked for the SEE, he succeeded in overcoming this resistance by having the company pay the workers a small salary, generally in kind, though it had no legal obligation to do so. Other companies began to follow suit, but even so it was not easy to hire laborers. The chiefs alleged they could not send away men who were indispensable for tending their crops and hunting and fishing for the food they ate. Often, when the recruiters approached, the able-bodied men hid in the underbrush. That was when the punitive expeditions began, the forced recruitments and the practice of locking women into so-called maisons d’otages (hostage houses) to make certain their husbands did not escape.

  Both in Stanley’s expedition and in Henry Shelton Sanford’s, Roger was often responsible for negotiating with the indigenous communities for the surrender of native workers. Thanks to his facility in languages, he could make himself understood in Kikongo and Lingala—and later in Swahili as well—though always with the help of interpreters. Hearing him attempting to speak their language eased the mistrust of the natives. His gentle manner, patience, and respectful attitude facilitated dialogues, as did the gifts he brought: clothing, knives and other domestic objects, as well as the glass beads they liked so much. He usually returned to camp with a handful of men to clear the countryside and work as porters. He became famous as “a friend of the blacks,” a name that some of his colleagues judged with commiseration while others, especially some officers in the Force Publique, reacted to with contempt.

  These visits to the tribes caused a disquiet in Roger that would increase with the years. At first he made them willingly, for they satisfied his curiosity to know something of the customs, languages, apparel, habits, foods, dances, songs, and religious practices of peoples who seemed mired in the depths of time, in whom a primitive innocence, healthy and direct, mixed with cruel customs, like sacrificing twins in certain tribes, or killing a number of servants—almost always slaves—to bury along with the chiefs, and the practice of cannibalism in some groups who, as a consequence, were feared and hated by other communities. He would leave negotiations with an ill-defined uneasiness, the sensation of playing dirty with those men from another time who, no matter how much he tried, would never be able to understand him fully, and consequently, in spite of the precautions he took to attenuate the abusiveness of the agreements, he felt guilty of having acted against his convictions, morality, and that “first principle,” which was what he called God.

  Therefore, at the end of December 1888, before he had completed a year on Stanley’s chemin de fer, he resigned and went to work at the Baptist mission of Ngombe Lutete with the Bentleys, the married couple who ran it. He made the decision abruptly after a conversation that began at twilight and ended at the first light of dawn, in a house in the colonists’ district in Matadi, with an individual who was passing through. Theodore Horte was a former officer in the Royal Navy, which he had left to become a Baptist missionary in the Congo. The Baptists had been there since David Livingstone began to explore the African continent and preach evangelism. They had opened missions in Palabala, Banza Manteke, and Ngombe Lutete, and had just inaugurated another one, Arlington, in the vicinity of Stanley Pool. Theodore Horte, an inspector of these missions, spent his time traveling from one to another, giving help to the pastors and looking into opening new centers. That conversation produced in Roger an impression he would remember the rest of his life; during the days of convalescence from his third attack of malaria, in the middle of 1902, he could have reproduced it in minute detail.

  No one imagined, hearing him speak, that Theodore Horte had been a career officer and, as a sailor, had participated in important military operations of the Royal Navy. He didn’t speak about his past or his private life. He was a distinguished-looking, well-mannered man of about fifty. On that tranquil night in Matadi, with no rain or clouds, a sky studded with stars that were reflected in the river, and the calm sound of the warm breeze ruffling their hair, Casement and Horte, lying in hammocks hung side by side, began an after-dinner conversation that Roger thought, at first, would last only for the few minutes after a meal and before sleep and would be another conventional, forgettable exchange. But shortly after their chat began, something made his heart beat faster than usual. He felt lulled by the sensitivity and warmth of Pastor Horte’s voice, inspired to speak about subjects he never shared with his colleagues at work—except, occasionally, Herbert Ward—and certainly not with his superiors. Preoccupations, anxieties, doubts that he hid as if they were something ominous. Did all of it make sense? Was the European adventure in Africa by any chance what was said, written, believed? Was it bringing civilization, progress, modernity by means of free trade and evangelization? Could those animals in the Force Publique be called civilizers when they stole everything they could on their punitive expeditions? How many of the colonizers—businessmen, soldiers, functionaries, adventurers—had a minimum of respect for the natives and considered them brothers or, at least, human beings? Five percent? One in a hundred? The truth, the truth was that in the years he had spent here he could count on one hand the number of Europeans who did not treat the blacks like soulless beasts whom they could deceive, exploit, whip, even kill, without the slightest remorse.

  Theodore Horte listened in silence to the explosion of bitterness from young Roger. When he spoke, he did not seem surprised by what he had heard. On the contrary, he acknowledged that for years he, too, had been assailed by terrible doubts. Still, at least in theory, that business about “civilization” had a good deal of truth in it. Weren’t the natives’ living conditions atrocious? Didn’t their levels of hygiene, their superstitions, their ignorance of the most basic notions of health mean they died like flies? Wasn’t their life of mere survival tragic? Europe had a great deal to offer to bring them out of primitivism. So they would end certain barbaric customs, the sacrifice of children and the sick in so many communities, for example, the wars in which they killed one another, slavery, and cannibalism, still practiced in some places. And besides, wasn’t it good for them to know the true God and replace the idols they worshipped with the Christian God, the God of mercy, love, and justice? True, many evil people, perhaps the worst of Europe, had ended up here. Wasn’t there a solution? It was imperative that the good things from the Old Continent come here too. Not the greed of merchants with dirty souls, but science, law, education, inherent human rights, Christian ethics. It was too late to take a step backward, wasn’t it? It was pointless to ask whether colonization was good or bad, whether, if left to their fate, the Congolese would have been better off without Europeans. When things could not be turned back, it wasn’t worth wasting time wondering whether it would have been better if those things had not occurred. It was better to try to redirect them along the right path. It was always possible to stra
ighten what had become twisted. Wasn’t that the greatest teaching of Christ?