About Roger Casement
Irish: Ruairí Dáithí Mac Easmainn
(September 1, 1864 - August 3, 1916)
 

Sir Roger David Casement was an Anglo-Irish diplomat for the United Kingdom, a humanitarian activist, Irish nationalist and a poet. Described as the "father of twentieth-century human rights investigations," he was awarded honors in 1905 for his powerful report on the Congo and knighted in 1911 for his important investigations of human rights abuses in Amazonia.

In Africa as a young man, Casement first worked for commercial interests before joining the British Colonial Service. In 1891, he was appointed as a British consul, a profession he followed for more than 20 years. He served in British West Africa, French Congo, and Brazil. Influenced by the Boer War and his investigation into colonial atrocities against indigenous peoples enslaved in the formerly Peruvian controlled Amazonian rubber estates of Caquetá and Putumayo, Casement developed anti-imperialist sentiments. After retiring from the consular service in 1913, he became more involved with the Irish Republican and separatist movement. He sought to obtain German support and weapons for an armed rebellion in Ireland against British rule during World War I. In 1916, he was arrested, convicted, stripped of his knighthood, and executed for treason following the Easter Rising.

A prolific writer, before Casement’s trial, the government circulated excerpts from his private journals, known as the "black diaries," which detailed homosexual activities. Given prevailing views and existing laws on homosexuality, this material undermined support for clemency for Casement. Debates have continued about these diaries: a forensic study concluded in 2002 that Casement had written them, but interpretations differ (e.g. a forgery) as to their meaning in his life.

Casement's voice and episodes of his life have survived in many different forms in a great number of biographical and fictional accounts, including three major novels: Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce; The Vortex (1924) by the Colombian José E. Rivera; and more recently, The Dream of the Celt (2010) by the Peruvian and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa.