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Roger Casement in the Amazon

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During the 28th October to 1 November 2024, an immersive week of creativity and inquiry into Roger Casement in the Amazon,  artist Mark Maughan opened his door to his latest performance piece, collaborating with thought leaders, innovators, and activists from across the Atlantic. This was a chance to dive into the making process, to dissect a series of questions, and to envision how these ideas might shape a powerful future performance.

About the Project:

The project peels back the layers of a dark chapter in history, focusing on the UK-funded Peruvian Amazon Company that thrived during the rubber boom between 1907 and 1913, on lands now recognized as part of Colombia. In 1911, Roger Casement, a British diplomat born in Ireland, penned a scathing report that revealed the horrific genocide of an estimated 60,000 Indigenous Peoples, drawing parliamentary scrutiny and ultimately leading to the company’s dissolution.

Portrait of Roger Casement, Artist: Sarah Henrietta Purser, 1848-1943, Oil on canvas.

Casement’s name became synonymous with human rights yet fell prey to scandal and personal turmoil, culminating in his execution at Pentonville Prison. The echoes of the UK rubber trade’s brutality still resonate today, leaving the trauma experienced by the Indigenous communities of the Colombian Amazon unresolved.

With a rich background as a translator for NGOs in Colombia, Mark Maughan has spent the past two years engaging with the four nations of La Chorrera—the Uitoto, Okaina, Muinane, and Bora. His theatre project seeks to amplify the unheard narratives of this troubled history, grappling with the tightrope walk between the pursuit of objective truth and the subjective nature of storytelling in theatre.

Check out the ‘Schedule for the Week’ below for details about the sessions and how people participated:

Open-Research-Week-Revisiting-Roger-Casement-int-he-Amazon

Open Research represents a fresh avenue for artists to collaboratively explore creative projects alongside public audiences as part of their making process. It draws inspiration from Reena Kalsi’s Process programme at Roundhouse London in 2022.

On the first day, Mon 28 Oct 24, Jeffrey Dudgeon MBE, Northern Irish politician, historian and gay political activist, author of the ‘Roger Casement: The Black Diaries – with a study of his background, sexuality, and Irish political life’ with Kinti Oreliana, Erna Von-Wall and Almiro Andrade provided content and perspectives to the start of the research.

The three-day event provided many answers and also left a lot to be explored after the event.

Why not start your research by contacting your local library and exploring Roger Casement, or contact NIGRA (Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association) the organisation which helped Jeff Dudgeon in the case Dudgeon v United Kingdom to the European Court of Human Rights; this successfully challenged Northern Ireland’s laws criminalising consensual sexual acts between men in private.

Links:

Roger Casement: Butterflies and Bones review: blood and thunder

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Secrets Of The Black Diaries...Picture Shows: Image order No HK6737 Irish Patriot and British Consular Official Sir Roger Casement (1864 - 1916) is escorted to the gallows of Pentonville Prison, London. TX: BBC FOUR Friday, March 15 2002 Getty Images/Hulton Archives Roger Casement, former British Consul to the Congo, was hanged for treason for his role in Ireland's 1916 Easter Rising. His conviction rested on a set of diaries that suggested he had pursued a highly promiscuous homosexual life. Under the social mores of the day, such a revelation deprived him of all hope of clemency. But were the diaries faked? BBC Four investigates the 85-year-old mystery. WARNING: This Getty Image copyright image may be used only to publicise 'Secrets Of The Black Diaries'. Any other use whatsoever without specific prior approval from 'Getty Images' may result in legal action.

Secrets Of The Black Diaries…Picture Shows: Image order No HK6737 Irish Patriot and British Consular Official Sir Roger Casement (1864 – 1916) is escorted to the gallows of Pentonville Prison, London.
TX: BBC FOUR Friday, March 15 2002
Getty Images/Hulton Archives
Roger Casement, former British Consul to the Congo, was hanged for treason for his role in Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising. His conviction rested on a set of diaries that suggested he had pursued a highly promiscuous homosexual life. Under the social mores of the day, such a revelation deprived him of all hope of clemency. But were the diaries faked? BBC Four investigates the 85-year-old mystery.
WARNING: This Getty Image copyright image may be used only to publicise ‘Secrets Of The Black Diaries’. Any other use whatsoever without specific prior approval from ‘Getty Images’ may result in legal action.


If you’ve never heard of Roger Casement, who was executed by the British for treason 100 years ago today, the reason is as simple as it is sad, he was homosexual. For that reason he was ignored when he was not being written out of our revolutionary history.

Jeffrey Dudgeon, MBE has written two wonderful insightful books into Casement,

and

Aidan Lonergan has written that there are ten things we don’t know about Casement:

  1. His Antrim father fought in Afghanistan
  2. His Anglican mother secretly baptised him as a Catholic
  3. He was looked after by the people of Antrim after his parents died
  4. He exposed one of the bloodiest colonial regimes ever
  5. What he saw changed him
  6. He sought German backing for an Irish rebellion during WWI
  7. Some see him as a gay icon
  8. Arthur Conan Doyle campaigned against his sentence
  9. He converted to Catholicism on the day of his execution
  10. A hundred years on from the Easter Rising, it’s important to remember Casement

However, as with all history, it is open to interpretation, and I know that different camps will have different feelings towards Casement, his impact on Irish history, and on Gay History.
The musical about him was one such attempt, and I hope that if it comes to a theatre near you, you will make an effort to see it and view it through the eyes of someone who is probably far older than he was, and also who has the benefit of a society that is beginning to be accepting of LGBT people.
 

Roger Casement is (again) centre stage, but this time it’s the dance world that’s exploring the many facets of his life

Source: Butterflies and Bones review: blood and thunder

100 years on, we can still honour Casement’s wish

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Martina Devlin

Irish Independent 

9 July 2015

Portrait of Irish patriot, Sir Roger Casement, 1864-1916. GettyJuly 1916. The days were ticking closer to Roger Casement’s execution on a charge of high treason. By now, he was publicly vilified in Britain not just as a revolutionary but as a homosexual, stripped of the knighthood he had earned as a human rights campaigner.

In his cell, his thoughts turned to the haunting majesty of the Glens of Antrim, scene of his boyhood, and he expressed a longing to be buried there.

That desire remains unfulfilled. As commemorations to mark the Easter Rising’s centenary begin on August 1 with a year-long series of events, it’s appropriate to re-open the matter of Casement’s dying wish. Now is the time to make a respectful request on his behalf to the Belfast and London governments.
Let me take you back to those final days in London’s Pentonville Prison. His appeal against conviction was rejected on July 18, and he began writing farewell letters. One of the most poignant went to his cousin, Elizabeth Bannister. “Don’t let my body lie here – get me back to the green hill by Murlough – by the McGarry’s (sic) house looking down on the Moyle – that’s where I’d like to be now and that’s where I’d like to lie.”
Paper was scarce for condemned prisoners, and his writing became progressively smaller as he tried to cram in everything he wanted to say. “God bless you and keep you my dearest, dearest one. You and G. (Gertude, another cousin) have been the best things in my life these awful days… And so au revoir.” He signed it Roddie.
The letter is dated July 25, 1916. Nine days later he was hanged.
His request was ignored. Instead, his body was buried in an unmarked grave in the prison yard. It was treated with contempt, thrown naked into an open grave without a coffin, and covered with quicklime. The quicklime was standard but the rest was not common practice, and showed how he was viewed by the British authorities in whose eyes the former diplomat had betrayed class and country.
Yesterday, I walked by the house where Casement was born in the Dublin suburb of Sandycove, a few minutes from where I live. I pass there regularly, always turning my thoughts towards this cultivated individual whose privileges did not blind him to the human rights abuses heaped on the voiceless and powerless.
He was a combination of North and South, raised by relatives in the Ballymena area after his parents’ death. How fitting it would be now for North and South to join together in a spirit of friendship, showing respect for a public-spirited countryman who campaigned with compassion and conviction against slavery in the Congo and Peru.
Ultimately, Britain treated his remains with respect. But still his bones lie other than where he asked. In 1965, following decades of petitioning, Casement’s grave was opened and he was removed from under the skeletons of two hanged murderers.
Ireland received his body but with conditions attached: he could not be buried north of the border in case either loyalist or nationalist sentiments were stirred. And so today he rests in the Republican plot in Dublin’s Glasnevin.
Surely, after so long, people can be encouraged to see Casement in his totality. A British consul by profession, he became an anti-imperialist, but above all else he was a humanitarian.
He considered Antrim to be his home, and memories of Murlough Bay – an area of outstanding beauty with views across to the Mull of Kintyre – appear to have afforded him some respite as his death approached.
It is a matter for regret that almost a century after he was executed, there is no prospect of his wishes being honoured. Perhaps some might contend that his bones have been disturbed enough. In which case, I suggest a memorial in Murlough Bay.
It could symbolise the reconciliation between North and South after too many decades of mutual misunderstanding.
The McCarry family mentioned in that letter, with a minor misspelling of their name, erected a stone Celtic cross to pay tribute to him in 1928. Sadly, it was vandalised repeatedly by sectarian groups and was finally blown up. But must extremist views hold sway?
Casement represents a number of the multiple strands entwined through this island’s shared history: son of a Northern military father and Southern mother; born Anglican and a convert to Catholicism immediately before facing the hangman; a British Consul knighted for his services to the Crown who became a 1916 revolutionary.
In those July days 99 years ago, supporters lobbied for his sentence to be commuted, even as Casement’s private diaries describing homosexual encounters were circulated – a cynical move to undermine calls for clemency. Arthur Conan Doyle, WB Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and the US Senate made representations on his behalf. It did not change the outcome.
And what difference, you may wonder, would heeding his dying wish make after so much time has elapsed? Quite simply, it’s the right thing to do. It attaches value to his humanitarian record, which stands apart from his republican aims.
Despite the pomp and ceremony of his state funeral, with throngs filing past his coffin and an oration from President Eamon de Valera, what Casement longed for was simpler.
As he finalised his affairs, the remote beauty of the Antrim coast he knew as a boy called to him. He called to it in return – must that cry continue to go unheeded?

Irish Independent

 

Daniel J Danielsen – a pioneering humanitarian who helped Roger Casement expose the horror of Belgian rule in the Congo

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An Irishman’s Diary on a Faroese hero

The Faroese government has issued a stamp with pictures of both Daniel J Danielsen and Roger CasementThe Faroese government has issued a stamp with pictures of both Daniel J Danielsen and Roger Casement

Brian Maye

Mon, Dec 15, 2014, 01:01 – The Irish Times

First published:Mon, Dec 15, 2014, 01:01

In the campaign to expose the appalling enslavement and exploitation of Congo natives by King Leopold II of Belgium, the names of two great humanitarians, Roger Casement (the 150th anniversary of whose birth occurred this year) and ED Morel, deservedly stand out. Now, thanks to the researches of Óli Jacobsen, a third name may be added – that of a humble Faroese missionary called Daniel J Danielsen.

Óli Jacobsen’s book on his fellow Faroese national has just been published and, to mark the occasion, the Faroese government has issued a stamp with pictures of both Danielsen and Casement. Adam Hochschild, the author of King Leopold’s Ghost, has described the book as doing “a fascinating job of restoring a previously forgotten man to his rightful place in the 20th century’s first great humanitarian crusade”.

Danielsen is remembered today, if at all, in the Faroes as one of the very early evangelists of the Plymouth Brethren movement there. He was also the first Faroese to serve as a missionary outside the islands, when he worked for the Congo Balolo Mission from 1901 to 1903.

Faroes

Óli Jacobsen had been writing short biographies of significant Faroese personalities when he decided to investigate Danielsen’s story. He had no expectation of finding anything of consequence to any history beyond that of the Faroes, so it came as a surprise to him to discover Danielsen’s significant contribution to Roger Casement’s investigation into conditions in the Belgian Congo on behalf of the British government.

ED Morel had been running a sustained writing campaign in Britain about the way natives of the Congo Free State were being treated, his information coming from British, American and Scandinavian missionaries, among others. Eventually the issue was taken up in parliament and the result of the debate was that Casement, the British consul in the Congo region, was sent to investigate the allegations.

In order to carry out an adequate investigation, Casement needed to be able to travel freely in the area but, hardly surprisingly, the Belgian authorities were not altogether willing to cooperate. He had to find an independent means of transport, especially to be able to travel up the Congo river to visit some of the more remote villages.

He had already established contact with Protestant English-speaking missionaries and eventually succeeded in hiring a steamer, the SS Henry Reed, from the American Baptist Missionary Union. The steamer was not in great working order and he was fortunate to meet and persuade Danielsen, who was an engineer, to accompany him on his journey.

He afterwards recorded his indebtedness to Danielsen, in a letter to the British foreign secretary, the Marquess of Lansdowne. “Mr Danielsen’s services were of the very greatest value: indeed without his help, I could not have proceeded very far on my journey. The Henry Reed is one of the oldest vessels still navigating the Upper Congo, having been launched in 1885. I think it was chiefly due to Mr Danielsen’s skill and hard work that she was kept running so long with me on board. As it was, we sprang a leak coming down the river on 13th September and apart from other consideration, I do not think it would have been possible to have the vessel continue running much longer.”

As well as acknowledging Danielsen’s invaluable help, Casement was writing to Lord Lansdowne to explain that he had refused to accept any remuneration whatsoever and to ask his superior to authorise him to make a modest donation to the Congo Balolo Mission, for which Danielsen worked.

Brutal flogging, the cutting off of hands and the taking of women hostage for the good behaviour of their menfolk were some of the barbaric practices perpetrated upon exploited Congo natives that Casement heard about, witnessed the results of and wrote about in his report, which caused a sensation when it was published and proved to be a turning point in the campaign to put an end to such atrocities.

Danielsen took some shocking photographs while accompanying Casement. Óli Jacobsen argues that these were of great importance in the public campaign that followed in Britain, because it was the first time an account of an atrocity could be illustrated so clearly to the public. Danielsen afterwards used the photos in lantern-slide shows at public lectures he gave as he campaigned to end the barbarities being inflicted on innocent natives in the Belgian colony of the Congo Free State.

Daniel J Danielsen and the Congo: Missionary Campaigns and Atrocity Photographsis available from olijacobsen@olivant.fo

Roger Casement: Controversies in Script and Image

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Roger Casement: Controversies in Script and Image

by Jeffrey Dudgeon

QUB School of Creative Arts, Room 101, 12 University Square, Monday 22 April 2013

Jeff Dudgeon is known through his work within the LGBT Community, his courtcase against the British Government resulting in the law in Northern Ireland being brought in line with the rest of Great Britain, and this has been recognised by the award of an MBE from the Queen for his services.

He is also an author, and his book on Roger Casement has been quoted as being ‘a comprehensive view of the texts, with explanations for many of the cast of characters’


 
 
Copy of the Speech: Roger_Casement_Controversies_in_Script_and_Image_Jeffrey_Dudgeon_QUB_School_of_Creative_Arts_22_April_2013