The Dream of the Celt: A Novel (5 page)

In the year he worked in the explorer’s service, still admiring the audacity and ability to command with which Henry Morton Stanley led his expedition through the largely unknown territory bordering the Congo River and its myriad tributaries, Roger also learned that the explorer was a walking mystery. The things said about him were always contradictory, so it was impossible to know which were true and which false and how much exaggeration and fantasy were in the true statements. He was one of those men incapable of differentiating reality from fiction.

The only clear thing was that the idea of Stanley as a great benefactor to the natives did not correspond to the truth. He learned this listening to the overseers who had accompanied Stanley on his journey of 1871 in search of Dr. Livingstone, an expedition, they said, much less peaceable than this one, on which, no doubt following the instructions of Leopold II, he proved to be more careful in his dealings with the tribes whose chieftains—450 in all—he had sign the allocation of their lands and workforce. The things those rough men, dehumanized by the jungle, recounted of the expedition of 1871 made his hair stand on end. Villages decimated, chiefs decapitated, their women and children shot if they refused to feed the members of the expedition or provide them with porters, guides, and men to cut trails through the jungle. These old associates of Stanley feared him and accepted his reprimands in silence and with their eyes lowered. But they had blind confidence in his decisions and spoke with religious reverence of his famous 999-day journey, between 1874 and 1877, when all the other whites and a good part of the Africans had died.

When, in February 1885, at the Berlin Conference that not a single Congolese attended, the fourteen participating powers, headed by Great Britain, the United States, France, and Germany, graciously ceded to Leopold II—at whose side Henry Morton Stanley was a constant presence—the million square miles of the Congo and its twenty million inhabitants so that he “would open the territory to commerce, abolish slavery, and civilize and Christianize the pagans,” Roger, who had just turned twenty-one and had lived for a year in Africa, celebrated the event. So did all the employees of the International Congo Society who, anticipating this concession, had already spent time in the territory, establishing the foundations of the project the monarch was ready to carry out. Roger was strong, very tall, slim, with intensely black hair and beard, deep gray eyes, and little propensity for jokes, a laconic boy who seemed a mature man. His preoccupations disconcerted his associates. Who among them took seriously the story about the “civilizing mission of Europe in Africa” that obsessed the young Irishman? But they appreciated him because he was hardworking and always prepared to lend a hand and take over a shift or an assignment for anyone who asked. Except for smoking, he seemed free of vices. He drank almost no alcohol and when, in the camps, tongues were loosened by drink and the talk turned to women, he was clearly uncomfortable and wanted to leave. He was a tireless explorer of the jungle and an imprudent swimmer in rivers and lagoons, energetically moving his arms in front of somnolent hippopotamuses. He had a passion for dogs, and his companions recalled the day during the expedition of 1884 when a wild boar buried its tusks in his fox terrier, named Spindler, and he suffered an emotional crisis when he saw the small animal bleeding to death, its flank torn open. Unlike the other Europeans on the expedition, money did not matter to him. He had not come to Africa dreaming of becoming rich but was moved instead by incomprehensible ideas such as bringing progress to the savages. He spent his salary of eighty pounds sterling a year on his associates. He lived frugally. He did, however, care for his person, dressing carefully, washing himself and combing his hair at mealtimes as if instead of camping in a clearing or on a river beach he were in London, Liverpool, or Dublin. He had a facility for languages, had learned French and Portuguese, and managed to speak several words of their African dialect after spending a few days near a tribe. He was always making notes in student copybooks of what he saw. Someone found out he wrote poetry. They made a joke about it and embarrassment barely permitted him to stammer a denial. He once confessed that when he was a boy, his father would beat him with a strap, and for that reason he was angered by the overseers when they whipped the natives if they dropped a load or failed to carry out an order. He had the gaze of a dreamer.

When Roger thought of Stanley he was hampered by contradictory feelings. He continued to recuperate slowly from malaria. The Welsh adventurer had seen in Africa only a pretext for dramatic exploits and personal plunder. But how could he deny he was one of those mythical, legendary beings who, by means of daring, scorn for death, and ambition, seem to have shattered the limits of the human? He had seen him carry in his arms children whose faces and bodies were eaten by smallpox, offer water from his own canteen to natives dying of cholera or sleeping sickness, as if no one could infect him. Who had this champion of the British Empire and the ambitions of Leopold II actually been? Roger was certain the mystery would never be revealed and his life would always remain hidden behind a spider’s web of inventions. What was his real name? He had taken the name of Henry Morton Stanley from a New Orleans merchant who, in the dark years of his youth, was generous to him and perhaps adopted him. It was said his real name was John Rowlands, but he never confirmed that to anyone. Or that he had been born in Wales and spent his childhood in one of those orphanages where children who had been picked up on the street by health officials were sent. Apparently, when he was very young, he left for the United States as a stowaway on a freighter, and there, during the Civil War, fought first in the Confederate ranks as a soldier, and then on the Yankee side. Afterward, it was thought, he had become a reporter and written articles about the advance of the pioneers into the west and their battles with the Indians. When the
New York Herald
sent him to Africa in search of David Livingstone, Stanley had no experience at all as an explorer. How did he survive the trek through virgin forests, like someone searching for a needle in a haystack, and succeed in finding in Ujiji, on November 10, 1871, the man he stupefied, according to his boastful confession, with his greeting: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

Of all Stanley’s accomplishments, the one Roger Casement had admired most in his youth, even more than his expedition from the sources of the Congo River to its outlet into the Atlantic, was the construction of the caravan trail between 1879 and 1881. The caravan route opened a way for European commerce from the mouth of the great river to the pool, an enormous fluvial lagoon that, as years passed, would be named for the explorer: the Stanley Pool. Afterward, Roger discovered this was another of the farsighted operations of the king of the Belgians to create the infrastructure that would permit the territory to be exploited following the Berlin Conference of 1885. Stanley was the audacious executor of that design.

“And I,” Roger would often tell his friend Herbert Ward during his African years, as he was becoming aware of what the Congo Free State meant, “was one of his foot soldiers from the beginning.” Though not exactly, since when he reached Africa, Stanley had already spent five years opening the caravan trail, whose first section, from Vivi to Isanguila, fifty miles up the Congo River, was completed at the beginning of 1880 and consisted of tangled, fever-ridden jungle filled with deep ravines, worm-infested trees, and putrid swamps where the tops of the trees blocked the sunlight. From there to Muyanga, some seventy-five turbulent miles, the Congo was navigable for pilots familiar with those waters, able to avoid whirlpools and, when it rained and the water rose, to take shelter in shallows or caves and not be tossed against the rocks and destroyed in the rapids that appeared and disappeared endlessly. When Roger began to work for the AIC, changed after 1885 into the Congo Free State, Stanley had already founded, between Kinshasa and Ndolo, the station he called Leopoldville. It was December 1881, three years before Roger reached the jungle and four before the Congo Free State would be legally born. By then this colonial possession, the largest in Africa, created by a monarch who would never set foot in it, was a commercial reality to which European businessmen had access from the Atlantic, overcoming the obstacle of a Lower Congo made impassable by rapids, cataracts, and the twists and bends of the Livingstone Falls, thanks to the route Stanley opened over almost three hundred miles between Boma and Vivi to Leopoldville and the pool. When Roger came to Africa, bold merchants, the advance guard of Leopold II, were beginning to go deep into Congolese territory and take out the first ivory, skins, and baskets of rubber from a region filled with trees that oozed black latex, within reach of anyone who wanted to harvest it.

During his early years in Africa, Roger traveled the caravan route upriver several times, from Boma and Vivi to Leopoldville, or downriver, from Leopoldville to the river’s mouth at the Atlantic, where the dense green waters became salty and where, in 1482, the caravel of the Portuguese Diego Cão entered Congolese territory for the first time. Roger came to know the Lower Congo better than any other European residing in Boma or Matadi, the two points from which Belgian colonization advanced toward the interior of the continent.

For the rest of his life, Roger lamented—he said it again now, in 1902, in his fever—dedicating his first eight years in Africa to working, like a pawn in a game of chess, on the building of the Congo Free State, investing his time, health, effort, and idealism, and believing that in this way he was contributing to a philanthropic plan.

At times, searching for justifications, he asked himself:
How could I have realized what was going on in those million square miles, working as an overseer or crew leader in Stanley’s expedition of 1884 and in the North American Henry Shelton Sanford’s expedition, between 1886 and 1888, in stations and factories recently established along the caravan route?
He was only a tiny piece of the gigantic apparatus that had begun to take form, and no one except its astute creator and a close group of collaborators knew of what it would consist.

Still, on the two occasions he had spoken with the king of the Belgians in 1900, when he had recently been named consul in Boma by the Foreign Office, Roger felt a deep mistrust of that large, robust man covered in decorations, with his long combed beard, formidable nose, and a prophet’s eyes who, knowing that the diplomat was in Brussels on his way to the Congo, invited him to supper. The magnificence of the palace with its deep, soft carpets, crystal chandeliers, engraved mirrors, and Asian statuettes made him dizzy. There were a dozen guests in addition to Queen Marie Henriette, the King’s daughter Princess Clémentine, and Prince Victor Napoléon of France. The monarch monopolized the conversation the entire night. He spoke like an inspired preacher, and when he described the cruelties of the Arab slave traders who left Zanzibar to make their “runs,” his strong voice attained mystic intonations. Christian Europe had an obligation to put a stop to that traffic in human flesh. He had proposed this and it would be the offering of little Belgium to civilization: liberating a suffering humanity from such horror. The elegant ladies yawned, Prince Napoléon murmured gallantries to the lady next to him, and no one listened to the orchestra playing a Haydn symphony.

The following morning Leopold II summoned the British consul for a private conversation. He received him in his private reception room. There were many porcelain objects and figurines of jade and ivory. The monarch smelled of cologne and had shiny nails. As on the previous evening, Roger could scarcely get in a word. The king of the Belgians spoke of his quixotic quest and how misunderstood it was by journalists and resentful politicians. Errors were committed and there were excesses, no doubt. The reason? It was not easy to contract honorable, capable people willing to risk working in the distant Congo. He asked the consul to inform him personally if, in his new post, he observed anything that needed correction. Roger had the impression that the king of the Belgians was pompous and self-involved.

Now, two years later, in 1902, he told himself the king undoubtedly was both those things, but also a statesman of cold, Machiavellian intelligence. As soon as the Congo Free State had been established, Leopold II, by means of a decree in 1886, reserved as Domaine de la Couronne some 100,000 square miles between the Kasai and Ruki Rivers, which his explorers—principally Stanley—had indicated were rich in rubber trees. This expanse lay outside all the concessions to private enterprises and was intended for exploitation by the sovereign. The International Congo Society was replaced as a legal entity by l’État Indépendant du Congo, the Congo Free State, whose only president and trustee was Leopold II.

Explaining to international public opinion that the only effective way to suppress the slave trade was with a “security force,” the king sent two thousand soldiers from the regular Belgian army to the Congo, to be supplemented by a militia of ten thousand natives, whose maintenance would be assumed by the Congolese population. Even though most of this army was under the command of Belgian officers, its ranks, and above all the leadership positions in the militia, were permeated by individuals of the worst kind, scoundrels, ex-convicts, adventurers hungry for a fortune, who had come from the low districts of vice dens and brothels in Europe. The Force Publique became embedded, like a parasite in a living organism, in the tangle of villages scattered over a region the size of Europe, measured from Spain to the borders of Russia, that would be maintained by an African community who did not understand what was happening to them, except that the invasion that overtook them was a plague more devastating than slave hunters, locusts, red ants, and incantations that brought the sleep of death. Because the soldiers and militiamen of the Force Publique were greedy, brutal, and insatiable when it came to food, drink, women, animals, skins, ivory—in short, everything that could be stolen, eaten, drunk, sold, or violated.