# Roger Casement British consul at Boma, and the man who went and looked. In May 1903 the House of Commons passed a resolution condemning the [[Congo Free State]] and instructed the government to investigate. Casement departed Matadi on 5 June 1903, travelled up the Congo to Léopoldville and Coquilhatville, went inland to Lake Mantumba inside Leopold's own Crown Domain, and spent five decisive days at Bongandanga, a rubber-concession station on the Lopori. He took testimony directly from Congolese witnesses, checked it against what he could observe, and returned to Europe on 7 November. The report was finalised in December 1903 and published as a British parliamentary command paper in **February 1904** — forty pages plus roughly twenty of witness statements, with the names redacted to protect the speakers. The unredacted original was not published in full until 1985. Its effect was immediate and structural. It converted the Congo question from atrocity rumour into an official finding of a European government, gave [[E. D. Morel]] the evidentiary spine his commercial analysis lacked, and forced [[Leopold II]] to convene his own Commission of Inquiry — which confirmed Casement's findings and then framed them as the excesses of individual agents. With Morel he founded the **Congo Reform Association** in 1904. Casement went on to investigate the rubber atrocities in the Putumayo region of the Amazon, producing a second report of comparable force, and was knighted in 1911. Then the second life. An Irish nationalist by conviction, he sought German support for Irish independence during the First World War, was landed by U-boat in Kerry in April 1916, arrested before the Easter Rising, tried for treason and hanged in August 1916. During the campaign for clemency, the British government circulated his private diaries — the "Black Diaries," describing homosexual encounters — to destroy support for him. Their authenticity was contested for most of a century; forensic examination in 2002 concluded they were genuine. The man who documented Leopold's Congo was destroyed by the same instinct for reputational demolition that he had spent his career turning on states. ## See also [[Congo Free State]] · [[E. D. Morel]] · [[Leopold II]] · [[Congolese History Hub]]