Offline: "The best thing was the Congo"

Abstract

In 1883, Casement went to work in the Congo, supporting the ambitions of Belgium's King Leopold II, who, he believed (in the novelist's words) was "a great humanitarian monarch bent on exterminating the social degradations of slavery and cannibalism and freeing the tribes from the paganism and servitude that kept them in a feral state". Adam Hochschild, in King Leopold's Ghost (1998), described Casement as a leader "of the first major international human rights movement of the twentieth century".