Roger Casement – a complicated man

Roger Casement, a hero of the Irish resistance to the UK or a traitor or a sexual exploiter of young boys many of them African, is the subject of a new biography. In A Rebel and a Traitor, Rory Carroll explores the tortured soul of Roger Casement — the British diplomat turned Irish revolutionary who was hanged at Pentonville in 1916.  He started as a national hero in Britain, exposing the slave economy and institutionalised savagery in the Belgian Congo while serving as a consular off