A searching work of investigative, on-the-ground reporting from the
front lines of a long-roiling conflict in the heart of Africa.The
civil war in Uganda, notes Financial Times West Africa
correspondent Green, has lasted more than 20 years, a complex
struggle marked by ethnic and religious rivalries as well as mere
party politics. That war has spilled over into neighboring states
that have had terrible troubles of their own - Kenya, Sudan, Congo
- and has cost untold numbers of lives. It has also been fought, in
large part, by children, most kidnapped and pressed into the
service of warlords. The figure of Green's title is one such
warlord, a man named Joseph Kony, whose Lord's Resistance Army
bears a name that speaks to his wish to rule not by the Sharia law
of the Islamists, but by the Ten Commandments. One imagines, while
reading Green's book, that Kony is not aware of the sixth, for his
army is a murderous lot - and one given to rape, looting, abuse,
torture and countless other misdeeds. Green entered the army's
orbit with a simple question, as he says: "How could one maniac
leading an army of abducted children hold half a country hostage
for twenty years?" One answer - as demonstrated by Ishmael Beah's
memoir A Long Way Gone (2007) - is that children make ferocious
soldiers, if ones in whom "the schoolboy had not quite died." Such
was the case with a youngster who hauled off a prized textbook as
loot following a raid, in addition to 139 young women who would be
sexually enslaved. Battling the forces of a corrupt government
whose ranks are also filled with children, Kony's band finally drew
the attention of the International Criminal Court in the Hague,
which has issued a 33-count indictment against him. Yet Kony, as we
learn from this vivid book, goes free, "adrift in the wilderness,"
and the war rages on.Essential for anyone interested in
understanding the politics of modern Africa. (Kirkus Reviews)
Somewhere in the jungles of Uganda, there hides a fugitive rebel
leader: he is said to take his orders directly from the spirit
world and, together with his ragged army of brutalized child
soldiers, he has left a bloody trail of devastation across his
country. Joseph Kony is now an internationally wanted criminal, and
yet nobody really knows who he is or what he is fighting for.
Intrigued by the myths, Matthew Green heads off into a war zone,
meeting the victims, the peacemakers and the regional powerbrokers
as he tracks down the man himself. The Wizard of the Nile is the
first book to peel back the layers of mysticism and murky politics
surrounding Kony, to shine a searching light onto this forgotten
conflict, and to tell the gripping human story behind an inhumane
war and a humanitarian crisis.
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