Who would want Jan Egeland’s job? As UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs between 2003 and 2006, he hopped from hellhole to hellhole registering, recording and occasionally ranting about the chaos and murder that constitute civil society in the world’s most stricken nations.
When Reuters journalist Matthew Green met him in Kampala, Egeland remarked that Uganda’s was ‘a terror like no other place in the world’. The foreign correspondent agrees but cannot muster any enthusiasm for the UN presence. He knows that Uganda will continue to be ignored while the media focuses its attention on Darfur, the Iraq debacle, Britney Spears. Since the ’80s, Uganda has been relegated to the ‘news in brief’ columns, and its civil war – which has cost thousands of lives and displaced millions – become just another African disaster.
In a bid to deconstruct the big picture, Green turns his attentions to the ‘wizard’ at the centre of Uganda’s violence, ‘General’ Joseph Kony, leader of the Lords Resistance Army (LRA). He knows the only possible scoop – and a story that might shatter the general apathy – is an interview with this much-mythologised, fanatical guerrilla.
The search for Kony gives this book a sort of quest. The rest of it is a tale of expat ennui that will appeal to readers of mid-career Graham Greene, interspersed with random travels into Sudan and into the war-torn northern provinces. Green tries to give his bus journeys a lively slant, but this is no place for even the hardiest backpacker and his jolly asides are unconvincing.
The background to the LRA story is interesting but not quite fascinating – somehow, the antitheses (healers v medics, rebels v governments, geopolitics v poverty) are dully familiar. Africa books are depressing, and something of the broken will, the sapped hope, seeps into this one. By the time Green gets to meet Kony, it seems too late and also rather irrelevant.
