Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan

by Deborah Scroggins (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2003

  $4.71

  Glamorous aid worker Emma McCune conformed to none of the stereotypes: although driven and committed to her work she was at least partially attracted to Africa because it enabled her to live in a style she could not achieve in Britain, and she was famous in East Africa for wearing mini-skirts and for her affairs with African men. Initially much admired, if also suspect for her social flair, she appalled the aid community with her marriage to a local warlord, who was deeply enmeshed in both rebellion and murder. She had fallen in love and, a rebel to the end, she insisted on following her feelings, even if it left her rejected by her fellow worker and in an ambiguous position - was she on the side of the refugees or the warmongers? This biography is also an evocation of the complexities and horrors of the Sudan, where Gordon of Khartoum lost his life and possibly his sanity campaigning against the slave trade, and where today life is so harsh that desperate families sell their children into slavery, hoping for a better life for the child, and hopeless children volunteer to be sold, grabbing at any opportunity for change, however slight, where boys grow up aspiring to be child soldiers and men dedicate their babies to war. Impotent among the dead and the dying, the well-educated, well-paid Western aid workers who try to impose order on this maelstrom are inevitably doomed to failure and, sometimes, are even complicit in creating human misery.

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $3.40

• New

  Paperback
  2004

  $14.57

  Love, corruption, violence and the dangerous politics of aid in the Sudan, by an exciting new writer.

  Emma McCune's passion for Africa, her unstinting commitment to the children of the Sudan, and her striking glamour set her apart from other aid workers the moment she arrived in southern Sudan. But no one was prepared for her decision to marry a local warlord - a man who seemed to embody everything she was working against - and throw herself into his violent quest to take over southern Sudan's rebel movement.

  At once a disturbing love story and a penetrating examination of the Sudan, Emma's War charts the process by which Emma's romantic delusions led to her descent into the hell of Africa's longest running civil war.