by Christian Jennings (Author)
When seven Burundian paratroopers booted down the door of my hotel room and arrested me, I was wearing nothing but a towelling dressing-gown. With angry movements of their Kalashnikovs, they gestured to me to get dressed. What, I wondered in that long, slow-motion second before the fear kicked in, do you wear to your own execution? Would the Gap jeans do one more day? In the summer of 1994, Christian Jennings arrived in Rwanda with an almost impossible mission: he had five days to track down the army officers and government ministers responsible for the slaughter of 850,000 people and persuade them to participate in a TV documentary about their crimes. He had $15,000 taped to his thigh, a satellite phone, thirty feet of rope, 18 litres of mineral water and a good command of French. Nothing in his past prepared him for the three and a half years that followed.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 368
Edition: New edition
Publisher: Phoenix
Published: 01 Feb 2001
ISBN 10: 0575400285
ISBN 13: 9780575400283
Book Overview: Across the Red River is an epic account of the terror and beauty of Central Africa, both moving and harrowing in its detail, and frequently appallingly funny In the tradition of Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English and We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families '[A] remarkable and important book' Scotsman 'Jennings rips open the baffling politics behind one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century' FHM '[With an] eye for detail and a novelist's ear for dialogue ... Christian Jennings has starkly documented the greatest humanitarian disaster since the Nazi holocaust in readable and surprisingly humorous prose' Daily Mail 'Jennings broad-brush pastiche [goes] a long way to explain why Africa is a continent in crisis' The Times