The Wizard of the Nile

Part Le Carré, part Gourevitch, the story of a journey into one of the wildest corners of the African continent, and into the psychology of the charismatic altar-boy-turned-rebel-leader who is waging a war without end, for a cause nobody understands The civil war in Uganda has bled on for over two decades, spilling over into Sudan and the Congo and drawing only occasional interest from the West. The rebel insurgency in the north is led by "the wizard of the Nile," Joseph Kony, whose Lord's Resistance Army is infamous both for its wish to rule Uganda according to the Ten Commandments and its unrelenting brutality. Matthew Green journeys up the White Nile in order to answer what seemed at first a simple question: "How could one maniac leading an army of abducted children hold half a country hostage for twenty years?" His quest is complicated not only by his plunge into a war zone to find the notoriously elusive Kony, but because the conflict itself continues to resist his, and our, attempts to understand it. He meets the victims maimed or raped by Kony's soldiers; the soldiers themselves, who were first children, victims of abduction; and the political leaders who have their own reasons for preferring war to peace.