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Tall, striking, and adventurous to a fault, young British relief worker Emma McCune came to Sudan determined to make a difference in a country decimated by the longest-running civil war in Africa. She became a near legend in the bullet-scarred, famine-ridden country, but her eventual marriage to a rebel warlord made international headlines—and spelled disastrous consequences for her ideals.

Enriched by Deborah Scroggins’s firsthand experience as an award-winning journalist in Sudan, this unforgettable account of Emma McCune’s tragically short life also provides an up-close look at the volatile politics in the region. It’s a world where international aid fuels armies as well as the starving population, and where the northern-based Islamic government—with ties to Osama bin Laden—is locked in a war with the Christian and pagan south over religion, oil and slaves. Tying together these vastly disparate forces as well as Emma’s own role in the problems of the region, Emma’s War is at once a disturbing love story and a fascinating exploration of the moral quandaries behind humanitarian aid.

From The New Yorker

In 1991, in the middle of a refugee crisis in southern Sudan, a twenty-seven-year-old British aid worker named Emma McCune scandalized the relief community by marrying a local guerrilla leader; the author describes Emma's brief career as a "First Lady-in-Waiting" as "the kind of surreal sideshow that often accompanies disasters." Formerly a champion of children's rights, Emma couldn't stop her husband from holding hundreds of adolescent boys in a squalid camp. Although she embraced the hardships of African life (bouts of malaria, water teeming with bilharzia), she was well-fed by local standards, eating fish that her husband's soldiers had stolen from a weaker, starving tribe. Meanwhile, Emma's fellow-expatriates grew less enchanted with her the more "African" she became—sick and constantly in need. Scroggins, a veteran reporter on Sudan, uses Emma's story to examine the failure of Western idealism in Africa. Emma turned out to be an incidental character: she died in 1993, in a traffic accident in Nairobi; the fighting continues.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Review

“Scroggins brings Sudan’s agony to vivid life; at the same time, she gives us a lyrical, suspenseful, psychologically acute study in idealism and self-delusion.” —George Packer, The New York Times Book Review

"Breathtaking and beautifully written. . . . Deborah Scroggins weaves the greater issues of Sudan around [Emma] McCune’s idealism.” –USA Today

“Brilliantly penetrating. . . . In [Emma McCune] Scroggins has found a feckless, captivating subject, as insufferable as the white man's insatiable need for redemption in Africa…. Scroggins undoes every illusion about aid, hunger and rebellion.” –Washington Post

“A wonderful, challenging book. . . . One of the best that I have ever read on the difficult relationship between the developed world and the Third World.” —William Shawcross, Sunday Times (London)

From the Inside Flap

Tall, striking, and adventurous to a fault, young British relief worker Emma McCune came to Sudan determined to make a difference in a country decimated by the longest-running civil war in Africa. She became a near legend in the bullet-scarred, famine-ridden country, but her eventual marriage to a rebel warlord made international headlines and spelled disastrous consequences for her ideals.

Enriched by Deborah Scroggins's firsthand experience as an award-winning journalist in Sudan, this unforgettable account of Emma McCune's tragically short life also provides an up-close look at the volatile politics in the region. It's a world where international aid fuels armies as well as the starving population, and where the northern-based Islamic government with ties to Osama bin Laden is locked in a war with the Christian and pagan south over religion, oil and slaves. Tying together these vastly disparate forces as well as Emma's own role in the problems of the region, Emma's War is at once a disturbing love story and a fascinating exploration of the moral quandaries behind humanitarian aid.

From the Back Cover

Tall, striking, and adventurous to a fault, young British relief worker Emma McCune came to Sudan determined to make a difference in a country decimated by the longest-running civil war in Africa. She became a near legend in the bullet-scarred, famine-ridden country, but her eventual marriage to a rebel warlord made international headlines--and spelled disastrous consequences for her ideals.
Enriched by Deborah Scroggins's firsthand experience as an award-winning journalist in Sudan, this unforgettable account of Emma McCune's tragically short life also provides an up-close look at the volatile politics in the region. It's a world where international aid fuels armies as well as the starving population, and where the northern-based Islamic government--with ties to Osama bin Laden--is locked in a war with the Christian and pagan south over religion, oil and slaves. Tying together these vastly disparate forces as well as Emma's own role in the problems of the region, Emma's War is at once a disturbing love story and a fascinating exploration of the moral quandaries behind humanitarian aid.

About the Author

Deborah Scroggins has won six national journalism awards for her reporting from Sudan and the Middle East. For Emma’s Warshe was awarded the Georgia Author of the Year Award. A former correspondent for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she has published articles in Granta, The Independent, Vogue, and Glamour. She lives in Atlanta.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

Aid makes itself out to be a practical enterprise, but in Africa at least it's romantics who do most of the work-incongruously, because Africa outside of books and movies is hard and unromantic. In Africa the metaphor is always the belly. "He is eating from that," Africans will say, and what they mean is that is how he gets his living. African politics, says the French scholar Jean-FranÃ§ois Bayart, is "the politics of the belly." The power of the proverbial African big man depends on his ability to feed his followers; his girth advertises the wealth he has to share. In Africa the first obligation of kinship is to share food; and yet, as the Nuer say, "eating is warring." They tell this story: Once upon a time Stomach lived by itself in the bush, eating small insects roasted in brush fire, for Man was created apart from Stomach. Then one day Man was walking in the bush and came across Stomach. Man put Stomach in its present place that it might feed there. When it lived by itself, Stomach was satisfied with small morsels of food, but now that Stomach is part of man, it craves more no matter how much it eats. That is why Stomach is the enemy of Man.

In Europe and North America, we have to look in the mirror to see Stomach. "Get in touch with your hunger," American diet counselors urge their clients. Hunger is an option. Like so much else in the West, it has become a question of vanity. That is why some in the West ask: Is it Stomach or Mirror that is the enemy of Man? And Africa-Africa is a mirror in which the West sees its big belly. The story of Western aid to Sudan is the story of the intersection of the politics of the belly and the politics of the mirror.

It's a story that began in the nineteenth century much as it seems to be ending in the twenty-first, with a handful of humanitarians driven by urges often half hidden even from themselves. The post-Enlightenment triumph of reason and science gave impetus to the Western conviction that it is our duty to show the planet's less fortunate how to live. But even in the heyday of colonialism, when Western idealists had a lot more firepower at their disposal, Africa's most memorable empire-builders tended to be those romantics and eccentrics whose openness to the irrational-to the emotions, to mysticism, to ecstasy-made them misfits in their own societies. And the colonials were riding the crest of a wave of Victorian enthusiasm to remake Africa in our own image. If the rhetoric of today's aid workers is equally grand, they in fact are engaged in a far less ambitious enterprise. With little money and no force backing them up, they are a kind of imperial rearguard, foot soldiers covering the retreat of a West worn down by the continent's stubborn and opaque vitality. They may be animated by many of the old impulses, idealistic and otherwise, but they have less confidence in their ability to see them through. It takes more than an ideal, even an unselfish belief in an ideal, to keep today's aid workers in place. Emma had some ideals, but it was romance that lured her to Africa.

Chapter Two

She was born in India, where her parents, Maggie and Julian McCune, had met and married in 1962, and the direction of her life, like theirs, was pounded and shaped by the ebbing tide of the British Empire. Maggie, a trim and crisp former secretary, still calls herself an ex-colonial, though the sun was already setting on colonialism when she was born in 1942 in Assam. She published a memoir in 1999 called Til the Sun Grows Cold about her relationship with Emma. The child of a loveless marriage between a British tea planter and an Australian showgirl who met on board a wartime ship, Maggie spent a lonely colonial childhood as a paying guest at various English homes and boarding schools. Emma's father, Julian-or "Bunny," as Maggie called him-was an Anglo-Irish engineer who had knocked around Britain's colonies for at least a decade before he and Maggie settled down in Assam.

Theirs was an unfortunate match from the start. Maggie, shy and wounded, was only twenty-one when she was introduced to Julian on a visit to her father in India. She married him, she admits in her book, mainly to escape England and the hard-drinking mother whose theatrics she despised. With depths of neediness her husband never seems to have fathomed, she wanted nothing more than to bring up lots of children in the safe and conventional family she felt she had been denied as a child. Julian, fourteen years older, was a charming sportsman who thrived on admiration. He also liked his whiskey. He seems to have been unprepared to bear any responsibilities beyond excelling at shirkar, the hunting and fishing beloved of British colonial administrators in India. Perhaps their marriage might have survived if they had been able to stay in India, where Julian, simply by virtue of being an Englishman who had attended some well-known public schools, was able to provide the luxurious lifestyle they had both come to expect.

In Maggie's words, life was "heavenly" for the British hired in those days by London tea companies to run the Assam tea estates. The British lived in comfortable bungalows, the adults attended by Indian servants and the children watched by Indian nursemaids. The men began work at six o'clock in the morning, but after two hours they broke for breakfast. At noon it was time for lunch, and after lunch everybody took two "golden and silent" hours of siesta. After siesta, Maggie writes, "there was a little more work to do, leaving time for tennis, a round of golf or a chukka or two of polo before the sun sank. Then the sun-downer drinks parties began, followed by dinner and dancing" at the club. But by the time Emma was born in 1964 and her sister Erica in 1965, it had become plain that the postwar world was going to have a lot less room for people like the McCunes.

For India, as for so many other colonies, the end of the Raj in 1948 was only the beginning of the slow and subtle process of loosening Britain's control over the country. In the first few years under the new Indian government, the British tea companies operated pretty much as they had under British administration. But by the late 1960s, they were under pressure from the government to replace British employees with Indians. Julian lost his job supervising the maintenance of the equipment used to grade and prepare tea leaves. Maggie's father was pensioned off and decided to return to England. In her book, Maggie says that she and Julian enjoyed mixing with people of all races in Assam, but the only Indians she mentions socializing with were the petty royals for whom the dissolution of empire was almost as much of a disaster as it was for the British. Julian talked about emigrating to Rhodesia or South Africa, where many of their British friends from India had already gone, but Maggie worried about moving to another refuge that might prove temporary. She wanted to spare her children the uncomfortable colonial sense she had always had of never quite fitting in England. She wanted "Home" to really feel like home for them. In 1966 the McCunes decided to move to Yorkshire, where Julian had gone to school and had family. Emma was two.

There was an old manor house on the windswept edge of the Vale of York that Bunny McCune had never forgotten in all his years of wandering. Julian's parents were dead, but his mother had come from Leeds, and as a boy he had attended the Aysgarth School in North Yorkshire before going on to Winchester College. Cowling Hall, a long, thin brick-and-plaster Queen Anne mansion not far from Aysgarth on top of a hill overlooking a spectacular view of the Yorkshire Dales, had first captivated his imagination when he was a schoolboy. The house was shaped like an L, and the oldest part had been built from the ruins of a despoiled abbey. It was empty when the McCunes arrived. Local people said it was haunted. A child had died in the house, and a man had suffered a nervous breakdown. It was an imposing, if dilapidated, piece of architecture, but in the winter a bone-chilling wind whistled right through it. The house was so cold that Maggie tells in her book of warming butter for toast by the coal fire in the drawing room. But with six bedrooms, it was more than big enough for what would become a family of six-Jennie was born in 1967 and Johnny in 1970-and Julian had to have it. He had already invested his inheritance in a franchise he planned to set up in North Yorkshire for a firm marketing closed-circuit-television monitoring systems. Charmed by Julian's manners, the titled owners of Cowling Hall agreed to rent it to the McCunes for the nominal sum of six pounds a week.

A number of Aysgarth old boys still lived into the area, and these former classmates helped the McCunes settle into North Yorkshire's county set. Wensleydale is the heart of James Herriot country, a misty green landscape of ancient stone villages and black-and-white cows that occupies a large place in the sentimental imagination of England. Bunny hunted and fished in the area's magnificent forests and streams; Maggie organized cricket teas and was elected to the local cancer research committee. There were ponies for the children: Maggie saw a moral purpose in such outdoor pursuits. "Ponies are such good discipline," she told me once. "When you come back from riding, you can't just think about yourself. You have to brush down the horse." And there were the all-important public schools. After attending the local primary, Emma became a weekly boarder at Polam Hall in Darlington. Emma is positively radiant in photographs from these years, her cheeks freckled and ruddy as she poses in front of Cowling Hall or astride her pony, Misty.

Julian and Maggie were a popular couple. If Julian had one talent-and by all accounts, it was an unusual talent in a place as rigid and class-bound as North Yorkshire in the 1960s-it was for striking up friendships with people of wildly different backgrounds. "Julian was a thorough gentleman," Peter Gilbertson, an old schoolmate from Aysgarth, reminisced many years later. "He could go into any worker's cottage or any stately home with his boots on and his spaniels at his heels, and he'd be fine. He'd put two bottles on the table and say, 'Right! We're having a party.' " Among their close friends, the McCunes counted Bedale's local squire and his wife, the doctor, and the vicar. Maggie, who had been raised Catholic, converted to the Church of England. Julian, whose political views Gilbertson describes as "conservative-very conservative," became the treasurer of the local Conservative Association. The genteel McCune facade was impeccable, and Emma's father seems to have felt that this really ought to have been enough. Like so many upper-middle-class public schoolboys of the period, he had been educated to serve the empire. He really had no other skills. After nearly twenty years abroad, he was at first baffled, then angry, to learn that in the Britain to which he had returned, his social graces and his old school tie would not by themselves translate into a sizable income. As Maggie later wrote, his indifference to work, easy to overlook in India, was harder to ignore in Britain. When his security franchise failed to prosper, he went to work for a cousin selling farm equipment to large landowners. After a year or so, the cousin fired him. Julian never discussed business matters with Maggie, and he did not tell her when he lost his job. Nor did he look for a position he considered beneath him. Instead, he pretended he was going off to work each day. After saying good-bye to her and the children, he would drive to a nearby river, park his car, and sit in it reading newspapers. Maggie never guessed that he was unemployed until his cousin finally phoned her to say he had fired Julian more than a year earlier for being "bone-idle, a scrounger, and a liar."

When Maggie confronted him, Julian acted as if he were above worrying about money, the opinions of others, or even the law. He was arrested for drunken driving. He took up with a woman who lived in the local village. He was taken to court in Leeds for debt. He continued to come home with expensive presents that Maggie had no idea how he bought. Then he was charged with using his position as a treasurer of the local Conservative Association to steal Tory funds. When a judge asked Maggie why her husband had not appeared with her in court the day the two of them were summoned for failing to pay the rent at Cowling Hall, she had to tell him that Julian was too busy fishing for salmon on the river Tweed. In 1975 local bailiffs evicted the McCune family from Cowling Hall. Maggie and the children went to live in a cottage on the grounds of the Aysgarth School; Julian retreated to a crofter's hut high in the Dales, where he found occasional work as a farm laborer. Emma was ten when the family broke up. "Her childhood ended there," her mother writes.

The very night Maggie discovered that her husband was having an affair with another woman, she happened to be reading one of Emma's favorite childhood stories, Hans Christian Andersen's "Thumbelina." The tale of a tiny girl rescued by a swallow from having to marry a mole, then flown to the warm lands of the south, where she became a princess, must have recalled to the McCunes the magical days in Assam, before they were exiled back "Home." As their troubles mounted in England, perhaps it was only natural that the family should recall their years in India as a time and place in which they had been free to be the aristocrats that Julian, at least, felt himself to be. After a few drinks, Julian was wont to regale the local pubs about how, in India, he had been able to take the law into his own hands and do as he pleased. He loved to tell the story of how he had gotten himself out of jail after accidentally hitting a sacred cow with his car in Calcutta. He never could get used to how the roguish behavior that his fellow expatriates had found so entertaining in India met with disapproval in England. When he invited the Yorkshire policemen who had caught him driving drunk to join him for a brandy before their court appearance, an English judge was not amused.

Review:

4.7 out of 5

93.33% of customers are satisfied

5.0 out of 5 stars Impossible to put down!

F. · October 16, 2005

One of the best written book I have ever read about Africa -- it really captures the mood and the challenges. This book provides both a history of the Sudan and surrounding areas, as well as an interesting story of a young Englishwoman, initially involved in humanitarian aid, who became involved with and married an African warlord. A remarkable story and one that richly increases one's understanding of the complications of providing assistance in Africa.I spent several months in Zaire/Congo right out of college and I finally understand the situation better. A number of my friends have been on missions in Africa. We cannot just stand back; yet, we must be aware of the effects of what we do and how we do it.Excellent account! Kudos to Deborah Scroggins for trying to make sense of it all.

4.0 out of 5 stars Ambivalence

J.B. · May 9, 2008

"Sudan's 26 million people were 2 thirds Muslim, but only a little over 1 third Arab. Muslim or not, most Sudanese were dark skinned Africans. Yet the country's wealth was concentrated in the hands of the descendants of a handful of Arabs (...) Meanwhile, this Arab elite kept the black African majority divided and fighting among themselves." The background in a nutshell.It's the brief comments out of the blue like this one that make the book well worth reading. In the first half of the book we have the settings, and a summary of Emma's life up to her final journey to Africa. The author's gift for synthesizing a lot of history regarding Emma and Sudan is truly laudable. But in the second part of the book, when it comes to the more day by day activities of the different tribes warfare and of Emma herself, it becomes boring, entangled and messy.The most interesting and revealing passages come unexpectedly. The conversations with Arab characters candidly reveal their racism towards blacks, and their intolerance towards other religions other than Muslim (see p.103 for a clear example).The issue of the European aid workers is always a intriguing psychological mystery: "It was against the unspoken rule of aid to admit that all one really wanted was to get away from home" (p.70) regarding Emma. You can make your own ideas about Emma and other aid workers, although intriguing, my own interest remained on the cultural issues at hand.There are more stories that are not dealt with here. We see African aristocracy, tribal high-class studying in nice English universities, going back to Africa to use their education to make war and impose their law on the rest of the people. This is a class worth taking a look at. The aid workers are also a class in itself, their motivations for being there, their personal stories, are all very interesting. All these peoples are interesting. The book should have continued to be like in the first part, more analyses, more summarizing, and less he-said-she-said and soap-opera.

5.0 out of 5 stars An example of "what not to do" while working in development

A. · May 21, 2014

I work in international development, and this book is basically a handbook of how not to behave while working abroad in an aid or NGO environment. I don't want to be too hard on poor Emma, since she passed away some years ago, but I was just stunned at some of the things she's said to have done. I've known some people who treated international development work as a sort of vacation filled with wild times, but never anything on her level! The author knew Emma, perhaps not on a best-friend level, but they seem to have had a professional relationship, which adds to the quality of the narrative. The author does not just tell Emma's story, but sets the book up as a sort of recounting of the travel and research she did to put the book together. I didn't like that at first, but the conversational style was pleasant and it grew on me. You really get to know the places Emma lived, for instance, because the author describes going there, and the interviews seem more personal when placed in the frame of the author's research. Awesome book, would recommend to anyone.

5.0 out of 5 stars thank you Nancy Scroggins

R.L. · January 24, 2012

I couldn't put the book down, I ate it up. I can't get the mental images out of my head and was fascinated as I tried to put myself in Emma's extreme world of war and suffering, corruption and extremes. She was amazing, albeit oblivious and wreckless in ways...but amazing and led with her heart to the point of blindness. She didn't see foreigners living strangely, she saw their reality and wanted them to rise above it. She saw people she related to. I'd rather err as she did in love of a people rather than turn from such passionate feelings for a nation in strife. Fascinating.

Fascinating true story that takes you through the events that ...

k. · July 28, 2017

Fascinating true story that takes you through the events that lead to a fairly uneducated girl (according to the book) but with a charismatic personality, to find herself married to a war lord and embroiled in the bloodshed after venturing to Africa to aid the victims. Interesting to observe how circumstances can lead a person to change their integrity and ideals when power comes into play.

Five Stars

a. · September 26, 2017

good read

Illuminating

S. · September 8, 2013

This is a very good read, which - aside from the personal story of Emma McCune - attempts to explain the complexity of a conflict that very few in the West really understand or really care to understand. A must read for those who are curious and willing to understand.

南スーダンの未開の地で、人道支援に活躍するEmmaという勇気と行動力のある女性が居た

U. · August 16, 2014

日本人にはあまりなじみが無いかもしれないが、これは、三年前の2011年７月９日に長い闘争の末に独立を果たした、南スーダンを舞台とした実話である。　私は、昨年（2013年）12月に、南スーダンの首都ジュバから緊急避難をしてきた。日本政府無償援助によるナイル川に橋を架ける仕事にとりかかる準備をしていたのだが、当時の南スーダンの副大統領だったRiek Macharが起こした反政府活動による争乱により、日本国外務省の避難勧告に従っての脱出だった。国連や国際NGOの職員達も避難を開始しており、空港はその人達で混雑していた事を覚えている。　その反乱を起こしたRiek Macharがイギリス人の白人女性と結婚していたとは、この本を今年の六月にナイロビ（ケニヤ）に出張した時に、本屋で手に取って初めて知ったのだった。それだけに興味をそそられた。　Emmaというのは、イギリスのNGO、Street Kid International の一員として1980年の後半からスーダンで活動していたイギリスの白人女性である。　スーダンという国は、イギリスから独立したその時点から、北部のアラブ系住民が政治や商業の主導権を握っていた。一方、南部のスーダン人は黒人系（Nilotic cattle-herding people、と呼ばれている）で占められており、北部のアラブ系住民によって奴隷としてかどわかされていた、という過去がある。そのようなこともあり、スーダン南部は開発が遅れ、北部との格差が大きかった。その後、南部スーダンは南スーダンとして三年前の2011年７月９日にスーダンから分離独立することができたのである。　この話は、南スーダンが成立する遥か二十数年前の、分離独立に伴う内乱時代の出来事に焦点を当てている。本の発行されたのが2003年ではあるが、今でも十分に読み応えのある、南スーダンに関係している人にとっては必読の書だと思う。　Emmaは、Street Kid Internationalの一員として、分離独立を目指すスーダン南部の黒人で構成される反乱軍（SPLA=Sudan People’s Liberation Army）によって軍事訓練を受けていた南部スーダンの少年達に、教育の機会を与えて社会復帰をさせようとして活動していた。その時に、南部スーダンのNuer族の政府反乱軍の指導者、Riek Macharと出会い、互いに惹かれて結婚するのだった。Macharは反乱軍の幹部ではあったが、少年兵の起用には反対していた。その後、考え方の違いから、SPLAの指導者であるDinka族のJhon Garangに反旗を翻す事になる。「Emma’s war」というのは、その彼女の少年達への教育活動、人権擁護、更には虐げられていた当時（分離独立前の）の南部スーダンの黒人達に対する思い入れを指している。　Emmaの人間性については、354ページからなるこの本を読み進むに連れ、初めはその人道的な勇気と行動力に魅入られ、途中で性に対する奔放さに呆れ、時には嫌悪も感じ、更に、Macharと結婚してからは妻としてMacharに感情移入していることに危うさを感じたのだが、最後には、物怖じしない奔放な性格のままに、未開の地で人道支援に活躍するEmmaという、勇気と行動力を持った女性が居た、という事実を受け入れていたのだった。　一方で、この本から、スーダンと南スーダンとの争いの歴史を知る事が出来た事は、大きな収穫だった。真実に基づいた取材と相俟って、著者の巧みな筋書きには物語性があり、読む人を飽きさせない。そしてEmmaの生き方と平行して述べられている、当時のスーダンと南部スーダンの確執や、エチオピアの南部スーダン反乱軍への肩入れ、石油の採掘を請け負った先進国の石油会社の利便の為に、スーダン政府が、異なる部族の南部スーダンの黒人同士を争わせて採掘現場を確保したこと、（これが南部スーダン人の部族同士の確執をあおって複雑な関係にしてしまった事になるのだが）、アメリカの介入など、当時の歴史を知る事が出来たのはなによりもよかった。　南部スーダンで一大勢力を持つDinka族の長で、SPLAの指導者だったJhon Garangは、独立前にヘリコプター事故で殺される。その後、同じDinka族でJhon Garangの部下であった、Salba Keerが独立後初の大統領となり、現在に至っている。一時は主流派のSPLAに反逆したものの、Nuer族と言う大部族の指導者だった故に、Riek MacharはSalba Keer大統領の元で、副大統領となる。この政体が、冒頭で述べた2013年12月の反乱まで続くのである。　この本から読み解くと、建国の父と讃えられているGarangではあるが、当初は社会主義に傾倒し、更には南スーダンとして独立しなくても、スーダンが世俗国家となり、南部の部族に自由と平等を与えてくれればよい、と考えていた事が分かる。それらは分離独立を目指していたMacharがGarangに対して反旗を翻した理由となるものであり、更には、Garangの尊大さと専制に辟易としていた、などが書かれている。しかし、一般的には、MacharがGarangとの確執の為に、スーダン政府と手を結んだ事は南スーダンの独立を遅れさせたのではないか、と思われており、それは常識的に見て、そうだと思う。　読んでいて落胆し、悲しく思ったのは、反乱軍であるMacharの私兵や、SPLAの兵士達の、規律の無さと、無教養から来ると思われる、同じ南部スーダン人であっても異なる部族への見境の無い殺戮、にである。MacharもGarangも、アメリカやイギリスで博士号を取った程の能力を持ちながら、一方で、兵達の指導力や統率力に必要な自分を律する自制心に欠けていたのかもしれない。飢えに苦しむ避難民の中にあっても優雅な暮らしをしている、彼等の暮らしを見て、兵士は自分もそうあってもよい、と思っていたのだろう、「その身正しければ令せずして行わる。その身正からざれば、令すといえども従わず」という論語の言葉が思い浮かんだ。　著者は女性であるが、その大胆な取材と巧みな記録の展開には敬意を表したい。取材を終えてスーダン政府軍の車で町まで送ってもらう途中で、急な腹痛に襲われ、隠れるところも無い野原で堪らず排便をした、それもトラックに満載されている兵士達の目の前で、には、女性の身でそこまでやるか、とEmmaの持つ積極性にも負けない、その勇気と行動力に驚嘆した。　著者がこの本の中で取り上げた、Emmaを取り巻く人物はたくさん居るが、あるイギリス人女性の人間観が印象深かった。Emmaの奔放な性格は、白人と黒人に関わらず（むしろ黒人に対しての方が多かった、との著者の記述であるが）、性に開放的であった。その事を幾人かのイギリス人は批判しているが、著者はHodgkins氏（幾世代にも渡りアフリカやスーダンと関わってきたイギリスの名家の女主人）がEmmaに会ってその行動力を認めた事に対して、次のように紹介している、「彼女（=Hodgkins）は人間の本質をその性的な道徳観だけで判断する人ではなかった」。私はこの件（くだり）を読んで、Emmaの性の奔放さに対する嫌悪感が消えた。　この本で述べているのは、今から二十年数年も前の日本がバブルで浮かれていた1980年後半から90年初期の事についてである。その頃既に南部スーダンの黒人達の間では、スーダン政府と戦う一方で、Nuer族とDinka族が部族間同士の反目から殺戮を繰り返していたのだった。遠く離れたアフリカ北部の話なので何の知識も関心も無かったのは、無理ない事かもしれないが、今、南スーダンに関わる身となったことを思料すると、その無知だったことに恥じるばかりである。　　この本のおかげで、今後ジュバに戻った時に新たな眼で南スーダンの人々を見る事が出来ると思っている。また、危険を顧みずに細部まで取材し、見事な作品を作り上げた著者に敬意を表したい。

Fascinating

C. · May 15, 2024

I am interested in the history of Sudan but the book gets a little confusing in places and would have benefitted from some graphics explaining the groups/leaders/alliances/priorities (islamic/ xtian /secular etc).

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Emma's War: A True Story

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