Africa faces many problems, from disease epidemics to genocide to civil war.  But none of these problems is as confusing or intriguing as the problems caused by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) led by Joseph Kony, the so-called “wizard of the Nile.”  The standard description in newspaper reports of Kony paints a disturbing portrait:

A self-proclaimed prophet who claims to take orders from a holy spirit, Kony wants to rule Uganda according to the biblical Ten Commandments.  His Lord’s Resistance Army rebels have abducted thousands of children for use as soldiers, porters, and sex slaves.  They are reviled for cutting off their victims’ ears and padlocking their lips.

Matthew Green’s compelling nonfiction account of Kony’s crusade, The Wizard of the Nile, follows Green’s search for the enigmatic Kony.  Simultaneously, we see the devastating consequences of twenty years of conflict between the rebels and the Ugandan government.   Green, a former East Africa correspondent for Reuters, started with a simple question: “How could one man leading an army of abducted children hold a country hostage for over twenty years?”  But after traveling through the villages of northern Uganda and southern Sudan, and witnessing life under a government based on corruption, it became all too clear that the problems run much deeper than a maniac abducting and leading child soldiers. 

Green’s search for Kony, part quest and part horror story, starts in Gulu, a tiny village near Kony’s hometown.  Having been there once before, Green recalls a man giving him a photograph of a cooking pot with “what appeared to be a human leg [poking] out from the top.  Bodies lay strewn on the ground, missing limbs.  The man scurried away before I could figure out what had happened.”  This time, however, Green acknowledges that his previous visit did not provide him with enough information.  He had blindly accepted what was going on around him.

Green realizes that in order to understand Kony more fully, he must learn more about the culture in which Kony grew up. Upon arriving in Odek, Kony’s birthplace, Green observes that “the land of the Acholi [a north Ugandan tribe] was so fertile I could have fed the whole country,” but the people cannot farm because the government prohibits farming and instead has set up “camps” that the people cannot leave.  The logic behind this tactic is to prevent the townspeople from assisting Kony and his rebels.  But, as Green points out, “instead of ending the rebellion, they had rendered huge numbers of people dependent on monthly food deliveries from the United Nations.”  This is where the problem in Uganda starts.  The townspeople do not like Kony, but they love their children.  It is impossible to ask them to refrain from helping their abducted children, but by doing so they help Kony.  This, in turn, hurts the small towns doubly as they are not only attacked by Kony but are also deprived by the government of a means to earn a living and to acquire food.  The focus of Green’s book is not necessarily Joseph Kony himself, but instead the terrible problems faced by the people of Uganda because of Kony’s fight with the government.  It is a tragic and unfortunate situation, and it is the people who are suffering, not the government or Kony.  Green treats each Ugandan person he encounters in the book with respect.  He does not judge the opinions of Ugandan army lieutenants, nor does he judge the commentary of Vincent Otti, Kony’s second in command.  This book works because Green evokes the horror that the Ugandan people have lived through at the expense of the government and Joseph Kony. 

The best example of Green’s refusal to mock the customs of the people occurs when he recounts his meetings with many Odek residents who knew Kony as a child.  The descriptions of Kony’s childhood do not mesh with his life today.  Kony never fought: “older boys would try to provoke the pair [Kony and his brother] into a fight by insulting their mothers, but Kony never took the bait.”  Kony was an expert in the Acholi’s traditional and ritual dances.  Things changed suddenly, though, when Kony “was forced by the spirits” to become a witchdoctor. We learn that “he could even have died if he had refused, so he accepted to become a witchdoctor and healed many people.”  Although he knows that spirits do not exist in this manner and that the “cures” of the witchdoctors are not really cures, Green treats the customs and beliefs of the Acholi as sacred.  He treats them in the same reverential manner as the people with whom he speaks. Matters took a new twist when Kony “gathered people to tell them that he had received a new spirit, the Holy Spirit, which had come to him so that he could go and fight to overthrow the government.”  From that point on, Kony and the Ugandan government, led by President Museveni, have been in constant conflict.

Green’s journalistic style is perfectly suited to this incredibly complex subject.  By simplifying his speech and focusing on his narrative and those of the people he meets, Green keeps both the audience’s attention and sympathy.  Although he maintains his reporter’s style, he does not become detached or cold about the material he presents.  Green clearly feels deeply saddened by the crisis in Uganda, and he lets his compassion show. 

As the story progresses, we meet two key figures who know Kony personally, Father Carlos Rodriguez, a Spanish missionary, and Moses, a former lieutenant in the LRA.  Father Carlos has long sought to end the conflict between the LRA and the Ugandan government, and in the process has met with the LRA many times.  Green’s conversations with Father Carlos provide insight into Kony’s current mindset: “‘For me the man is a psychopath,’ [Father Carlos] said.  ‘He may be laughing with you and very cordial, saying that he really wants peace, but the next minute he’s very angry and shouting and making threats and saying he’s going to give orders to kill everybody.’”  The most touching and terrible story is that of Moses, a former lieutenant in the LRA, who recalls the night he was abducted:

He was not sure what had woken him — the flashlight shining in his face, or the hand shaking his bunk.  The rebels roped 39 boys together and marched them into the night, including Moses and his two half-brothers. ... Young gunmen tore off branches and whipped the new “recruits.” Moses knew not to cry out, clenching his teeth through dozens of strokes.  Then he watched as an officer singled out one of his brothers, Baptist, for a demonstration.  He was given what Kony’s men call a “rest.” Rebels forced him to lie down and then began to hit his head with a log.

Green’s interactions with all the different people in Kony’s life, written in straight-forward prose of a reporter, bring the problems in northern Uganda into our consciousness.  Moses’s story is heart-breaking and terrifying, yet also filled with hope.  He overcame the terrible circumstances into which he was thrown, leading us to consider at least the possibility that the situation can be remedied.  He escaped and now lives peacefully with his mother, wife, and children.  Likewise, Father Carlos’s best friend was murdered by the LRA, and yet he still keeps trying to achieve peace.  Green shows us that there is hope in this terrible situation, coming from the people of Uganda and their allies. Throughout his encounters with former LRA members, soldiers in the Ugandan Army, and the politicians trying to find a solution to this terrible problem, Green focuses on the success that Moses and Father Carlos have had despite the awful circumstances.  

As his money dwindles and his deadline creeps closer, Green, along with a group of journalists from around the world, finally gets a chance to meet Kony.  The trip to the Congo-Uganda border is arduous, but once there Green is rewarded with an opportunity to talk to the wizard of the Nile in person.  When asked “Who are you?”, Kony responds, “I am a man, I am a human being, I am Joseph Kony.  Those words people say to me, that is propaganda, because they spoil my name like that, so people will not love me as a human being.”  Green’s meeting  with Kony inspires his understanding of the entire terrible situation in northern Uganda:

I assumed he would exude something of the aura that held his army together.  But facing the questions from a bunch of bedraggled journalists, he looked almost pathetic.  The best defense he could muster for all his crimes was: “I am a human being.”  The wizard of the Nile was simply a man, and he was afraid.

The stories of Kony might have created a myth about him, one that is deservingly terrifying, but the reality of Kony is that he does not live up to the myths.  Green shows us that he is not the awe-inspiring, charismatic maniac of the newspaper reports, nor the wizard of the local myths.  He is simply a human being afraid for his life.

Green finally has an answer to his original question, “How could one maniac hold half a country hostage for twenty years?  I was beginning to realize that, even before I met Kony, I had begun to find the answer.  He hadn’t.  At least, not by himself.”  Joseph Kony has committed terrible atrocities in the name of the Ten Commandments, but “it became clear that the conflict had much clearer origins than talk of Satan or spirits would suggest.  The roots of Kony’s war stretched all the way back to the north-south divide crystallized under colonial rule, then nourished by Uganda’s cycles of post-independence bloodshed.”  Green’s search has shown both him and us that the man demonized by the Ugandan government is, in the end, merely a way for the government to disguise deeper problems.

 As long as the conflict was portrayed as the result of one man’s seemingly inexplicable ‘evil,’ there was no need for people to look any deeper.  And blaming one ‘madman’ played right into Museveni’s hands. ... Casting Kony as the arch villain of the piece made it easier for Museveni’s powerful backers in London and Washington to turn a blind eye, not only to his failure in dealing with the conflict, but to their complicity in tacitly endorsing his strategy.

The situation in Uganda is not a result solely of the actions of Joseph Kony and the LRA, but grows from the corruption of the entire government.  Throughout his journey, Green emphasizes the plight of the people of northern Uganda, who are being used by both sides.  Their children are being abducted to join an army of rebels who terrorize them, and the government does not want to solve the problem completely, fearing it will lose support and have no one to blame for its failures. 

The Wizard of the Nile covers a sensitive and terrifying topic that for too long has gone unnoticed.  Matthew Green explores the topic without becoming patronizing or falling back on clichés about Kony and the LRA.  Written with empathy but also a reporter’s objectivity, Green captures what the average people of northern Uganda are thinking about the situation. He explains how the problems that arise from the unfortunate circumstances are important not because they involve a lone madman, but because they affect people who have lost their children and their ability to maintain a normal life.  Matthew Green’s book provides much needed insight into the origins of this tragedy and hope for a positive solution.

In his own way, Rob Mrkonich ‘11 is, perhaps, the most dangerous man who ever lived!