EMMA'S WAR, by Deborah Scroggins

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The Nation.

The African Predicament

by DEBORAH SCROGGINS

[from the June 14, 2004 issue]

Howard French has written a passionate, heartbreaking and ultimately heartbroken book about covering West Africa's blood-soaked descent into a nightmare of war and greed as a reporter for the New York Times in the 1990s. The book is called A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, and, much as French wished it otherwise, there is far more tragedy than hope in it.

It has become something of a tradition for the correspondents of America's major newspapers to write a tour d' horizon upon concluding a stint on the continent. After David Lamb's The Africans was published to commercial and critical success in 1983, we had Blaine Harden's Africa: Dispatches From a Fragile Continent in 1991; Alan Cowell's Killing the Wizards: Wars of Power and Freedom From Zaire to South Africa in 1992; Keith B. Richburg's Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa in 1997; and Bill Berkeley's The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe and Power in the Heart of Africa in 2001. Since Lamb's time, the books have grown progressively bleaker, and French's may be the bleakest of all. Although French abhors the war porn he believes dominates most coverage of Africa, the continent's rot has advanced to a point where it is almost impossible to look beyond it. It is a situation that angers and sickens French all the more because he has a deeper and more profound connection to the continent than most journalists.

French fell in love with Africa before he gave any thought to journalism. Growing up in the United States, he was reminded by his proud African-American parents of black achievements at every turn. His father, a doctor, moved the family to Ivory Coast so that he could run a regional health program. After graduating from college, French spent six years living in Abidjan, first as a translator and university lecturer and finally as a freelance reporter. He married an Ivorian, learned several African languages and read widely and deeply about African culture and history.

He writes that he accepted the Times's West Africa bureau in 1994 "as a personal challenge." He would not become a "fireman" chasing one disaster after another to satisfy what he regarded as "the world media's insatiable market in images of horror." He would not make heroes out of Westerners rushing to the rescue. He would show his readers Africa's strengths as well as its weaknesses.

It was not to be. The blaze already licking at West Africa when French returned burst into an inferno, forcing French to play the fireman after all and eventually burning him so badly that he felt lucky to escape. Sent to Mobutu's Zaire in 1995 to cover the outbreak of the ebola virus, he was wary of "rushing toward another lurid African mess that, thanks to the magic of television, had become the global story of the week." Within a year, he would find himself covering the collapse of Zaire itself and the death of millions sucked into its conflicts. As he struggled to make sense of what was happening--and especially the disastrous consequences of the Clinton Administration's decision to hand a wide swath of the continent over to a brand-new set of dictators (often euphemistically described as "strong-men"), starting with Rwanda's Paul Kagame--Africa fell further and further outside the orbit of world attention.

Following US foreign policy is part of a Times correspondent's job, and French's book gives an unusually depressing account of American hypocrisy and mendacity toward Africa. The Clinton Administration wished Africa well. But it was not willing to risk American lives, treasure or votes even to halt the most gargantuan African tragedies, much less to foster African democracy, human rights or economic development. The "African Renaissance" the President was eager to trumpet turned out in large part to amount to opening the doors for American corporations eager to extract the continent's resources. Struggling democracies such as Mali's received little or no help (though when one considers the fate of such countries as Nigeria and Angola, which attracted more solicitous notice, perhaps indifference is a blessing in disguise). After the killing of eighteen US Rangers in Somalia, the Administration declined in 1994 to intervene when Rwandan Hutus began slaughtering their Tutsi compatriots by the hundreds of thousands, or even to call what was happening a genocide. "If we use the word 'genocide' and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [Congressional] election?" French quotes Susan Rice, a rising young black star who would soon be named Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, as saying in April of that year.

Paul Kagame's Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front finally relieved the Administration of this embarrassment by invading Rwanda and seizing power there. The Clintonites rewarded him with a shower of patronage. In a further attempt to evade responsibility, they allowed Rwanda's new Tutsi leaders and their Ugandan allies to carve up Zaire, now known again as Congo, while pursuing their vendetta against Hutu refugees hiding in that country. And the Administration turned a blind eye toward the Western businessmen who formed a series of unholy alliances with Rwandan, Ugandan and other warlords feasting on Zaire's carcass to maintain control over West Africa's oil, diamond, cobalt and other natural resources. The result has been the Congo wars, known in Africa as "Africa's World War." As French writes about the onset of the wars:

Since independence, instability and bad governance had been Africa's twin Achilles' heels. They were the two internal weaknesses most immediately responsible for the continent's persistent misery, and the fighting that had just begun under Washington's generous political cover would spew both of these plagues across Central Africa, sowing political unrest, armed conflict and humanitarian disasters for at least the next decade.

If one moment symbolizes the US-African relationship chronicled in this book, it's when Clinton's UN envoy Bill Richardson visited Zaire in 1997. In the midst of his efforts to engineer the departure of longtime US ally Mobutu Sese Seko in favor of America's new, Rwandan-backed favorite, Laurent Kabila, Richardson invited French to accompany him on a side trip to rebel-held Kisangani. Richardson's intention was to demonstrate Washington's concern for the Hutu refugees Kabila's forces had been massacring. "There was an absurd proposition behind the stopover: a photo-op amid a holocaust," French writes. Kisangani was the "innermost river station" of the Belgian Congo, the last place from which boats leave up the Congo River, a brooding place of innumerable horrors. On the day he and Richardson arrived, a fresh surge of Hutu refugees confirmed that in the forest only thirty miles away, Kabila's men were engaged in massacring Hutus, including women and children. Aides quickly ushered Richardson toward a distraught mother carrying an infant.

Like any American politician, the envoy reached for the baby as he spoke a few sympathetic words to the mother. "Richardson's face bore the most basic expression of human sympathy and recognition of life's fragility, and his pity appeared entirely genuine," French writes. But this was Africa, not America. The moment Richardson reached for the baby, it died.

Needless to say, the baby's death didn't make the US evening news. And despite Richardson's assurances, Washington has made sure the revenge massacres of the Hutus and all the others who have died in the Congo wars have never really registered on the American consciousness, although at an estimated 3 to 4 million, the number of dead is truly astounding--far greater than the 800,000 memorialized during the recent ceremonies marking Rwanda's genocide or indeed in any other conflict since World War II.

Seeking to account for the West's indifference to Congo's nightmare, French does not spare the media. He blames himself for failing to do the "rudimentary ethnic detective work" that would have allowed him to spot Zaire's "Banyamulenge uprising" for the Rwandan-inspired Tutsi coup that it was. And he feels that in chasing the tale of Mobutu's fall, he and other reporters lost sight of the human carnage taking place inside Zaire's rainforest. But he reserves his most serious criticism for the New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch, whose reporting on the Rwandan genocide--later published as a book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction--made a deep impression on President Clinton. In French's view, Gourevitch mistakenly applied the template of the Holocaust to Rwanda's genocide, comparing the Tutsis to the European Jews and Kagame's regime to Israel. As the Congo wars got under way, Gourevitch's pieces became enormously influential in Washington. "Emotionally overpowering but deeply flawed analogies with Israel and with European Jewry and the Holocaust," he writes, "began to drive Washington's policies in Central Africa."

French believes that in portraying the Tutsis as unalloyed victims, Gourevitch turned a wrenching history of intercommunal struggle into a facile morality tale--with serious implications for the American policy-makers who accepted it. "The Tutsi, unlike Europe's Jews," he writes, "were a small minority that had enjoyed feudal tyrannies in Rwanda and neighboring Burundi for centuries. In Burundi they perpetrated genocide against the Hutu three times in a generation, and in both countries they were committed to winning or retaining power by force of arms." French says that Gourevitch, whose girlfriend's brother was Clinton spokesman James Rubin, not only played an important role in selling Laurent Kabila to Washington but downplayed the Rwandan-backed slaughter of the Hutu refugees in Congo. French is not alone in his disagreement with Gourevitch. Indeed, it could be argued that Gourevitch's readiness to view the Hutu-Tutsi conflict through the prism of the Holocaust is but another version of the intellectual laziness French notes among so many Western reporters and others, who insist on defining Africa and its problems in Western terms rather than making the effort to learn enough about Africa to begin to understand it on its own ethnic and political terms. But I would add another reason for America's lack of interest in the Congo dead: In Congo, unlike in Rwanda, the murder, rape and mayhem continues to this day. With the need to act still apparent enough to tickle our collective conscience, we do not care to look too closely.

And, human nature being what it is, very few outsiders are ever going to care enough to put Africa's interests ahead of their own. Given this, one wishes that French had shared more of his thoughts about what Africans themselves can do to improve matters, regardless of what the West does. How can Africa rectify the weakness that has bedeviled its relations with the rest of the world ever since the days of the slave trade?

Early in the book, French retells the story of Affonso, the King of the Kongo, who wrote to the king of Portugal in 1526 to deplore "the monstrous greed" that led his fellow Africans to sell even members of their own families in exchange for Western goods. The king of Portugal's reply was "brutal in its simplicity," French writes. "Kongo," he said, "had nothing else to sell."

Brutal though it is, the king's reply still stands. The vast majority of Africans still lack the means to buy or make the goods they need and want, including such basics as rudimentary medicine, clean water and elementary schooling. Far too often, Africa's ruling classes are willing to kill or essentially enslave their fellow citizens or consign them to lives of misery in exchange for a shot at a few foreign luxuries. (We are quick to condemn such "vampire elites" even as we take entirely for granted the Western, middle-class lifestyle to which they aspire and see no other means of gaining.) Colonialism was sold to European and American publics as a humanitarian effort to deal with the wars, slave-raiding and economic exploitation that resulted in the late nineteenth century from this historic imbalance in Africa's terms of trade, internal and external. When that project failed to solve the underlying problem, the West erected African nation-states in its own image. Now these states are falling to pieces. The spectacular failure of both models has left us right back where King Affonso started: "Corruption and depravity are so widespread that our land is entirely depopulated."

But perhaps it is churlish to ask French to answer such questions when he has already told us so much in this book. By the time he fell ill with malaria in 1997, French, like so many others, was burned out. "I began to conclude that Africa was starting to kill me," he writes. "So many loves had kept me going here: the beauty and the unfussy grace of the people, the amazing food--yes, the food--music rich beyond comparison, the sheer immediacy of human contact, the pleasure of living by my wits. But the grim truth was that a single mosquito bite had contained enough deadly force to lay me very low indeed." One can only hope that after a period away, he regains his strength and returns for another round with Africa, in all her loves and her sadnesses, too.

Contemporary Review

Jan. 2004

Sudan and the plight of Liberal English Ladies

Emma's War: Love and Death in Sudan's War - Book Review

by Venetia Ansell

Emma's War: Love and Death in Sudan's War. Deborah Scroggins. HarperCollins.  £ 17.99. 220 pages. ISBN 0-00-257027-0.

The Sudan is one of the few havens from the white world--rather appropriately, given that soudan is the Arabic word for black. The Christian South of the country is all but closed to the world--no roads, no post, no phones. Pale skin is conspicuous; khawajas or foreigners are a novelty and Emma McCune, the subject of Deborah Scroggins' study, caused a small sensation. Aid workers and missionaries worldwide have exchanged the starched matronly look of colonial times for an all too caricaturable outfit of ill-fitting garments, celebrated above all for their practicality. Emma's miniskirt formed an incongruous addition to this parade of shapeless sack dresses, zip off trousers and sandals.

Deborah Scroggins fills in just enough background details--the philandering father, the fashionable London scene and the early Oxford connections with the Sudan--to help to explain Emma's flamboyance and drive. But, in successful defiance of the current psychoanalysis trend among biographers, she does not seek to justify her subject's every move with an explanatory reference to the past. She does, though, account for Emma's attraction to the Sudan. Firstly, the young English girl had a predilection for dark skin. Her experiments, first with foreign friends in England and then with the genuine article in the Sudan, were consummated in her marriage with Riek Machar--a senior warlord in John Garang's rebel group, the Sudan People's Liberation Army.

Then, of course, the romance. For not only did Emma develop an erotic fascination with the Africans; Africa herself proved irresistible. Here, Deborah Scroggins--a leading American journalist writing extensively on this side of Africa--excels. She examines the over-documented form of colonialism practised by the aid workers, the politically correct way of sating the Western need to help Africa. She also takes a look at the African side of things. Not many dare to criticize different cultures in today's live-and-let-live attitude. But Western failure in countries such as the Sudan is partially a result of local failure to cooperate. African inefficiency is notorious for a reason. The narrative often veers off to delve into the taboos of slavery, to describe a sickening famine scene at Safaha, or to analyse the new breed of expat socialites in Nairobi. Miss Scroggins' interest in the Sudan is a many faceted thing.

However it is Emma, by virtue of her marriage to Riek, who enables the author to gather these different strands into one bundle. Such a marriage was unlikely to be a smooth affair. Pitched against the infinitely fractured politics of the Sudanese civil war, it became a veritable thorn bush, pricking all but the most wary. Emma also provides a pitiable study in divided loyalties. The fervent idealist was transformed by her marriage. Emma was compromised--her husband was committing the very atrocities against which she had so effectively campaigned. In following her Sudanese spouse so faithfully, she betrayed his country--the same country which she had set out to save.

Deborah Scroggins is ambiguous in her portrayal of Emma. Is she really the guileless victim? Her premature death adds drama to the story; but Miss Scroggins is careful not to cast her as the martyr. Still, one is left wondering whether her role was truly great. The overly detailed political analyses do go some way in placing Emma's story in perspective: very important people with very important agendas are the real players. The Sudanese have named that phase of the fifty-year-long civil war after Emma, immortalising their khawaja in stories and songs. In the West, such figureheads are insubstantial.

Nicole enters movie maelstrom

By Stephanie Bunbury
Age correspondent
London

April 16, 2005

A planned film about an aid worker who joined the fight of Sudanese rebels has her family furious.

Emma McCune was beautiful, determined, romantic and very tall. So when Hollywood producers decided to turn her life into a film, the part seemed made for Australian film star Nicole Kidman.

In recent weeks, however, Ms Kidman has found herself at the centre of a pitched battle between an angry, bereaved family and the producers of the forthcoming film Emma's War.

Ms McCune, a young aspiring English aid worker, went to war-torn Sudan in 1987, full of zeal and determined to help. After working as a teacher, she found work with the Canadian organisation Street Kids International and founded more than 100 village schools in the country's devastated south.

She then made headlines at home when she met and married a rebel guerilla commander, Riek Machar. Their attraction was, apparently, instant; the liaison cost her her job. After they married, she lived with him behind the battlelines of one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century. She had just retreated to Nairobi to have her first child when she died, at 29, in a car crash. The high drama of Emma's story is surely made for Hollywood.

Sure enough, Tony Scott, brother of Ridley, is slated to direct an adaptation of a biography of Ms McCune written by American journalist Deborah Scroggins, Emma's War.

Tony Scott last directed Kidman in Days of Thunder, the film that brought her together with Tom Cruise. He is best known for action films.

But for the McCune family, Emma's short and volatile life is not just an adventure story. For them, it is a matter of respecting her memory. They have no objection to seeing a film about her, says Emma's brother Johnny McCune, but they want to be consulted. Most importantly, they do not want a film based on Scroggins' award-winning biography, which Johnny McCune called "underhand and sloppy journalism".

Scroggins' book, Mr McCune said, portrayed his sister unfairly as "a mini-skirted hooker who slept her way to the top" and insinuated she was partly responsible for genocide in rebel Sudan. Scroggins had not checked her material for accuracy, he said. "She writes about my father that he was a convicted fraudster, when he wasn't. She goes into their marriage, but she didn't speak to my mother."

His mother, Maggie McCune, also wrote a book about her daughter, Till the Sun Grows Cold, published in 1999. It also had been optioned for film development, Mr McCune said. "But my mother's film was shelved once the Scotts announced theirs, as there is not room for two films."

He has approached Kidman's agent to ask her not to take part in Emma's War. "I suspect Nicole Kidman has no idea that she is about to embark on a project which makes the real cast of the story - my family - saddened and shocked," he said.

The agent had advised him that Kidman was yet to sign up for the film, "but there seems to be loads of press about it, with pictures of Nicole Kidman with Tony and Ridley Scott on all the movie sites".

This is not unusual in Hollywood, where actors are often provisionally "attached", sometimes for years, to films that are yet to be financed or scheduled.

Like Scroggins, said Mr McCune, nobody involved with the film had approached the family for advice. Oddly enough, he said, scriptwriter Steve Knight was an old colleague. "But he won't show me the script. I rang and said I can't believe you're doing this, but he won't call me back. I was led to believe he was told not to."

Mr McCune is confident Kidman would want to meet the family and get the real story before she played his sister. "I believe she is very thorough and would be likely to approach us anyway," he said.

Scroggins has denied that her book "sexed up" the aid worker's story. "There is nothing sloppy about my journalism. Sex is part of the story. She had a passionate affair and married Riek Machar. That's what made her different," she said.

Scroggins has won several significant awards for her journalism, including the 2003 Ron Ridenhour Award for Truth-Telling for Emma's War.

According to her book, Emma McCune was a controversial figure when she was alive, too. Various anecdotes paint her as reckless, self-absorbed and vain, given to wearing short skirts when other aid workers deliberately dressed down in khaki baggies. When she threw in her lot with Machar, she crossed a line of neutrality essential to any aid work, then used her status to become his pamphleteer to Western organisations, including aid donors. Worst of all, she was determinedly blind to the fact that her husband's breakaway rebel faction was as brutal and corrupt as the others.

Scroggins does acknowledge, however, that many Sudanese loved "the tall woman from small Britain". And there was no doubting her colourful personality or the force of her commitment, which continue to have some surprising legacies. Take Emmanuel Jal, a boy soldier adopted by Ms McCune at 13, who has recently emerged as Kenya's answer to Eminem.

Ms McCune met him as one of 11 survivors from 400 soldiers who made a three-month trek across country to defect to her husband's faction and engineered his escape to Kenya hidden on an aid flight. Now 25, he has been contacted by the Scott brothers to talk about his adoptive mother.

A spokesman for Tony Scott's office said the film was still in very early stages. "We don't even have a script yet," he said. "I can't tell you who is attached and who isn't. Call us back in three years."

Child soldier turned rap star

Saved from waging war at age 13 by an aid worker, Emmanuel Jal is now busy with other projects -- promoting peace in Africa and helping with a film, starring Nicole Kidman, about his rescuer.

By Vanessa Thorpe

March 22, 2005  |  Emmanuel Jal is a rap star who already holds the key to international success in his hands. The hottest thing to hit Nairobi, Kenya, and quite possibly the entire African music scene, for some time, he is Sudanese by birth and a former child soldier. His music is already at the top of the charts in his adopted home of Kenya. It is also gaining a big following in the United States.

An excerpt from Emma's War, here