Emmas War: Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan

(Paperback)

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This is the story of aid worker Emma McCune. Beautiful, compassionate, driven in her work, she was famous throughout eastern Africa and the aid community for going about her work in a mini-skirt. Initially a Princess Diana, she became a Lady Macbeth after marrying one of the local warlords, who was deeply enmeshed in both rebellion and murder. Her eventual death in a road accident commanded a full-page in the Independent, and the fascination of her story continues. It is a mixture of Romeo and Juliet and Heart of Darkness, with a large helping of Graham Greene; a story about love and lust and power and corruption and revolution.

Reviews

'Ever since Victorian abolitionists and Christian missionaries traveled to Khartoum in the 19th century, the British aid worker, whether liberal do-gooder or conservative God-giver, has sought, many times over, to help Sudan's helpless. As Deborah Scroggins shows in her brilliantly penetrating portrait of one such worker, Emma McCune, those who think they are helping are more often than not harming. And those they are harming are far less helpless than their would-be rescuers have wanted to know. In her, Scroggins has found a feckless, captivating subject, as insufferable as the white man's insatiable need for redemption in Africa' Washington Post 'Deborah Scroggins uses the romantic aspects of this beautiful white woman's story to draw in unsuspecting readers. But she has a sharp eye, and her real aim is to tease out the inconsistencies of Emma McCune's brutally short life as a way of looking at how foreigners through the ages have involved themselves in the Sudan...Emma's War is about the politics of the belly, and what happens when the fat white paunch meets the swollen stomachs of the hungry in Africa. It is a sorry story, but Ms Scroggins tells it awfully well' Economist 'Emma's dreams, delusions and failures are those of all the white people who have tried to bring their idea of the good to Sudan. This is what makes her story, told so well here, worth telling' New York Times Book Review 'The most revealing book on Africa and the West's obsession with it that I have read in several years' --Robert D. Kaplan, author of The Ends of the Earth and The Coming Anarchy

Author Bio

Deborah Scroggins is the author of Emma's War, which was translated into ten languages and won the Ridenhour Truth-Telling Prize. Scroggins has written for the Sunday Times Magazine, The Nation, Vogue, Granta, and many other publications, and she won two Overseas Press Club awards and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award as a foreign correspondent for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She divides her time between Barnstable, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C.