The tribal bloodletting sparked off by Kenya’s recent elections shows the danger of assuming a country has reached political maturity. Today’s Uganda is usually regarded as a rare African success story (just like Kenya before December) and its president, Yoweri Museveni, as a darling of the West. Perhaps this is not surprising given what went before (Idi Amin, the Butcher of Uganda) and the country’s violent neighbourhood, sandwiched between the war zones of eastern Congo, southern Sudan and Rwanda.

Yet north of the Nile, which splits the country, Uganda has been in the grip of one of the continent’s longest running and ugliest civil wars for most of the 21 years of Museveni’s rule. It is also one of the most bizarre. The former Catholic altar boy Joseph Kony, head of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), is generally seen as a Christian madman who communicates with spirits and wants to turn Uganda into a theocratic state based on the Ten Commandments. He doesn’t seem to mind if he breaks a few on the way – the LRA relies on abducting children to become fighters or sex slaves and cutting off ears or padlocking lips of those who protest. So horrific are the LRA’s acts that Kony was the first person to have an arrest warrant issued by the United Nations International Criminal Court when it was set up in 2005.

As a Reuters reporter churning out copy from the relative comfort of Nairobi, Matthew Green found himself regurgitating formulaic one-paragraph descriptions of a “self-proclaimed prophet leading a ragtag army”. Editors would call him from London to demand, “Get the bit about the Ten Commandments up high.” Even when he travelled to northern Uganda to talk to victims it was just for a few days to write the stereotyped story of “rebels in an obscure corner of Africa doing awful things to innocent people”.

To his immense credit, Green became intrigued and decided to go in search of the man behind the one-paragraph description. “My question was simple,” he writes. “How could one maniac leading an army of abducted children hold half a country hostage for 20 years?”

The problem is that Kony is almost as elusive as Osama Bin Laden, and Green does not have the foreign correspondent’s luck of being in the right place at the right time. So it is that he sets off on a six-month trip across northern Uganda, eastern Congo and Sudan – and, at one point, Croydon – yet manages to be on a day trip to Darfur when Kony finally decides to present himself to a group of journalists in a hideout in the Congolese forest.

It must have been incredibly frustrating, particularly as by this point Green is running out of money. He makes the best of it though and, aside from a few too many accounts of bus journeys, he is a likeable guide to one of the world’s most underreported battle-grounds. Downplaying his own discomforts, he writes vividly of places such as the Acholi Inn in the northern city of Gulu where amnestied former LRA commanders while away their days drinking Red Bull and watching premiership matches. Most of them support Arsenal, because as militia men they identify with the team’s nickname, the Gunners.

Through talking to Kony’s former schoolmates, his fighters and his victims, Green tries to understand what lies behind the would-be Messiah who set off from his village in 1987, with just 11 followers, a white dove and no guns – and the disapproval of his mum. We learn of a man who prefers to communicate with spirits than to use the telephone, and who takes his pick of abducted girls to amass 88 wives and numerous children, including one called George Bush.

Most interesting of the people Green gets to know is Moses, an escaped former LRA commander who was abducted as a 16-year-old school prefect with dreams of becoming a vet. As he and his schoolmates were whipped with logs and he watched one of his brothers being killed, Moses decided that survival lay in employing the strategy of “if you can’t beat them join them”. But he didn’t give up his ambitions. When they raided a school and abducted 139 girls, he made sure to pick up a biology textbook.

Among the fascinating snippets Moses imparts is how the rebels are promised immunity from bullets if they follow a strange set of rules – respect water, no shouting when crossing rivers and no eating of mutton, pork or pigeon. Yet in some senses this admirable book is a frustrating read. We never really do get to know Kony the man or what motivated him. What we do get is Green maturing as a journalist to discover that the reality is far more complicated than the tinpot god he set off to seek. Kony is one of the Acholi people who felt excluded after the overthrow of the northern leader Milton Obote by Museveni. It is the Acholi who are the real victims, caught between the rebels and soldiers of a government that herded them into camps in order to deprive Kony of support. Instead of ending the rebellion these camps rendered hundreds of thousands of people dependent on UN handouts and resentful at not being able to farm their own fertile land.

As Green writes, it is a war that would not be able to continue without the support of southern Sudan – and the complicity of Museveni. Blaming the conflict on an evil madman plays into the president’s hands, enabling him to avoid dealing with the legitimate grievances of the Acholi and allowing his donors in Washington and London to turn a blind eye.

Since Green did his research last year, a ceasefire has been in place and peace talks to end the war are currently underway. Whatever happens next, this was a quest worth following, even if it did leave this particular reader wanting to know more. The author is a journalist to watch.

THE WIZARD OF THE NILE: The Hunt for Africa’s Most Wanted by Matthew Green
Portobello £16.99 pp335

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