Conville & Walsh

Somewhere in the jungles of Uganda, there hides a fugitive rebel leader: he is said to take his orders direct from the spirit world and, together with his ragged army of brutalised child soldiers, he has left a bloody trail of devastation across his country. Joseph Kony is now an official enemy in the US War on Terror and wanted in Europe for war crimes, and yet nobody really knows who he is or what he is fighting for.

Intrigued by the myths, Matthew Green heads off into a war zone, determined to track down the man himself. Along the way, he meets the victims abducted, raped or maimed by Kony’s soldiers, the refugees living in poverty and fear in overcrowded camps, the mediators trying to bring peace to this desperately divided land, and the political leaders who have their own reasons for allowing the war to shudder on.

The Wizard of the Nile is the first book to peel back the layers of mysticism and murky politics surrounding Kony, to shine a searching light onto this forgotten conflict, and to tell the gripping human story behind an inhumane war.

About the Author

Born in 1976, Matthew Green studied African politics at university, and has spent four years on the ground in East Africa as a reporter for Reuters. He is now the West Africa correspondent for the Financial Times. This is his first book.