Customer Rating: 
Summary: The Heart of Darkness still beats
Comment: Like a lot of people, I have entertained idle thoughts of going and doing aid work in Africa. This book hasn't deterred me, but through its examination of the life of one person, does 'dramatise' the issues involved.These are...
The unexamined motivations of young people to do aid work as a way of escaping an emotionally and physically 'boring' developed world (Scroggins makes mention on several occasions the incomprehension of the African towards the kawahaja (white person) - "we'd far rather be in London")
The limited vocabulary the western media has for describing white women in Africa - dispensers of aid or venerated queens.
The impossibility of delivering aid to refugees without compromising your moral stand - the armed men control access to the refugee camps, eat first (and best) and see getting aid as a zero-sum game played against their military opponents.
The most compelling part of the book is Emma's change from aid worker to lover/wife of a charismatic military commander, and the subsequent betrayal of the ostensible motives that led her out of Europe in the first place.
Scroggins writes the book from three angles, of her own investigation in the civil wars and conflicts in the country, her meetings and subsequent documenting of Emma's life, and as necessary, a history of Sudan and the Upper Nile region. Her own love for this part of the world comes through, as does a quite clear-eyed recognition of the limitations of any options for outside parties in trying to 'aid' a country in the grip of conflict.
A reviewer elsewhere thought that Emma was closer to a Greene character in her naivete and good intentions, though I think that I would stay with the Conradian interpretation that it was the situation of the war and the cheapness of life that create a re-orientation from Western to African values. Which to our eyes is the horror.
