Emma’s War

"Emma’s War looks at how women who enter conflict zones to assist, at times end up getting caught up in the chaos and pathos of war. It’s a story of one woman’s experience, an aid worker who became the second wife of a Sudanese warlord. It’s a journey about idealism and the realities on the ground. And it asks a lot of really powerful questions about what aid does, what aid stops and what aid prolongs. Emma’s War does something that I really tried to do – it brings to life a place that most people will never see and a time that will never be again, in this case Sudan during the 90s. Idealism collides with reality in a number of very painful ways. It shows what happens when foreign aid workers get caught in the middle of a conflict. When you come face to face with combat, seeing it on the ground really changes you. Emma’s War really reflects what happens when you get caught up in conflict, and what happens when – through no part of your own – you are stranded in the middle of it."

"It’s a great read and extremely informative about Sudan’s civil war. Scroggins’s vehicle for talking about the war is a British aid worker, Emma McCune, who married a rebel warlord in south Sudan. It is a marvellous story, but in parts you can almost forget Emma exists. Though she is an extremely interesting character, in some ways she is the least important part of the book because there is just so much action and history in it. Emma’s husband, Riek Machar, who I met, is the vice-president of the government of southern Sudan now. His first wife is a top official in the oil ministry. Most of Scroggins’s characters are still very present in Sudan today. Emma’s War is a great book if you’re interested in the history of the region but you’re not a PhD student. In a way, my book picks up where this one leaves off. Much of The Black Nile looks at the new peace in Sudan while Emma’s War takes place in the 1990s, when the end of the war was still not in sight. I believe she acted according to her character. People are fallible. After she was married she was not an aid worker – she was a wife and propagandist. She was not a villain, though there are plenty of those in southern Sudan. When the rebel movement split and her husband’s forces committed massacres of other southerners, she was blind to it. There is no shortage of people who said that Emma was an accident waiting to happen, but in the end she didn’t die through misadventure, but in a car crash. And, however blind she may have been to the issues, if she had died fighting with her husband for that cause – whatever one might think of Riek’s cause in those days – it is my impression that she wouldn’t have complained."