Status Updates From Emma's War: Love, Betrayal ...

I just don’t get this. « She knew she was going to sleep with him before she went to meet him. » What an absolutely dim-witted adventure junkie: I like to have sex with dangerous men because it is dangerous.

Tragic that peace agreements dissolved in 1989. Being familiar with Emma’s set in Nairobi today, I find even more parallels to Dinesen’s aristocratic fascination with Kenya. Except Dinesen didn’t set up schools. And drive around landmines. And sleep around amidst an AIDS epidemic. Was Emma brave? Or just fearless?

The Safaha camp sounds utterly expected and still overwhelming. I can’t imagine what Scroggins was feeling like trying to balance her own safety with extending what help she could to the mass of Dinka sufferers. Crazy that she left just in time to be successfully treated for typhoid. So many places in the world where this is life…

“The war, like the country, was not one but many: a violent ecosystem capable of generating endless new things to fight about without ever shedding any of the old ones.”

Is Emma like the female James Bond who magically seduces all her African mentors??

King Leopold’s Ghost is ongoing on the other side of the continent as Britain retakes Khartoum #worldscollide But odd how everyone agrees on the desolate prize: “This fight of half a generation for such emptiness, a God-accursed wilderness, an empty limbo of torment for ever and ever.”

I’m getting Michela Wrong “Do Not Disturb” vibes from this book already. Unputdownable, not because I like the central characters (Emma equally rebellious but presumably much poorer judge of character than Tana Dinesen) but because it’s a free history lesson about the crossborder political intrigue of the entire region