Biography of a British aid worker in Sudan, marries a local warlord.
"...at the same time, he was engaged in writing a doctoral dissertation arguing that the West had turned refugee aid into a self-perpetuating industry that often did more harm than good in Sudan."
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"Zaroug and the others were forever complaining about the arrogant young foreigners who ran so many of the refugee programmes. Just as the Victorians in the nineteenth century trusted Gordon and Baker more than the Egyptians to carry out their anti-slavery agenda in Sudan, so twentieth century North Americans and Europeans trusted their own nationals more than Africans to carry out their schemes for African improvement. Frustrated by what they perceived as the inefficiency and corruption of African governments, they chanelled an increasing amount of their aid through private, non-governmental organisations such as World Vision and Oxfam. The overseas aid workers were often hired not for their knowledge of Africa but for their familiarity with Western ideas about what should be done for Africa. In the 1980s that meant concepts such as women's rights and 'grassroots development'".
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"I've just got to get back there," she [Emma] moaned, seeming not to understand that it was against the unspoken rules of aid to admit that all one really wanted was to get away from home".
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Talking about Operation Lifeline's base camp at Lokichoggio.
"Loki in 1989 was not yet the 'five-star dude ranch, complete with a swimming pool and restaurant' that foreign reporters would mock a decade later. Visitors at Loki slept in army tents on camp beds. They took showers outside in sun-warmed water and ate in a communal mess hall. From the WEstern point of view, they were still roughing it. But that was not how the Sudanese saw it. An SPLA commander who visited Loki that year later described it to the human rights group African Rights. "When I saw the UN compound in Loki, it was amazing,', the commander said. 'When people tlak about Heaven... Heaven is where you enjoy life... When you want to drink something cold, you go for it. When you want to drink something hot, you go for it. Some people are enjoying Heaven. There are people who are enjoying Heaven. There are people who are enjoying our war in southern Sudan, and I was sorry for that because people are dying in the hundreds'. Southern Sudanese like this commander assumed that relief workers like Emma were in it for the money; they often remarked that such people must be failures in their societies to want to come to Sudan".
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"The supposedly neutral aid workers did not seem much better to her; she thought hte ugliness of the power realities tarnished everyone. The tendency of the Westerners to see themselves as 'fighting evil' offended her. 'We were all there to advance our careers,' she said. 'I never saw anybody sacrifice anything. Everyone benefited somehow.'. And that was what made it so upsetting. As the Sudanese put it, they were all 'eating' from the situation that kept the boys penned up in the camp across the river from Riek and Emma"."
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"Was the US 'Intervasion', as journalists called it, a prelude to a UN takeover of Somalia? If so, wasn't that just another name for colonialism? Had we come full circle, back to the point 100 years earlier when Britain had justified its conquest of places like Sudan and Somalia by arguing that they were saving the inhabitants from famine and slavery?".
"This talk about humanitarian assistance is completely misplaced if it takes place in a political vacuum... Unless this is accompanied with a political reconciliation, you have no chance of creating the conditions to stop the cycle of hunger and greed and destructiveness'."
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"I went to the office and read Emma's obituary in The Times. It referred to her, inevitably, as a 'British aid worker'.
I flung down the paper with irritation. At the time of her death it had been two years since Emma had been employed by an aid agency. But the clichés of mercy are so powerful that it was perhaps beyond the obituarist's imagination to see her as anything but a humanitarian. She was British; she was in a poor and angry part of Africa; therefore she must be helping. I thought of some of the things Emma was called in Sudan: First Lady-in-Waiting; concubine; spy; heroine. To label her an aid worker seemed another example of the West's inexcusable narcissism: the lazy refusal to see beyond our salvation fantasies and look at Africa and ourselves for what we are. There seemed to be no escape from this hall of mirrors."
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The noble cause, the great saving illusion.
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