Emmas War A True Story Of Love And Death In Sudan – Deborah Scroggins

In marrying her, Riek would form a valuable political as well as personal alliance. If Riek was less than adept at Nuer spear throwing and hunting, he excelled at the art of wooing. He courted Angelina in traditional fashion, paying her extravagant compliments and chanting poems in her honor. In the Nuer language, a woman is said to “agree” to the man she marries; “to agree” was the closest synonym the early missionaries could find to the English verb “to love.”

Angelina agreed to Riek when she was still in her teens, but her father insisted that she finish secondary school before she could marry him. Her father set another condition to their marriage: Angelina was to be Riek’s only wife. Riek was known to like the ladies. He already had one daughter with another woman. When Angelina protested that Riek had promised to be monogamous, her father cautioned her that she would need all the safeguards she could get to keep a Nuer husband from bringing home another wife.

“Men will always take advantage of culture,” he warned. Kuma insisted that Riek take his vows in the Catholic Church, considered the most strictly monogamous of all the Christian churches, in addition to paying the traditional Nuer bride-price for Angelina. “Not that it made any difference,” Angelina laughed bitterly many years later. The elders of the two families met many times to decide on the bride-price. After that it was up to Riek’s father to find the necessary fifty cattle from among the family herd.

For most Nuer, marriage was more like an ongoing process than an event. A young Nuer wife did not leave her own family to live with her husband until her first or even second child was born. But modern young people like Riek and Angelina had no time for such conventions. When Riek came home from Scotland in 1981 for his wedding, he had been offered a place to study for a Ph.D. at Bradford Polytechnic in Yorkshire. He talked Kuma into letting Angelina to go back to Britain with him.

Angelina was only eighteen. All her life she had heard about England. Now was her chance to see it. A diligent student, she hoped to study biochemistry at the polytechnic herself. In three or four years, she thought, she and Riek would return to the Sudan with their degrees.

“Deborah Scroggins … has a sharp eye, and her real aim is to tease out the inconsistencies of Emma McCune’s brutally short life as a way of looking at how foreigners through the ages have involved themselves in Sudan.… It is a sorry story, but Ms. Scroggins tells it awfully well.” —The Economist “A brilliantly compelling and painfully honest exposé.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution “Deborah Scroggins’s utterly fascinating account of Emma’s short life is the narrative thread that helps recount the famine and desperate religious struggle, now 19 years and counting, that has killed 2 million Sudanese.”

—Austin American-Statesman “A wonderful book.… A gripping history of the Sudan, which doesn’t shirk the country’s complexities and which integrates into its cruel history the saga of Western efforts to help and interfere.” —The Observer (London) “Scroggins, a veteran reporter on Sudan, uses Emma’s story to examine the failure of Western idealism in Africa.” —The New Yorker “The most revealing book on Africa and the West’s obsession with it that I have read in several years.” —Robert D. Kaplan, author of The Coming Anarchy “A painstaking and loving portrait of this remarkable woman, who should have been born more than 100 years ago, when she could have been an imperial heroine.”

—The Evening Standard OceanofPDF.com DEBORAH SCROGGINS Emma’s War Deborah Scroggins has won six national journalism awards for her reporting from Sudan and the Middle East. For Emma’s War she was also awarded the Ridenhour Book Prize and the Georgia Author of the Year Award. A former correspondent for The Atlanta Journal- Constitution, she has published articles in Granta, The Independent, Vogue, and Glamour.

She lives in Atlanta. OceanofPDF.com OceanofPDF.com FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 2004 Copyright © 2002 by Deborah Scroggins All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2002. Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Portions of this book originally appeared in slightly different form in Granta magazine.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows: Scroggins, Deborah. Emma’s war / Deborah Scroggins. p. cm. eISBN: 978-0-307-80885-1 1. Sudan—History—Civil War, 1983—.2. Scroggins, Deborah—Journeys—Sudan. I. Title. DT157.672.S37 2002 962.404—dc21 2002022033 Map by David Lindroth, Inc.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 0529ad3753359eb5
• File Extension: .pdf
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• Title: –
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• ISBN: 9780307808851
• Pages: 483
• Language: English (en)

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