J R Sparrow

Broken heart of Africa J R Sparrow

It is 1996. Slaughter darkens the heart of Africa and former British soldier Jonathan Kemp and Yugoslav refugee Dragana Kiss, an aspiring TV journalist, pursue a Hutu mastermind of Rwanda's genocide. Innocent Kayibanda, known as the Butcher of Butare, is wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda but Kemp and Kiss - both scarred by the horror of recent experience - have personal reasons for hunting him. Their quest takes them from Africa to Europe and back again. From the Belgian chateau of an aristocratic arms dealer they suspect plans to arm a Hutu campaign to retake Rwanda, the trail leads to the killing fields of north-eastern Zaire, today's Democratic Republic of the Congo. Hutu fighters have found a refuge there from which to mount a guerrilla insurgency. It is a virtual no-go area and inter-tribal conflict deters outsiders from entering unless in the company of an army. Kemp seeks help from old friends among the Twa, the region's original inhabitants, a much maligned and persecuted pygmy people who constitute less than one per cent of Rwanda's population. Long despised, removed to society's sidelines, condemned to lives of poverty and discrimination, a third of them died in the genocide, in events that were not of their making. Despite that the world at large has forgotten them. Reluctant at first, a handful of Twa lead Kemp into a blood-soaked land, through the rain forest cloaking the Virunga volcanoes. Their leader believes the time has come for his people to make a stand, and a stand must begin with justice. To help them they enlist the assistance of a notorious tribal militia. 'Broken heart of Africa' is the story of an epic journey and en route explores the minds and lives of those who make it, and the people they encounter. The fact-based context raises contemporary issues, first and foremost the Twa's predicament, and delves into the causes of atrocity far greater than that of the genocide itself. The related conflict in the former Zaire has never ceased and in a six-year period that followed the events witnessed by Jonathan Kemp close to four million people perished. Today, as an epilogue explains, rebel Hutus and others continue to terrorise the population. The book's universal themes of intolerance and displacement were never more relevant than today.