Free A Dark Redemption by Stav Sherez Page B

Cummings carefully as he told her about Grace Okello. When he began speaking, his face lost a couple of years and sleepless nights; something in his eyes lit up and she could tell that he’d be a favourite among students. He had a way of talking, imparting information, that wasn’t condescending and yet guided you along so that when you came to the conclusion you thought you’d got there yourself.
    ‘Grace was bright, articulate and funny, that was easy to see, but I don’t think I really spoke to her alone until it came time for the students to hand in their dissertation proposals. You work here ten years as I’ve done, you see the same ideas and theories recycled every year, so when something new comes along it leaps out at you. Grace was that kind of student. International students tend to be far less trouble than English ones. They understand what a privilege it is for them to be here studying while their friends are facing hunger, war and unemployment back home. They don’t use their three years as an opportunity to get drunk, stoned and laid every night.’
    Geneva scribbled some notes in her pad though the digital recorder was preserving every utterance of the conversation. She sometimes found that her notes were wildly divergent from the recordings. One was for facts, the other for feelings, hunches, suppositions. She was also aware of the effect it had; how people got nervous when the person opposite them was writing things they couldn’t see. ‘You mentioned her dissertation. What was it about?’
    Cummings leant back in the chair. ‘She was interested in rebel groups. Revolutionaries. The thesis was a study of post-colonial African insurgencies and coups.’
    ‘You said it struck you as original. What made it so?’
    Cummings took a few seconds to think, rubbing his hands through what was left of his hair and nodding to himself. ‘Most of these students, most young people, are enamoured by men with guns who come bearded and filthy out of the bush after years of fighting and take control of the country. I bet one in three students still have posters of Che Guevara on their walls.’
    Geneva smiled, thinking of the Che poster her mum had in the kitchen, the letter the Argentine doctor had written to her mother before he set off on his fateful Bolivian journey.
    ‘Well, Grace saw beyond that,’ Cummings continued, more at ease now he was back in his area of expertise. ‘She didn’t think that Che and Mao were such heroes. She saw how African insurgencies, like all insurgencies, began with good intentions and ended in blood, torture and jail cells. How every rebel regime that came to power became the very thing they’d sworn to destroy. She was looking primarily at her homeland, Uganda, at Museveni who grabbed the presidency sixteen years ago after fighting as a bush guerrilla. She looked at Charles Taylor in Liberia and Laurent Nkunda in the Congo, Gaddafi, Mugabe and Mobutu. And she was very interested in Joseph Kony.’
    ‘Joseph Kony?’ Geneva was lost, history never her strong point, African history a total blur to her like Conrad’s white map.
    ‘The papers like to call him Africa’s Most Wanted Man, though there’s a new contender for that crown every day. He’s a northern Ugandan who began a rebel offensive in the mid-eighties against the government of Museveni. His soldiers are called the Lord’s Resistance Army, LRA for short, and most of them are abducted children. He says he wants to bring the rule of the ten commandments to the region but in twenty years he’s achieved just the opposite.
    ‘What was so original in Grace’s work was her take on these rebel movements. She saw them not as some glamorous Marxist emancipation but as men who were only interested in blood, money and power but who had learned to disguise their motivations in ideology and charisma. You see, Grace understood rebel movements not as political forces but as death cults.’
    Geneva made illegible notes,