The Night Wanderers: Uganda's Children and the Lord's Resistance Army Seven Stories Press, February 2012
The problem with talking to Samuel lay in the fact that he was both victim and executioner all at once. - Wojciech Jagielski, The Night Wanderers (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Seven Stories Press, 2012)
This is not strictly a journalistic account of war and mayhem; it is
something more powerful and lasting: a literary sojourn through an
African landscape of haunted horrors, observed with extraordinary
patience and empathy by an exceptional writer and reporter. Wojciech
Jagielski paints masterful portraits of messianic guerrilla leaders and
mad dictators, but unforgettable ones of stone-faced child rebels who
have been forced to kill and maim, and in the process have lost the
ability to laugh, cry, or even enjoy ice cream. - Pamela Constable, author of Playing with Fire: Pakistan at War with Itself and Fragments of Grace: My Search for Meaning in the Strife of South Asia
Wojciech Jagielski's The Night Wanderers is framed by a compelling account of the experience of one child forced to commit horrific acts of brutality as a soldier in the rebel forces of Joseph Kony, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Kony claims to commune with spirits and controls his subordinates through sheer terror. Along the way, Jagielski outlines the the history of Uganda and the cultural and political context in which someone like Kony could come to command such a formidable force. Jagielski also provides a vivid impression of the dilemmas that face a journalist from the outside, trying to break into an unfamiliar world.
The Night Wanderers was shortlisted for Poland's highest literary award, the NIKE prize, in 2010.
