A potty-mouthed comedy writer travels to Uganda to report on a man that she admires who is trying to negotiate a peace deal between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Ugandan Government, to end the horrific suffering of the people of Northern Uganda. It does not sound like a promising scenario for a humorous book, but Jane Bussman makes a fair attempt at it in her book The Worst Date Ever: How It Took A Comedy Writer to Expose Africa’s Secret War.
The book starts with a description of the inanities of the author’s career writing feature articles about Hollywood celebrities, and it goes on to describe how she developed a crush on John Prendergast, an American who was heavily involved in conflict resolution in Darfur and various other African hotspots. She follows him to Africa, and ends up doing her own investigations about the “most evil man in the world” Joseph Kony, who kidnaps children and forces them to become child soldiers, and the Ugandan Army who make money out of foreign aid instead of chasing Kony.
The situation as it was in Northern Uganda a few years ago did not naturally lend itself to comedy, with more than a million people herded into miserable camps and hundreds of people mutilated or murdered by Kony’s thugs or by Ugandan Army thugs. The book is quite well written and funny in bits if you appreciate the author’s confronting style of humour, but there are other books that give a better overview of the Ugandan troubles.