The trauma of war reportage: nightmare stories from the front line

One day during the Rwandan genocide in 1994, Evariste Maherane heard about a Tutsi boy whose parents had been killed in a massacre at a church. The boy had escaped. He was about ten, the same age as Evariste’s son. A family of Hutus, instead of joining the slaughter of Tutsis that many of their ethnicity were perpetrating, had taken him in. They had tended to his wounds but he was still weak. Evariste went to their house. Hand him over, he told them. There was a banana plantation nearby. Evariste took the boy there. He gripped his neck and began to beat him. With help from another man, he dug a hole. When it was deep enough, they threw the boy in. His arms and legs flailed as they filled the hole in. ‘It was a time of hatred,’ Evariste told the BBC war reporter Fergal Keane years later. ‘Our heads were hot. We were animals.’

We are all of us animals. What else to conclude from the many and varied horrors that Keane recounts in this compulsive yet moving memoir? When a Freetown fisherman being tortured by soldiers hears one of them cock a rifle, ‘he screams in a way that I never imagined a human could scream, as if the voice has left his body, fled to a place of animal terror’. In the suburbs of Khartoum, those who live beside the ‘ghost houses’ where the military debase dissidents play music so as not to hear the ‘animal cries’. This is life as Francis Bacon – like Keane, the damaged son of a dysfunctional father in a dysfunctional Ireland – would paint it.

The Madness avoids becoming another compilation of a foreign correspondent’s derring-do.