Black humour

‘The trouble with most people,’ a reporter friend of mine once remarked, ‘is they just don’t grasp the funny side of genocide.’ He was a rather eccentric friend, possessed of a none-too-healthy fascination with guns and violent death, but he had a point. As any soldier knows, horror lends itself to black humour. An uncontrollable fit of the giggles is often a spontaneous reaction to the utterly grotesque.

Gripped by post-colonial guilt, few Westerners have the nerve to admit this when it comes to Africa, which does a strong line in genocide, and the continent’s non-fiction suffers from the kind of po-faced earnestness that would make a missionary yawn. Jane Bussmann is a gloriously irreverent, genitally-fixated exception to the rule. As I read her account of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, convulsed with sinus-clearing snorts of astonished laughter, I found myself marvelling that so few of us Africa hacks have thought to try her mould-breaking approach.

The book kicks off in Beverly Hills, where Bussmann, a north Londoner who once nursed hopes of a script-writing career, spends her days making up quotes for interviews with celebrities she rarely gets to meet. Her interrogation routine — ‘You’re in amazing shape, what’s your secret?’ — is hardly John Humphrys, but works a treat in getting Hollywood stars to ‘relax and open up, like a bumhole on amyl nitrate’. She’s stranded in Stupid Town in the Golden Age of Stupid. When even actor Ashton Kutcher, the ‘bloke who took over from Bruce Willis on Demi Moore’, lectures Bussmann on her lack of moral direction, she’s forced to admit it’s time for a change.

She longs to join the ranks of those she dubs the Useful People. Failing to win a job at Doctors Without Borders (the organisation wasn’t recruiting celebrity journalists that year), Bussmann stumbles across the photo of a man who represents everything she craves: John Prendergast, former Director of African Affairs in the Bill Clinton administration, an expert on conflict resolution and a man who notches up frequent flier points to Darfur and eastern Congo.