Anti-War Crimes Comedy

Nairobi, Kenya - One wouldn’t think that a 22-year-old Central African insurgency, notorious for mutilations, child abductions and sexual slavery, would make good fodder for comedy.

But Jane Bussmann's book The Worst Date Ever, featuring a cover photo of a scantily-clad dyed-blond, gives a refreshing new spin on Africa’s longest-running war and some of the factors that perpetuate it.

Bussmann’s quest to join the ranks of what she calls 'The Useful People' began when she left the world of celebrity journalism in Hollywood to Uganda, first as a teacher then as an aspiring foreign correspondent.

She would frequent the Acholi Inn, the nicest hotel in northern Uganda, for interviews.

“Apparently you had to work for a charity to afford to stay there,” she tells a Nairobi audience here for a comedy show rendition of her book. The Acholi, she says, was “full of Westerners come to save the children."

There was, she jokes in her classy British accent, an ulterior motive for her escapade to northern Uganda: “John Prendergast would fancy me.”

"This bloke’s day job is to end war," she says of the co-founder of the Enough Project. "In Africa. A renegade White House Director of African Affairs under Clinton. The rock star of human rights violations."

When she turns up in northern Uganda with lip-plumping gloss ready for her date (interview) with John Prendergast, Bussmann finds she’s been stood up: Prendergast had to return to Washington.

Bound and determined to write the story that will expose the horrors of the Lord’s Resistance Army and, as she tells it, catch Prendergast’s attention with her dedication to the cause, Bussmann stays in northern Uganda and begins covering the under-reported war.

Bussmann describes her first 2005 encounter with the 'night commuters' as “Like a Stephen King novel": Children would journey from their villages to northern Uganda’s largest city as night fell to sleep under the watch of armed guards at the bus terminal so as to avoid being abducted and ‘conscripted’ by the LRA.

Interviewing army commanders, priests, civil society leaders, former child soldiers, mediators, non profit workers and politicians, Bussmann pieced together evidence that rather than working to end the insurgency, the Ugandan government was actively sabotaging efforts to coax Joseph Kony, head of the Lord's Resistance Army, out of the bush and rescue child soldiers.

Bussmann reasons that the insurgency had been a boon for business, which is why Kony had been allowed to get away for so many years. By 2005, Museveni had deployed some 40,000 Ugandan soldiers to track Kony and his fighters. But rather than look for Kony “They were next door, in the Congo, full of gold and diamonds, in a feeding frenzy.”

She eventually discovers that the Ugandan army commander responsible for the military offensive against the LRA owned the Acholi Inn, where the foreigners sent to deal with the humanitarian crisis came to spend their expense accounts.

“This story is bigger than John Prendergast," she wrote in the book. "It’s kids getting bombed, it’s the army letting a kidnapper run free, and it’s Britain and America funding them."

At its core, Bussmann’s performance and book reflects a deep concern about the human tragedy that has been allowed – by the Ugandan government and the international community – to transpire in Central Africa.

Speaking to her after the show, Bussmann said she will closely follow the rollout of the new US strategy for confronting the LRA, mandated through the LRA bill signed by President Obama in May.

For a full listing of Jane Bussmann’s upcoming performances in London, Los Angeles and New York, check out janebussmann.com/live-shows.

Photo credit: Jane Bussmann