Matthew Green, Reporter, writer and video journalist

'Matthew Green has penetrated the heart of one of Africa's darkest wars in which thousands of children were abducted and trained to attack villages in Northern Uganda for over two decades. This is an important book, a penetrating insight into one of the worst conflicts in the world, a war in which African governments and the international community failed the thousands of children abducted, and the hundreds of thousands of people displaced.'
Jon Snow, Channel 4 News

'Joseph Kony is one of the world's great evils. He should be stopped. This story of a real-life Kurtz takes us closer to understanding the inhumane horror of one madman's war.'
Bob Geldof

'In a brave and tenacious investigation, Matthew Green brilliantly de-mystifies the hatreds and fears fuelling an African conflict in which kidnapped children have been forced to commit unspeakable crimes.'
Tim Jeal, author of Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer

'In his cogent, readable exploration of what must surely be Africa's most misrepresented conflict, Matthew Green nails the comfortable myths and lazy thinking that have contributed to the devastation of a swathe of the continent.'
Michela Wrong, author of It's Our Turn to Eat: the Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower

'Tracking down Uganda's Joseph Kony, one of Africa's most bizarre and brutal leaders, is in itself a remarkable tale, vividly told in The Wizard of the Nile. But Matthew Green gives an additional dimension to this gripping account. He leads the reader into another world - of myth and magic, faith and superstition, as he tries to understand his quarry. What the author learns he passes on with insight and compassion, turning Wizard into far more than a gruelling search for the elusive Kony, riveting though that is. Green helps us understand how a seemingly pointless conflict in the heart of Africa has complex roots - part of a continuing struggle to reconcile old and new Africa, indigenous faiths and colonial legacy, past values and traditions and current challenges. And it's a message and a lesson that applies well beyond the borders of Uganda.'
Michael Holman, former Africa editor of the Financial Times and author of Last Orders at Harrods: An African Tale

'Matthew Green has written a remarkable book - a gripping, thoughtful, penetrating account that goes a long way towards unravelling one of the world's most tragic and least understood conflicts.'
Stephanie Nolen, author of 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa

'A fine, brave book that ... illuminates a rarely understood part of the world, and even less fathomable extremes of human mendacity'
Andrew Mueller, The Times

'Hard-hitting to the extent of gut wrenching at points, this book may not entice you to venture to the areas of Uganda occupied by the rebel Kony's army, but it will leave you with greater understanding of and insight into this damaged African country'
Hannah James, Real Travel

'Child soldiers. Mutilations. A mystic leader - all the clichés of Africa violence. But in a new book, Matthew Green looks behind the horrors to the fissures in African society that created Uganda's Lords Resistance Army'
Andrew Cawthorne, Reuters

'Green meets the victims, supporters and governments involved in one of the world's longest-running wars, and eventually Kony himself'
FHM

'Green is particularly good on the conflict's moral ambiguity and the role played by the international community... It is as good an account of Uganda's post-Idi Amin instability as there is.'
Tim Butcher, Daily Telegraph

'To his immense credit, Green became intrigued [by Kony] and decided to go in search of the man behind the one-paragraph description... [This is] a likeable guide to one of the world's most under-reported battlegrounds... The author is a journalist to watch.'
Christina Lamb, Sunday Times

'Green pieces together a much murkier reality: one where Museveni and the equally heinous Sudanese government next door have their own reasons for sustaining the conflict... [He is] refreshingly candid.'
Siobhan Murphy, Metro Scotland

'This is a wonderful tale of personal obsession... I recommend this as a rollicking good read in the best tradition of foreign correspondents'
Aidan Hartley, Literary Review

'Matthew Green, a young reporter working for Reuters in East Africa, decided to track Kony down in his hideout in Southern Sudan and interview him. Along the way he uncovers a murky story of complicity and corruption, where it is often difficult to distinguish victims from villains.'
London Review of Books

'Green's short history of this strange war is an honest and factual account, devoid of the sort of exaggeration and self-aggrandisement to which journalists are prone.'
Catherine Bond, New Statesman

'An exemplary piece of investigative reportage ... he comes back with a gripping account of the realities behind nasty guerrilla wars in so many third-world nations'
Traveller

'As northern Uganda's nightmare appears to be coming to an end, there is, at last, a book that dispels the myths which helped keep it going'
Steve Bloomfield, Independent

Back to Top