“When Hari’s village [in Darfur] was attacked and destroyed, his family was decimated and dispersed. He escaped, and together with a group of friends roamed the battlefield deserts, helping the weak and vulnerable find food, water and a path to safety. And when international aid groups and reporters arrived, Hari gave his services as a translator and guide. To do so was to risk his life, for the Sudanese government had outlawed journalists, punishing aid to ‘foreign spies’ with death. Yet Hari did so time and again. Until, eventually, his luck ran out and he was captured…”

Review: This is an important book. It is not an easy book to read, for the people and images in it will stay with you for a long time – and rightly so. Daoud Hari’s memoir of a life lost and found in Darfur is a remarkable testament to both the humanity and inhumanity of man. As a teenager Hari dropped out of school to join up with a resistance group to oppose a Sudanese dictator. His beloved older brother Ahmed convinced him to go back to school. “Shooting people doesn’t make you a man, Daoud,” he said. “Doing the right thing for who you are makes you a man.”

A teacher encouraged Hari’s interest in learning English and reading the classics. “These changed me. They opened and freed my mind.” Later he remarks, “Because of my schooling, my fate would always be a little different from my friends.”

The power of this memoir lies in its intimate, engaging tone, as though Hari and the reader are conversing as friends. Again and again, he invites the reader to compare a relationship or experience they have had with the one he is describing. This talent for friendship is one that has saved Hari’s life many times. After his Zaghawa village was destroyed by government-backed Sudanese militias, his brother Ahmed and other family and friends murdered, Hari wandered in a daze, kept going only by the sense of purpose afforded him by helping those who were in even more dire need than himself. Eventually he reached a refugee camp in Chad, where because of his ability to speak English, he was asked to become a translator for genocide investigators. With investigators, aid workers and journalists, Hari risked his life many times to bring victims’ stories to the attention of the world.

Hari offers rare insight into tribal society, and repeatedly pays tribute to the strength of the women and children, who suffered, and continue to suffer horrendously. Through Hari’s vivid descriptions, the reader is placed squarely in village huts, marketplaces, vast expanses of inhospitable desert, refugee camps, prisons, amongst child soldiers, rebel and resistance groups, with aid workers and journalists, and amongst families at the height of their joy or grief. Everywhere he went, Hari found despair and outrage. But as this book chronicles, even in unspeakably terrible circumstances, humour and humanity can be found. Hari demonstrates that person’s heart can be opened, and borders dissolved until there is no such thing as ‘my people’ or ‘your people’ – “Perhaps everyone is your people. I was wondering about that.”

Hari now lives in the United States as a resettled refugee. He is a spokesman for www.SaveDarfur.org . Though an important work, and compulsively and easily readable in style, this memoir is aimed at adults, and contains many descriptions of atrocities, suffering, rape, torture, and death.

 At the end of the book is a ‘Darfur Primer’ and a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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2008-08-03