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. It is in a category with The Bang-Bang Club, the photographers Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva’s account of covering apartheid’s violent final years. Like them, Keane has not just the courage to risk death so that the most important stories can be told, as well as the eye to tell them with vivid subtlety, but also the humility to reveal the havoc that this task visits on the beholder.

In the garden of one of the psychiatric hospitals to which he is periodically admitted, Keane grasps that he too is an animal. A cameraman friend points out a crow watching a squirrel hide a stash of nuts. ‘The minute the squirrel vanishes, the crow will steal it,’ he tells Keane. ‘No matter how many times this happens the squirrel doesn’t get what’s happening.’

After each breakdown, Keane goes back to war – Africa, the Balkans, Myanmar, Ukraine – and the nightmares invade his waking hours. But he believes his trauma started in the womb, when he first sensed the danger of a household run by an alcoholic. As a child in the Troubles, he received further infusions of fear. Along with his own alcohol habit, he developed an ‘irresistible compulsion to be where the night was darkest’.

Again and again he is almost flattened by a shell or minced by a mine while bearing witness, a service ever more valuable in our age of disinformation. And yet he is consumed by guilt. He feels guilty that he is acclaimed for being one of what Susan Sontag called the ‘star witnesses, renowned for their bravery and zeal’, whose reports ‘nourish belief in the inevitability of tragedy in the benighted or backward – that is, poor – parts of the world’. Most of all he feels guilty for not saving those whose suffering he observes. Eventually, tormented by the ghosts of Rwanda, he comes to see this guilt for what it is: a fantasy of control. He no more chose not to save them than they chose not to save themselves.

Could Evariste have spared the Tutsi boy? Or was he as much a prisoner of brain chemistry as Keane is? The best passages of The Madness are where Keane forces us to confront this question. Sure, there are those like a Rwandan survivor who tells him that ‘pain is like a wild animal to be tamed’. But some animals stay wild. In rehab, Keane meets a junkie from an English council estate holding his addiction at bay long enough to start regaining the trust of his young daughter. Then he cracks, and calls a cab so he can find a dealer, because when an addict’s need takes over ‘no force on Earth short of tying them up and sticking them in a padded cell will stop them using’. Back in Ireland, Keane reconsiders a constable’s reputation as a fearsome thug on learning that he was moulded in the trenches of the first world war.

‘Most atrocities are not committed by psychopaths,’ Keane concludes, comforting delusion though that would be. On his return to Rwanda ten years on, he accepts the hardest truth – ‘the potential of the monster within us all’.