Johnny Mad Dog: A Novel (edit title)

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Liked It Rated 5 stars “Emmanuel Dongala’s Johnny Chien Mechant (Johnny Mad Dog) is a profoundly disturbing split narrative that tells a tale, through contrasting narrative points of view in alternate chapters, of the barbaric cruelty of regular army soldiers and irregular militiamen against the civilian population...” see full review » see other reviews »

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  • Rated 5 stars

  “Emmanuel Dongala’s Johnny Chien Mechant (Johnny Mad Dog) is a profoundly disturbing split narrative that tells a tale, through contrasting narrative points of view in alternate chapters, of the barbaric cruelty of regular army soldiers and irregular militiamen against the civilian population during a civil war. Of all the African civil war narratives I’ve read, including Ken Saro Wiwa’s Sozaboy and Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation, this is unquestionably the most searing and powerful. The two narrators are a nearly imbecilic teenage militiaman with a disturbing blood lust and an ability to rationalize nearly any vicious act, and a young girl fleeing for her life with her younger brother and her mother, a double-amputee, whom she must transport in a wheelbarrow. Her courage and resilience are inspiring, as horror after horror descends upon her. It doesn’t make one feel any better to realize that her story is hardly exaggerated. Accounts of atrocities in Sierra Leone, where I lived for two years before the outbreak of their civil war, more than confirm the reality of Dongala’s tale. Dongala does not attempt to simplify a complex reality by blaming the violence solely on one source. In his ironic narrative, public ignorance, greed, and a maddeningly complacent international community all come in for a share of the blame. The novel abounds in powerfully ironic passages. All the European embassies, except the UN High Commission on Refugees, shut their doors in the face of the refugees fleeing the brutal militiamen. When an ultimatum is issued by the militia leader, however, even the UN abandons the refugees, sending in a military strike force to rescue not the refugees but the European and American rescue workers. When the poor girl with the wheelbarrow, who has by then lost all of those nearest and dearest to her, flees to the rain forest, an international rescue team helicopters in--not to save her, but a tranquilized lowland gorilla. No one can read this novel and remain blasé or indifferent to the cruel consequences of tolerating misrule in Africa.”

  peter b wrote this review Thursday, April 17 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No