Under Africa's spell

It is often said that Africa is a poison. One visit to this continent, its vastnesses, savannahs, jungles, swamps and exotic peoples will provoke a lifelong infection, impossible to shake. Southern Sudan, for some, is Africa's most seductive landscape. Westerners who encounter the swamps of the Sud leave entirely changed, often warped, by the experience.

None more so than Emma McCune, the daughter of a tea-planter who had failed to cope with a return to Britain; as the sun set on the empire, he collapsed into alcohol, infidelity, penury and suicide. He left his redoubtable wife, Maggie, to bring up Emma and her two siblings in nouveau pauvre gentility.

But Emma was different. She was staggeringly beautiful. The outfits she improvised and draped over her leggy frame ensured she was the Cinderella at the country balls she swept through during her teens.

Social but not silly, Emma knew she was destined for far more interesting things. By the time she found herself at Oxford Polytechnic and fell under the spell of the legendary Willy Knocker, a white Kenyan intellectual bushwhacker, anthropologist polyglot, she knew her destiny lay in Africa.

She was armed with charm, charisma, and what later emerged as a ruthless ability to manipulate her friends. She had none of the skills that could make her of any use to the aid community in Africa; none the less, she managed to wangle a job setting up schools for thousands of southern Sudanese children dispossessed by the long-running civil war with the Arab-dominated government of the north.

Emma cut a Merchant-Ivory figure. Refusing to adopt the sanctimonious sackcloth gear of the modern aid worker, she swept through Sudanese villages of almost naked Dinka and Nuer tribespeople, decked out in floppy hats and diaphanous dresses.

She cast herself as the romantic lead in her own movie. It began well.

Much to everyone's surprise, she was a brilliant educational fieldworker, setting up schools where none had been contemplated for decades and feeding the southern Sudanese hunger for learning.

Soon, she was in love. Not for Emma the ordinary entanglements with fellow aid workers and sweaty evenings beneath canvas. She fell for "Commander" Riek Machar, a smooth-talking, gap-toothed, southern rebel warlord with a PhD from a British university, and a magnetic personality.

Tragically blinded by love, and by her new role as a sort of Queen of Nasir (his base on the Sobat River), she could not see that, despite his many charms, Machar was, like so many rebel leaders in Africa, a vainglorious, homicidal, doubledealing fool.

Soon after their marriage, Riek split with the equally ghastly John Garang, leader of the Sudan People's Liberation Army, ostensibly over Garang's appalling human-rights record. Within weeks, a tribal conflict, which Garang's supporters called "Emma's War", plunged a region twice the size of Texas into internecine slaughter and famine. By the time Riek's Nuer forces had massacred thousands in the remote town of Bor, Emma had become his chief apologist, public relations adviser and confidante. Some of us who considered her a friend were enraged by her blunt refusal to acknowledge Riek's atrocities. Or his connivance with his "official" enemies in Arab-dominated Khartoum against fellow southerners - and his cynical manipulation of starving masses in pursuit of international sympathy, and funds for his bloodletting. We had to agree never to discuss the Sudan with Emma. Deborah-Scroggins, a regular visitor to the region for her Atlanta newspaper, stuck with Emma's story to the end - which came in a car crash in Nairobi.