When The Walking Defeats You: One Man's Journey as Joseph Kony's Bodyguard - Softcover

Ledio Cakaj is an independent researcher who has worked for more than a decade in the Balkans and East and Central Africa and has spent many years studying the Lord’s Resistance Army for organizations including the World Bank, the Enough Project, Small Arms Survey, and Resolve.
 

“When the Walking Defeats You is that rare achievement: an account of a rebel movement as seen from the inside. Cakaj’s meticulously researched account takes the reader into the heart of one of Africa’s most feared organizations, capturing the mundane brutality of life in the LRA.”
  (Michela Wrong, author of Borderlines and It’s Our Turn to Eat)

“When the Walking Defeats You is that rare achievement: an account of a rebel movement as seen from the inside. Cakaj’s meticulously researched account takes the reader into the heart of one of Africa’s most feared organizations, capturing the mundane brutality of life in the LRA.” (Michela Wrong, author of Borderlines and It’s Our Turn to Eat)

“Cakaj renders interview subject George Omona’s story of joining the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda with a somber and assured tone. . . . The book captures the fierceness of infighting within the group and the powerful hold exerted on it by founder Joseph Kony.” (Publishers Weekly)

“What makes this book exceptional are the sections voiced by ‘George’ (names are changed). Cakaj’s real-life protagonist spent three years in the bush with the LRA, much of it serving as Kony’s own bodyguard. He is a doubly useful informant, at once an insider and an outsider, unlike his fellow fighters, he was an educated young townie who joined voluntarily, not a peasant-child from a rural Acholi village, abducted at gunpoint and then forced to kill. . . . George’s unflinching narrative of his experiences—including the murder of unarmed civilians—reads like a particularly dark crime procedural: an account of how to say alive, and even find a measure of belonging, at the heart of a paranoid self-propelled death cult.” (Times Literary Supplement)

“A heartbreaking story, unmasking the everyday complexities of a most gruesome and sorrowing war. Absolutely remarkable!” (Sverker Finnström, author of Living with Bad Surroundings: War, History, and Everyday Moments in Northern Uganda)

“A remarkable first-hand account of life in the LRA, providing a compelling and convincing perspective on what it was like to be a combatant.” (Tim Allen, co-editor of The Lord's Resistance Army: Myth and Reality)

“As I read this book, I read my own experiences and what I went through. It is a story that all people should know about: how men, women, and children suffer and survive conflict.” (Evelyn Amony, former LRA captive and author of I am Evelyn Amony)

“This is a unique and compelling account that effectively intertwines the biographical account of George Omona (fictional name)—a young man who voluntarily joined and fought for the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Central African Republic, South Sudan, and Eastern Congo between 2007 and 2010 before escaping—with the wider narrative of an ongoing conflict. . . . An important addition to the literature on the LRA and rebel groups more broadly.” (LSE Review of Books)

“Cakaj skillfully takes the reader inside the harrowing world of the LRA. Interspersed with stunning photography and reflections of persons who survived LRA attacks, a multi-layered story comes to life, further unfolding the complexities of such a devastating war.” (Erin Baines, University of British Columbia)

“A deep and intimate portrait of the daily life of a child soldier. His book deserves to take its place next to books like Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone and Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation in the sad catalog of stories about children at war.” (Andrew Rice, author of The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget)