Author: Nicolas Winer
ISBN: 978-1-84923-126-8
Publisher: YouWriteOn.com

 Click Here To Purchase The Tethered Goat

Nicolas Winer spent twenty years as an aid worker in Africa, and he worked for Oxfam in Ethiopia and Sudan. It is here where his debut novel, The Tethered Goat  is set.

The story opens in the late 1988 when thirty-four year old Mark Delama, who was the local director one of the bigger British aid agencies, was on his way from Addis Ababa to Gambela on the Sudanese border. The purpose of his trip is a bit murky. It seems that Mark suspected something dishonest was going on pertaining to the aid agencies, and he decided to take on the role of a secret agent.

There was rumors that food destined for the refugees was finding its way instead to the rebel south Sudanese army and that the refugee camps were being used as military training camps. When he began his journey Mark never conceived that his sleuthing activities would lead to the opening up of quite an assortment of discoveries endangering him as well as his girlfriend, Val, an American journalist on assignment.  Regrettably, Mark discovers too late that he is a pawn in a devious scheme to guarantee the West’s entrée to Sudan’s oil as well as the unwitting ally of an unscrupulous Ethiopian rebel.

As the title suggests, he is like a manacled goat that is entrapped in a world of espionage, deceit, cynical shenanigans among world powers, corruption within the ranks of United Nations agencies, murder, trading of valuable emeralds, torture, and other devious acts.  

I have to confess that before reading this novel, my knowledge of the political and social climate of Ethiopia during this era was quite scanty.  Moreover, I did not have a clue where Gambela was and what role it played during the conflicts that were taking place in this part of the world. Consequently, as Winer unfortunately does not provide his readers with a needed prologue or introduction providing this information, I looked elsewhere to fill me in on the pertinent details.

The Tethered Goat unfolds in Gambela, Ethiopia, and thus my first stop was to find out all about this backwater of a town. Gambela is one of Ethiopia’s three multi-ethnic states and over the years, it has suffered from the multi-layered occurrence of ethnic conflicts. During the era that this novel takes place, Gambela revealed its full weakness as a border region with Sudan. As we discover in the novel and as my research revealed, the civil war in Sudan forced a huge number of refugees to the area. Most of these refugees ended up in camps established by the United Nations High Commissioners For Refugees (UNHCR), which were used as camp bases by the Southern Peoples’ Liberation Movement/Army (SPLA).

The SPLA was a rebel group of south Sudanese soldiers of the Sudanese Army and one of its founders and leaders was John Garang, who as we discover, plays an important role in the novel. The primary aim of the SPLA was the establishment of a democratic Sudan with it as the principal party in control of the southern areas. Although, the war was mainly described in religious and ethnic terms, it was also a struggle for control of water and oil resources located in the southern and the western Sudan.  As we know from previous experiences, whenever there is oil, the big powers are not far behind. Incidentally, the Ethiopian Government had no qualms in accepting the SPLA as administrators of the Gambela region.

Now, getting back to our story, when Mark arrives in Gambela, he is informed by an official that his papers are not in order, notwithstanding that he was issued a permit to travel there. He is arrested and subsequently meets Captain Tesfaye who becomes his principal interrogator. Shortly thereafter Mark convinces Tesfaye that it is useless to keep him any longer than is necessary, and if he would drive him to the airport, he will arrange for his departure to Addis. When Mark is at the airport, he notices that grain sent by truck from the huge government stores at Nazareth to feed the refugees was going over the border for the SPLA. He also notices several containers where most were American but there were others with eastern European scripts on them and even some others Arabic. He is at a loss what to make out of these containers as they could have contained anything from agricultural machinery to arms. 

What follows next and something that will come back to haunt Mark was Tesfaye question: “if he found what he wanted”?  The question was repeated while Tesfaye slid his pistol out of its holster and pointed it at Mark. Again, Mark repeats yes, as he notices the trail of food from the warehouse to the loading area of the runway. He tells Tesfaye that is what I was looking for as it proves that United Nations food is going to the SPLA. That is all he wanted to establish. However, here is where the kicker comes in when Tesfaye tells Mark that this is a known fact. He then goes onto to call Mark a stupid ferengi (foreigner) and a disappointment. When Mark questions Tesfaye as to what escaped him, he receives the curt response that it is not for him to know.

From this point onwards, Winer spins his sizzling yarn with a convoluted plot about a naive aid worker with very little political interest who finds himself drawn into the heart of a surreal landscape where he witnesses dirty, hypocritical and perilous political games at his expense. Winer skillfully captures with telling details the danger as well as the painful voice of this part of the world with its famine and war during the latter part of the 1980s. It is a world populated with a cast of some very devious characters that think very little about the lives of others.

On the surface, the novel may seem like another chilling mystery with an African slant. If you dig a little deeper, however, you will find a complex portrait painted by someone with an informative hand who has probably experienced some of the scheming mischief of the various players in the area. 

This is not to say that the novel is flawless, as one of its noticeable weaknesses is its lack of good content editing. At times, it was very laborious to stay with the story, as I was mystified as to what was going on. What's more, I couldn’t even differentiate the good guys from the bad. Perhaps, this was deliberate on the part of the author in view of the chaos that Mark found himself in? 

Click Here To Read Norm's Interview With Nicolas Winer