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Unhealed Wounds Trauma, Aid and Angola
In the shadow of a failed international intervention in Somalia, Gareth lands in war-torn Angola, thrust into a besieged city teetering on the brink. Malanje, encircled by UNITA rebels deploying medieval tactics, becomes ground zero for a crack team of Irish aid workers fighting to stave off starvation for tens of thousands of children.
Amid mortar fire and minefields, he bears witness to haunting violence and unwavering human spirit. His eight-month emotional descent unfolds as a complex tapestry of deep camaraderie, visceral fear, and the painful reckoning of his own privilege. At the heart lies a brutal legacy —colonial plunder and Cold War complicity – tempered with the inspirational humanitarian ethics of a bygone era.
Three decades later, his story resurfaces—raw and unflinching. Unhealed Wounds interrogates the mythology of white saviourism, sheds light on forgotten lives and demands remembrance in an age of eroding global solidarity. Powerful and evocative, this memoir invites readers to urgently contemplate what has been lost from the true embodiment of humanity’s collective cause: connection between and respect for all peoples. Far more than a personal account, it is a searing moral reckoning for our divisive contemporary times of eroding internationalism and encroaching global catastrophe.
I would beg any reader to speed read the historical intro at the start of this book if you start flagging early on – the ebb and flow of UNITA and the MPLA are an important backdrop, but the main story is far more compelling. Once Gareth lands in Angola his vivid prose explodes off the page and his observations and perceptions are both visceral and cerebral in a fascinating dialectic.
Gareth is frank and open about the impact of the experience on his own well-being; something that alumni from earlier generations were perhaps to keen to gloss over. That people can now talk constructively about mental health and the impact of PTSD in the humanitarian sector is down to Gareth and a very few others who have been prepared to put pen to paper.
Reading this felt a privilege – an irony I hope he would appreciate.