Joseph Kony, Africa's most wanted rebel leader, is popularly portrayed as a deranged, dreadlocked mystic who talks to the Holy Spirit and lives deep in the jungle surrounded by a harem of wives and battalions of gun-toting children.
For two decades his Lord's Resistance Army has abducted thousands of children in northern Uganda and committed hideous atrocities, slicing off victims' ears and noses and padlocking their lips together. The conflict has killed tens of thousands and uprooted 2 million people.
In 2006 British journalist Matthew Green ventured into the jungle to track down the reclusive rebel leader, who claims he wants to create a Uganda based on the Ten Commandments - even though he's broken most of them.
Green's question was simple. How could one maniac hold half a country hostage for 20 years?
"I thought something about this doesn't add up - there's got to be more to it than one lunatic with an army of child soldiers," said Green, who has written about his hunt for Kony in a new book, "Wizard of the Nile: The Hunt for Africa's Most Wanted".
"I wanted to demystify the conflict. Because of the strange image of Kony and the sheer bizarreness of the LRA the explanations tend to stop there. There was very little serious journalistic work about why this conflict persisted."
Green argues that the Kony myth has masked major factors behind the war. These include Uganda's north-south divide, the deep sense of alienation among the northern Acholi people, their spiritual beliefs, President Yoweri Museveni's policies and the roles played by Sudan, the West and the aid agencies.
Kony is now wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes - hence the book's title - but he started out as a traditional healer in Acholiland. He took up arms after Museveni seized power in 1986. But it was Sudan that made Kony when it armed the LRA and used them to fight as a proxy in its war against its own rebels in the south.
Museveni's response to the insurgency was to herd the Acholi population into camps where disease killed more people than the rebels did. "It was a classic drain-the-lake-to-catch-the-fish counter-insurgency strategy", says Green, but only served to entrench resentment.
ATROCITIES
Given Kony's aim is to overthrow the Museveni government, it is striking that his victims are chiefly his own Acholi people. In part this was because they failed to rise up en masse and support him.
Kony's rebels mutilated anyone suspected of helping the army. In his travels, Green met a teenager called Geoffrey. Rebels had chopped off his lips, ears, fingers and thumbs and stuffed a letter in his pocket warning that anyone who tried to join the army would meet a similar fate.
At one point, Kony even declared that villagers caught riding bikes should have their legs cut off. This wasn't evidence he had gone bonkers - bicycles were the quickest way for villagers to alert the army.
But through a very perverse logic the atrocities and massacres also served to bind the Acholi people to their tormentors.
"As long as the LRA, a relatively tiny organisation, can prove that nowhere in northern Uganda is safe they have succeeded in one objective in convincing people that the government is not the answer," Green said.
His book sums up the many ambiguities of the war. "It was a conflict in which the people who chopped off people's noses were also victims, having been abducted and forced to kill in Kony's name," Green writes.
"It was a conflict in which people would give food to the very rebels who could wipe out their whole village, hoping it would help their lost sons and daughters to survive. And it was a conflict in which people felt betrayed by both the rebels who terrorised them and a government who left them to rot in camps."
Green also takes a critical look at the U.N. World Food Programme, which kept people alive in the camps, but was effectively sucked into sponsoring the system. (Click here for more on this.)
Western donors, keen to court Museveni as an ally, looked away. "The West needed Uganda to be a success so it didn't serve anybody's purpose to start asking questions about their strategy in the north," Green said.
KIDNAPPED
One of the key characters in the book is an ex-rebel called Moses, who spent eight years fighting with the LRA after being abducted from his school dormitory.
"What was most striking about talking to Moses was his sense of injustice or sense of resentment towards the government," Green said.
You would imagine that someone, who has been kidnapped, deprived of his education, and eventually escapes to find his relatives dead and mother destitute, would feel incredible resentment towards the rebels, but Moses seems more angry with the government for allowing it to happen.
"A large part of the explanation for why the war has persisted is the sense of alienation among the Acholi community," Green said. "They feel victimised by both the rebels and the government. The Acholi people don't just feel neglected, they feel actively persecuted.
"Although people hated Kony for his methods, many would sympathise with the aim of changing the government."
The book has lots of colour and some surprising details too. We learn that Kony has a son called George Bush and that Ugandan soldiers are fans of London football team Arsenal (nickname "Gunners") because they think there's some military connection.
There's also a great image of the south Sudanese vice-president and peace mediator Riek Machar sitting in the bush reading Stephen Hawking's "Brief History of Time" as he waits in vain for Kony to turn up.
Green eventually meets Kony in the Democratic Republic of Congo when he joins Machar on another peace mission.
'HE JUST LOOKED AFRAID'
When Green begins his adventure he has no real idea what Kony will look like. The only well known photo is one of Kony as a young man with dreadlocks and a T-shirt with the slogan "Born To Be Wild" - an image that has undoubtedly fed the exotic myth.
But when Kony appears in the bush he's wearing a crisp white suit, which prompts Green to wonder who does his ironing.
"He did not look like a soldier. He looked more like a teacher or a priest - he actually had quite a gentle expression. He didn't look intimidating," Green said. "He seemed very nervous, frightened and anxious...He just looked afraid."
Green admits that on one level Kony's demeanour was something of an anticlimax, but on another it underlined the book's main argument.
"In a sense that was the lesson of the book. By the time we meet him this guy is not the story. The story is the government's failure, it's the alienation that allows someone like Kony to survive, it's the Sudanese role, the Western role..."
Green hopes his book will encourage people to look beyond the clichéd portrayal of many African wars.
"As outsiders or as Westerners we often have this need almost to see these African conflicts in these very simple terms. We tend to assume there's some predisposition towards violence or some inexplicable dark forces at work - the scream from the swamp," Green said.
"The Kony myth spoke to all our prejudices so that it obscured questions about both the government's strategy and the Western response."
Green worked for Reuters until 2006 and now reports for the Financial Times. You can watch a video of him talking about his book at London's Frontline Club on their website.
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