My Friend The Mercenary: A Memoir

By James Brabazon

James Brabazon, a war reporter and filmmaker, was already a veteran of many conflict zones by his early thirties. So when he was offered an exclusive opportunity to report from Liberia, caught up in a vicious civil war, it proved too tempting to turn down. He needed to take a bodyguard, someone with strong knowledge of the region and, more importantly, someone with a gun slung over his shoulder. James hired Nick du Toit, a former South African soldier and mercenary commander, to guide him into the bloody world of Liberia’s rebels. During their time together, James and Nick slowly formed an unlikely friendship, forged during scorching days under unrelenting gunfire. Narrowly surviving the harrowing experience, James returned to the quieter, saner confines of his life in London. But only a few months later he found himself back with Nick in a fly-blown bar in West Africa plotting another, much more dangerous journey—this time to the heart of Equatorial Guinea. Nick’s mission: to overthrow the government of this tiny nation fabulously rich in oil.

My Friend the Mercenary is an exploration of the mercenary myth and a chapter in the story of modern Africa. It is a brutally honest and undeniably human account of a journey into the heart of what it takes to be a friend, a survivor and a journalist in the morally corrosive crucible of war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jan 25, 2011
• ISBN: 9781443405423

James Brabazon

JAMES BRABAZON is an award-winning frontline journalist and documentary filmmaker. Based in London, he has travelled in more than sixty countries investigating, filming and directing in the world’s most hostile environments. He has written for The Observer and The Sunday Times, appears as a commentator on CNN and the BBC, and lectures on the ethics and practicalities of reporting conflict.

Reviews for My Friend The Mercenary

[cyclops1771 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Amazing tale of a reporter and a mercenary who teamed up to produce a documentary on civil war in Africa. This brotherhood forged in fire led to an unusual friendship that extended and expanded over time.

[cargento-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great, unbelievable story! Strongly recommended if you can stomach it.

[alexbolding · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

The author’s approach is honest, but also sensational and utterly depressing in its ethnocentricity. Here we have the British equivalent of a gung-ho mentality: literally anything goes, as long as the author gets his war movie and attains his claim to fame. Soldiers are ambushed and slaughtered at the instigation of the author, innocent victims are butchered cruelly for the sake of the movie, African characters mainly figure as cannon fodder, African rulers are nothing but corrupt and cruel, female investigative journalists mainly feature as prey for a young dick on the prowl, and deep friendship and ambition can morally legitimize all that. I read it mainly to find out more about the foiled coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea, and found the book somewhat rewarding in that respect. But before getting there, one has to munch 300 pages of gruelling self-serving pages of boyish adventure and extreme naïveté.