Africa: Brotherly love and loyalty are probably out of fashion these days. Certainly you hear very little about them.
Brothers are men, after all, and therefore seen as part of the whole network of masculine oppression of women. In this age of gender politics, brothers are a throwback.
But in the person of Richard Wilson we have someone who could redeem the good name of brotherhood. He stands out because of his loyalty to his beloved sister, who was murdered in a terrorist outrage in Africa six years ago.
Charlotte Wilson (27) was travelling on a bus called Titanic Express (hence the name of this book) from the Rwandan capital, Kigali, to Bujumbura, capital of neighbouring Burundi, on December 28th, 2000. In doing so, she was ignoring severe warnings that she could become another victim of Burundi's long-running and extremely bloody civil conflict. The terrible strife between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda we all know about, but the same fault-line also exists in Burundi, although it has attracted less attention internationally.
A highly qualified science teacher working in Rwanda for Voluntary Service Overseas, Charlotte was travelling to Bujumbura with her fiancé, Richard Ndereyimana, a Burundian of mixed Hutu-Tutsi background, who wanted her to meet his family. About half an hour from Bujumbura, the bus was attacked by a group of men and boys, said to be members of the Forces Nationales de Liberation (FNL), a rebel Hutu faction that is waging a terrorist campaign against the Burundi government.
A total of 21 passengers from the bus were shot dead in the massacre, including Charlotte and Richard. The details of the event keep shifting throughout the book as fresh evidence, or alleged evidence, comes forward. However, the author is in no doubt over who should be held to account, namely, Agathon Rwasa, leader of the FNL. Both the FNL and Rwasa have denied responsibility.
Since Charlotte's death, he has waged a campaign to have Rwasa prosecuted as a war criminal. In former times, such a campaign would have been conducted by writing letters, mounting pickets and handing out leaflets. Richard Wilson's principal weapon, however, is the website, http://agathonrwasa.blogspot.com.
This book is part of the campaign, too, but it is more than just propaganda. Richard Wilson writes well and, in addition to being an indictment of an alleged mass killer, the book has elements of family history, loving reminiscence, personal diary and political analysis.
It's an impressive piece of work for such a young man. We shall undoubtedly hear more of him, especially if he widens his brief from the single issue which currently, and understandably, preoccupies his thoughts.
In December 2003, three years after Charlotte's death, the papal nuncio to Burundi, Archbishop Michael Courtney, from Nenagh, Co Tipperary, was shot dead, and this was also blamed on the FNL. I was in Burundi the following April and saw the Land Rover in which the archbishop was shot.
The broken glass and bloodstains were still there and, judging from the pattern of bullet-holes in the vehicle and other circumstances, the shooting had, as I wrote in this newspaper at the time, "all the hallmarks of a professional hit" by a killer who knew the exact identity of the man wearing full clerical regalia in a car with a papal flag on the bonnet.
The archbishop's death was also blamed on the FNL, although this book quotes a source close to that organisation as saying that Courtney was "a friend of the FNL" and "they had no reason to kill him". The killing, according to this particular source, was actually carried out by supporters of the Burundi government, seeking to discredit the FNL on the eve of Ireland's accession to the EU presidency for the first six months of 2004. It was reported at the time that the archbishop was investigating a case of fraud involving funds intended for a Catholic university, and had raised the matter with the Burundi authorities. Three years on, we obviously need an international investigation under United Nations auspices.
Though admirable in so many ways, there are odd features about this book. At the start we are told that "a number of names" have been changed for safety and other reasons, but it would have been helpful if the author had specifically indicated in the course of the narrative when a pseudonym was being used.
The narrative also suffers from the fact that the author never actually went to Burundi to investigate his sister's death. A tall order, perhaps, and his security might well have been in doubt, but surely he must have thought about it? The issue is not addressed, although he does tell us about travelling to Laos and Cambodia, neither of which are destinations for timid souls.
We are told in the Acknowledgments that the author's hypnotherapist helped him to piece together the events since Charlotte's death, and it would have been interesting to read more about this. But although there is much intimate soul-searching, hypnotherapy does not get a mention in the main body of the book. And while I'm at it, at this cover price for such a slim volume, surely there might have been an index?
• Deaglán de Bréadún is the Foreign Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times
• Titanic Express By Richard Wilson Continuum, 250pp. £16.99