The Translator: A Memoir

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A suspenseful and deeply moving memoir that “lays open the Darfur geocide . . . intimately and powerfully” (The Washington Post Book World) and shows how one person can make a difference in the world.

“A book of unusually humane power and astounding moral clarity.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

I am the translator who has taken journalists into dangerous Darfur. It is my intention now to take you there in this book, if you have the courage to come with me.

Daoud Hari—his friends call him David—is a Zaghawa tribesman and grew up in a village in the Darfur region of Sudan. As a child he saw colorful weddings, raced his camels across the desert, and played games in the moonlight after his work was done. This traditional life shattered in 2003 when helicopter gunships appeared over Darfur’s villages. Hari was among the hundreds of thousands of villagers attacked and driven from their homes by Sudanese-government-backed militia groups.

Though Hari’s village was burned to the ground, his family decimated and dispersed, he himself escaped, eventually finding safety across the border. Roaming the battlefield deserts on camels, he and a group of his friends helped survivors find food, water, and the way to safety. With his high school knowledge of languages, Hari offered his services as a translatorand guide after international aid groups and reporters arrived. In doing so, he risked his life again and again, for the government of Sudan had outlawed journalists in the region, and death was the punishment for those who aided the “foreign spies.” And then, inevitably, his luck ran out and he was captured. . . .

The Translator tells the remarkable story of a young man who came face-to-face with genocide—time and again risking his own life to fight injustice and save his people.

Daoud Hari was born in the Darfur region of Sudan. After escaping an attack on his village, he entered the refugee camps in Chad and began serving as a translator for major news organizations including The New York Times, NBC, and the BBC, as well as the United Nations and other aid groups. He now lives in the United States and was part of SaveDarfur.org's Voices from Darfur tour.