Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa
A Financial Times Book of the Year 'Jaw-dropping' Daily Express 'Grimly fascinating' Financial Times 'Humane, timely, accessible and well-researched' Irish Times The dictator who grew so rich on his country's cocoa crop that he built a 35-storey-high basilica in the jungles of the Ivory Coast. The austere, incorruptible leader who has shut Eritrea off from the world in a permanent state of war and conscripted every adult into the armed forces. In Equatorial Guinea, the paranoid despot who thought Hitler was the saviour of Africa and waged a relentless campaign of terror against his own people. The Libyan army officer who authored a new work of political philosophy, The Green Book, and lived in a tent with a harem of female soldiers, running his country like a mafia family business. And behind these almost incredible stories of fantastic violence and excess lie the dark secrets of Western greed and complicity, the insatiable taste for chocolate, oil, diamonds and gold that has encouraged dictators to rule with an iron hand, siphoning off their share of the action into mansions in Paris and banks in Zurich and keeping their people in dire poverty.
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One of few books in recent years that I purchased new (although only because I was given a gift voucher), and an excellent choice it was. Five stars.
In this book Kenyon catalogues the actions of various dictators in Africa, noted below. It was surprising to me how much they were all alike, and how many common threads there were. Each typically started out as an underdog, with idealistic goals who triumphed against either colonial occupation or another tyranny, then rose up up take control and then ultimately be corrupted by that power. There is only one end to the dictatorships they set up, and none of them end well for the dictator. Whispers, subordinates plotting, and ultimately the coup are desperately feared by the always paranoid dictator, and their many millions of dollars of corrupt or stolen money can't stop their downfall.
Kenyon does an excellent job of scene setting and describing the situation in each country and what is happening in the adjacent countries as he tells each story separately. The background, the recent events and all that is in between are set out in a logical and readable narrative, and while each dictator could probably have carried off a book on his own, the power of this book is the comparative and additive value of each successive story to form an overall picture - and it isn't a happy one.
Mugabe passed away in the days I was reading his story. It is not the first book I have read about Mugabe, and he is clearly a nasty piece of work, who didn't deserve as longer life as he had. Certainly the world is a better place without him, but it reinforced how weak organisations like the League of Nations and then the United Nations are in their inability to deal with these despicable setups which cause such humanitarian crises to the detriment of so many.
The parts of this book are:
Gold and Diamonds-
Congo (Mobutu)
Zimbabwe (Mugabe)
Oil-
Before the Dictators (background)
Libya (Gaddafi)
Nigeria (Sani Abacha)
Equatorial Guinea (Obiang Nguema)
Chocolate-
Before the Dictators (background, incl Sao Tome & Principe)
Cote d'Ivoire (Felix Houphouet-Boigny)
Modern Slavery
Eritrea (Isaias Afwerki)
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