Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa

Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole AfricaCondition: BRAND NEW ISBN: 9781784972141 Format: Trade paperback (UK) Year: 2018 Publisher: Bloomsbury Description: '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

'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.