Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa

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.

‘This is a breathtaking account of how a handful of men were handed a continent of rich lands and poor people. How they became tyrants overnight and turned their countries into cruel kleptocracies. How they ransacked their treasuries to make billion-pound fortunes, and lived in unimaginable luxury while their people often starved.’ MICHAEL BUERK

‘Mr Kenyon narrates a jaw-dropping tale of greed, corruption and brutality.’ FREDRICK FORSYTH

‘The stories it tells of dictators such as Robert Mugabe and Muammar Gaddafi are grimly fascinating and leave the readers to ponder why so many African liberators heroes turned into villains.’ FINANCIAL TIMES

‘It is the minute observations that make Mr Kenyon's book so hard to put down.’ ECONOMIST

‘Dictatorland is a humane, timely, accessible and well-researched book that shines a light on urgent African issues that can no longer be dismissed as merely somewhere else's problem.’ IRISH TIMES

Author: Paul Kenyon

Paperback 

453 pages