The Baringo Kid: Confrontations With Africa

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"The Cold War was ending, and the Soviet Union was about to vanish - along with the West's chief strategic reason for supporting development aid in Africa. A disastrous UN adventure in Somalia would soon supply the public relations coup de grace." "This is an eyewitness account of daily life among the expatriate development aid community in EastAfrica during the period. Based on the author's personal experience while working with several aid organizations, including the United Nations, it turns a lens on the lives of Africans, ordinary and extraordinary, and the often unabashedly mercenary non-African expats with whom they for years shared a relationship of mutual aid and exploitation." That relationship had started out with high hopes in the 1960s, when countries like Kenya first celebrated their independence from colonial rule. But it proved largely disappointing, wrecked by a combination of First World arrogance and Third World corruption. The sometimes comic, sometimes tragic human encounters to which it gave rise nevertheless provide a rich source of understanding of what went wrong, and why.

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