Baringo Kid (The): Confrontations with Africa

"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. But the 30-year-old "aid industry" was at its apogee. Most of its workers in the field, the idealistic and the cynical alike, were unaware they were witnessing the twilight of an era. Much like the White Highlandersof Britain's prewar East African Empire, they didn't know they were living out a last act. This is an eyewitness account of daily life among the expatriate development aid community in East Africa during the period. Based on the author's personal experience while working with several aid organizations,including the United Nations, in Kenya and Somalia, 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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