Dictatorland

A Financial Times Book of the Year'Jaw-dropping' Daily Express'Grimly fascinating' Financial Times'Humane, timely, accessible and well-researched' Irish TimesThe 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.

The stories it tells of dictators such as Robert Mugabe and Muammer Gaddafi are grimly fascinating and leave the reader to ponder why so many of Africa's liberation heroes turned into villains, A humane, timely, accessible and well-researched book that shines a light on urgent African issues [...] that, when we consider the state of our own societies, can no longer be dismissed as merely somewhere else's problem, Paul Kenyon is a brilliant writer who's been there and tells a story of unparalleled greed and western complicity in vivid detail, It is [the] minute observations that make Mr Kenyon's book so hard to put down, Mr Kenyon narrates a jaw-dropping tale of greed, corruption and brutality

Paul Kenyon is a distinguished BBC correspondent and BAFTA award-winning journalist and author. He has reported from danger-zones around the world for BBC Panorama, pushing the boundaries of investigative journalism and asking the questions many wouldn't dare – from tackling Gaddafi's son in a cage full of lions, to secretly filming Iran's secret nuclear sites. He's even faked his own death in a Haitian funeral parlour to expose a group of fraudsters. Kenyon is the recipient of an Association of International Broadcasters Award, three Royal Television Society awards, and is the author of Dictatorland, a Financial Times Book of the Year in 2018. He lives in London with his wife, Flavia.