Book description
A gripping account of both an individual caught on the horns of an
excruciating moral dilemma and a continent at a turning point.
When Michela Wrong's Kenyan friend John Githongo appeared one cold
February morning on the doorstep of her London flat, carrying a small
mountain of luggage and four trilling mobile phones he seemed determined
to ignore, it was clear something had gone very wrong in a country
regarded until then as one of Africa's few budding success stories.
Two years earlier, in the wave of euphoria that followed the election
defeat of long-serving President Daniel arap Moi, John had been
appointed Kenya's new anti-corruption czar. In choosing this giant of a
man with a booming laugh, respected as a longstanding anti-corruption
crusader, the new government was signalling to both its own public and
the world at large that it was set on ending the practices that had made
Kenya an international by-word for sleaze.
Now John was on the run, having realised that the new administration,
far from breaking with the past, was using near-identical techniques to
pilfer public funds. John's tale, which has all the elements of the
political thriller, is the story of how a brave man came to make a
lonely decision with huge ramifications. But his story transcends the
personal, touching as it does on the cultural, historical and social
themes that lie at the heart of the continent's continuing crisis.
Tracking this story of an African whistleblower who started out as a
pillar of the establishment, Michela Wrong seeks answers to the
questions that have puzzled outsiders for decades. What is it about
African society that makes corruption so hard to eradicate, so sweeping
in its scope, so destructive in its impact? Why have so many African
presidents found it so easy to reduce all political discussion to the
self-serving calculation of which tribe gets to "eat"? And at
what stage will Africans start placing the wider interests of their
nation ahead of the narrow interests of their tribe? Michela Wrong is
a distinguished international journalist, and has worked as a foreign
correspondent covering events across the African continent for Reuters,
the BBC and the Financial Times.
Based on her experiences in Africa, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz, her
first book, won the PEN James Sterne Prize for non-fiction. I Didnt Do
It for You focuses on the African nation of Eritrea.
