The Men Who Destroyed Africa

David James Smith's YOUNG MANDELA described the intoxicating mood of optimism that greeted Nelson Mandela at the beginning of the 1960s when he travelled out of South Africa for the first time and saw at first hand the dreams of black nations among the newly independent states of Africa. In the entire continent, only Liberia and Ethiopia had ever avoided being colonised altogether. These were heady days of hope for the positive changes that liberation would bring.

Tragically, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the new and successive generations of homegrown leaders were not selfless, noble and good, like Nelson Mandela, but turned out to be tyrants instead: The Men Who Destroyed Africa - the dictators, the self-appointed life presidents and high and mighty emperors who siphoned the wealth out of their own countries and subjugated their people with fear and violence and sometimes mass murder.

This book is their story and it brings to life the very worst of those African dictators, charting the course of modern history in post-colonial Africa through a vivid new account of the six big personalities and their misdeeds: Mobuto of Kenya, Bokassa of the Central African Republic, Idi Amin of Uganda, Mengistu of Ethiopia, Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Gaddafi of Libya. Irresistibly, the richness of the narrative rests in fresh accounts of the personal and political excesses. However, this is not a book about a disparate selection of corrupt leaders. It is the story of modern Africa with a broad historical sweep across the last half century of liberation and disappointment.