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