The Baringo Kid: Confrontations with Africa - Softcover

Pawlick, Thomas F.

9781581127072: The Baringo Kid: Confrontations with Africa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1581127073 ISBN 13: 9781581127072

Publisher: Brown Walker Pr, 2000

The Baringo Kid is an eyewitness account of daily life among an expatriate development aid community in East Africa during the end of the Cold War. Based on the author's personal experience while working with several aid organizations, including the United Nations, it turns a lens on the lives of Africans, ordinary and extraordinary, and often unabashedly mercenary non-African expats with whom they for years shared a relationship of mutual aid and exploitation.

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From the Publisher:

For more than 40 years, the international "aid industry" sent cash and field workers to Africa to boost "development"--to little avail. The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a disastrous United Nations mission in Somalia that saw U.S. troops humiliated by local warlords, effectively ended the effort, and ended an era. This is an eyewitness account of life among the expatriate aid community shortly before the end, written by a journalist and former UN diplomat who saw the handwriting on the wall, but like many others was powerless to change the tide of history.

From the Back Cover:

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 Highlanders of 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.

An award-winning journalist with more than 30 years experience, Thomas Pawlick gives a glimpse of the human side of a unique period in Africa's history.

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