It's Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower
Michela Wrong
An anti-corruption czar blows the whistle on his own government.
Wrong tells the story of John Githongo, the Kenyan anti-corruption official who fled into exile after exposing the Anglo Leasing procurement scandal reaching to the top of government. Her title captures the ethnic logic of patronage, the expectation that each community's turn in power is also its turn to eat. The book put a human face on grand corruption and the machinery of impunity, and it became a lightning rod for debate about accountability, ethnicity and power in Kenya.
Its legacy. Kenyan bookshops initially hesitated to stock it for fear of libel suits.
- Author
- Michela Wrong
- First published
- 2009
- Genre
- Investigative journalism
- Theme
- The Postcolonial State and Its Discontents
The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence
Next →We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
More from The Postcolonial State and Its Discontents
- Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism — Mahmood Mamdani
Colonialism split Africans into citizens and subjects, and independence kept the divide.
- On the Postcolony — Achille Mbembe
Power in the postcolony rules through spectacle, excess and grotesque intimacy.
- The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly — Jean-Francois Bayart
Politics as appetite: power pursued through patronage and the belly.
- The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence — Martin Meredith
Fifty years of independence, from the hopes of 1960 to their unraveling.