All Poor Together: The African Tragedy and beyond

John Hollaway welcomed the end of Rhodesia's UDI in 1980 and the opportunity it gave him to travel around Africa once again. As a mining consultant, he did just that, only to find a continent that since 1960 had become impoverished, crime-ridden and despairing. Worse, the aid projects he encountered were doing nothing to make matters better. So, while this is a good read, with its tales of encounters with the "barefoot prospectors" who are illegally producing more than a billion dollars a year of gold and gemstones, stories of mining scams and frauds and the larger-than-life characters who risk their own (or other people's) money in Africa, in the end it is the story of aid in Africa.