It's Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle Blower by Michela Wrong

Michela Wrong's reflections in It's Our Turn to Eat about Africa's inability to govern itself are certainly gloomy. But the story she tells is more interesting because she humanises the problem by exploring it through the experiences of a friend, John Githongo, an intelligent and well-educated Kenyan who convinced himself that his government genuinely wanted to eradicate corruption.

Githongo was appointed to be a sort of anti-sleaze tsar by the government formed in 2002 by President Mwai Kibaki, who was initially regarded as one of Africa's promising reformers capable of repairing the depredations of the long regime of Daniel arap Moi.

A trenchant newspaper columnist who had taken a degree at the University of Wales, Githongo was a colourful character around Nairobi with many friends within expatriate journalistic and diplomatic circles. But soon after his appointment as the scourge of corruption, it became clear that Githongo was in fact an unwitting stooge employed only for presentational purposes. There was no appetite to reform government structures, and Githongo was quickly thwarted and then traduced by those who were determined to continue lining their own pockets.

The gregarious 39-year-old bachelor became the subject of a vicious campaign in Nairobi's lurid press, where he was branded a homosexual and a founding member of the exotically named, and nonexistent, Royal Gay Society. Fearing for his life, he eventually fled, and turned up on the doorstep of Wrong's flat in Camden Town. Sportingly, Wrong, a veteran Africa hand who now seems to despair of the continent she knows so well, offered him her spare bedroom and found herself drawn into a clandestine operation to protect him in London against Kenyan agents who might seek to do him harm.