Supper with the President

West Africa in the 1970s was a volatile mélange of old and new; of aspiration, corruption, power and influence. In its midst, Ian Mathie laboured in his role as a water engineer to help improve the lives of ordinary people. His work brought him in touch with presidents, kings, emperors, chiefs and a succession of extraordinary characters. Circumstances contrived to place him at dinners with four heads of state whose rule had immense impact, positive and negative, on their countries and on West and Central Africa: Mobutu of Zaire, Traoré of Mali, Senghor of Senegal and Eyadema of Togo. In Supper with the President, he recalls those events and the insights they gave him, interweaving those experiences with true stories of other extraordinary brushes with sorcery, slavery, wildlife conservation, desert travel and a jail-break that could only happen in Africa.