Tell me about Jane Bussmann’s book, The Worst Date Ever.

Jane Bussmann is a North London girl who moved to LA, planning to write the film script of all time, but ended up as a showbiz correspondent interviewing the likes of Britney Spears and Mischa Barton. She’s staggeringly honest about the reality of being a celebrity journalist and how the most testing question you ever get to ask is: ‘You’re in great shape. How do you do it?’ She’s pining for meaning when she sees John Prendergast on television – he used to be an adviser on Africa in the Clinton administration and is a kind of Africa-trotting troubleshooter – and she develops this massive crush. To impress him, she goes to Uganda to write about the Lord’s Resistance Army, the rebel group that is supposed to be devastating Northern Uganda. So she goes from interviewing Britney to interviewing child soldiers and refugees and she does it brilliantly well. She doesn’t change her tone of voice and there is no attempt to be earnest or worthy. She just transfers her sarcastic and foul-mouthed writing style direct to Uganda.

Does she score?

No! She never does get off with him. There are some great moments where she’s going round the local chemist’s looking for a lip-plumping gloss for her upcoming date – not an easy item to find. But the point is that along the way she gets sucked into the Ugandan story in its own right. It’s an excellent piece of journalism, because while the story presented to the world by the government in Kampala is that the Lord’s Resistance Army is a terrible force destroying Northern Uganda and enormous amounts of aid are needed to stave off a threat to international security, people in Uganda know that the army is making a massive amount of money out of the conflict and is very happy to keep it going. Effectively, the Ugandan army is holding the population of Northern Uganda hostage in supposedly protected villages. These places are little better than concentration camps, where the girls, who have already been raped by the rebels, then work as prostitutes for the soldiers. Bussmann captures all of this. It’s a story that doesn’t often get told and because it’s incredibly funny you have to keep reading. If you were presented with a serious work on the troubles in Northern Uganda you probably wouldn’t get through it.

You’ve gone for Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father next.

It came out in 1995 when Obama was a young man and it was reissued in 2004, when he’d just been made senator. I’m glad I read it after writing my own book on Kenya because it goes to the heart of something that I try to capture in my book but probably don’t manage to do quite as well. My book is about corruption, his is about more than that, but the point he makes, and I agree with him, is that corruption is not about personal greed, it’s about compassion. Compassion for the extended family, whose members put incredible pressure on those who do well. Since they don’t trust the state to do anything, they’re dependent on family. Obama tells the story of Auma, his half-sister, who is educated, hard-working and has succeeded abroad, who owns property and a car, and recounts the way the entire family basically leeches off her. It’s not good for either side. She resents it because all her projects are undermined, but the family is also resentful of her because they don’t like being beholden. If aid is one of the problems in Africa, the extended family is also both a blessing and a blight. Obama didn’t even spend that long in Kenya, but he captures that conundrum immediately.