"Such were the Conditions: The Kahnplay Incident" is a richly packed memoir, motivated by Africa’s poverty conundrum. It offers ground-level, front-row views of African development, as it navigates through, around, and over obstacles—harrowing, overwhelming, and heart wrenching—faced by a young Ghanaian determined to fulfil the promise of independence in the aftermath of truncated development: through war, coups, geopolitics, corruption, and misguided donor conditionalities. This fast-paced, elucidative book captivates the reader as it tells of the tragic loss of life during Liberia’s coup, the isolation in Kahnplay’s dungeons, a death sentence meted out by a military tribunal, desperate days of homelessness in the US, the schizophrenic world bribery and extortion impose upon business negotiations in Ghana, and the high risks for private development in Charles Taylor’s Liberia.