"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.