Witty Tales Meaning: African Humour Stories: Population Of Somalis In Ethiopia

The book tells the story of a district officer on Kenya's Northern Border.

The memoirs of Hugh Walker MBE contain hair-raising and witty tales of life as a Colonial District Officer in Kenya's wild northern frontier-land in the 1950s, and in Aden during the Insurgency. Along the way, he delivers piercing insights into the political machinations of these end of Empire periods.

He writes bitterly about how the British government broke its promises that Kenya's Somali population would be allowed to secede. In Aden he supplied favored tribes with guns, ammunition, and silver Maria Teresa dollars, surviving death threats and escaping Aden just one week before his successor was blown up by a bomb placed in an aircraft. He later became head of the BBC's Somali Service and spent a decade as a civil administrator in colonial Hong Kong. All this comes against the unpromising background of early life in a children's home until he was adopted by a wealthy spinster. In his 50s he finally found his birth family and later married the painter Anne Moorse, to settle with her in Dorset.