David Hines (1915-2000) worked in East Africa from 1938 to 1972.

His claim to fame is that he developed farming co-operatives from 1947 to 1962 in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and then Uganda. When responsible for about 400 staff throughout Uganda, some 500,000 farmers joined co-operatives growing cotton, coffee, maize, and tobacco.

This radically improved living standards in the transition from subsistence farming to cash crops that included exporting coffee and cotton from landlocked Uganda – only for all progress to be lost during the subsequent tyrannical Idi Amin dictatorship.

Previously, iIn World War II, learning to speak Swahili fluently, Captain Hines commanded lightly armoured cars fighting to eject the Italian army from Kenya, Somalia, Abyssinia, and Eritrea – and the Vichy French from Madagascar.

From 1943 to 1947, he was the accountant for the USA-lend-lease “Tanganyika wheat scheme” to help feed Europe after WWII. In Nairobi from 1966 to 1970 he advised the newly independent Kenya government.

David Hines was born in Stoke-on-Trent, the English potteries town in 1915. Educated in England, he only saw his parents every few years, as his father worked in India. In Cooper Brothers (later PWC) in London he became a chartered accountant,