Your author, Graham Tottle, is a Cambridge-trained historian and computer scientist with many publications. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society.
He was a District Officer (government official) in the southwest of Uganda for five inspiring years just before independence in 1963. Followed by 20 years programming and managing big mainframe software in ICL (International Computers Limited) in Manchester, then 20 years as a consultant in agricultural computing for development. This involved working for the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and similar organisations in 21 Third World countries, 18 from the Commonwealth. Accounts of its animals is the theme of this book. He is mostly the editor, sometimes the author.
He was under surveillance as a consultant to the Director of the Ministry of Planning, later hostage (until he was rescued by Kofi Annan) in Saddam Hussein’s Ministry of Planning, Iraq, at the first Gulf War. This was shortly before Kofi was appointed Secretary General of the UN. Graham has often worked in hotspots and war zones, at the leading edge of IT, for the World Bank, UN and UK since the seventies. So he knows his stuff.