White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa

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King was in Ghana for the independence celebrations in 1957, along with world leaders, freedom fighters, and others from the civil-rights struggle in the U.S.. They were also joined by the U.S. Vice President, Richard Nixon. Nixon was apparently in his element at the extended political jamboree, shaking hands with everyone, patting heads and ‘smiling, smiling all the time’ (p.13). At one point, he went up to one man, whom he took to be Ghanian, slapped him on the shoulder, and asked him how it felt to be free. ‘“I wouldn’t know, Sir” came the reply. “I’m from Alabama”’ (p.14). Williams shows that “assassination, overthrowing elected governments, sowing conflict between political groups and bribing politicians, trade unionists and national representatives at the UN” were just some of the strategies employed. Then one night late in 2018 after my book Whiteness:The Original Sincame out, he interviewed me for a show he had on Anthony Cumia’s Compound Media network. Throughout the entire interview, he steadfastly denied that white people were getting slammed in the media. Last question he asked me was whether I thought Hitler got a bad rap in the press. I said of course he did. Before I was even given a chance to elaborate, he cut me off, ended the interview, and I never heard from him again. Congo was therefore at the centre of the U.S. neocolonialisation strategy, in which it wasn’t necessary to maintain an explicitly colonial regime to reap the benefits of being a colonial power. As Nkrumah explained, in this neocolonialist reality, ‘the state which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside’ (p.363). The U.S. was not the only aspiring practitioner of neocolonialism. Former colonial powers, after all, commonly expected to be able to maintain their interests in their former colonies. For example, the Belgian settlement for Congo expected Belgian companies to be able to go on exploiting Congolese resources as they had always done. The resources that the U.S. put into this were, however, extensive.

Indeed, after reading this book, one could get the impression that every American or European living and working in Africa at this time was an intelligence operative with a shadowy agenda. I, too, traveled the pipeline from Libertarianism to the Far-right via Objectivism. Although I didn'... Colour Bar: The Triumph of Seretse Khama and His Nation, Allen Lane, 2006. ISBN 978-0-7139-9811-5 – on the founding president of Botswana Organiser with Dr Mandy Banton of a seminar to launch a new book by Professor Henning Melber. Speakers were David Simon(Royal Holloway) and Marion Wallace (Africa Curator, The British Library). China too had stepped up its efforts to spread its ideology in Africa through military and cultural programmes. Dos Santos and Viriato da Cruz became infatuated with Maoism after their visits to China in 1954 and 1958. ‘The time spent in China,’ dos Santos later reported, ‘was a real school in Marxism-Leninism.’ Viriato da Cruz, the most committed Maoist of the Angolan anti-colonialists, regarded Khrushchev’s policy of peaceful co-existence as a betrayal of the principles of Marxism-Leninism. Neto disagreed: he remained much closer to the Portuguese Communist Party, which took its cue from Moscow. When Viriato da Cruz drafted the first manifesto of the MPLA – an organisation he and Andrade hoped would bring together the country’s disparate nationalist movements – neither Beijing nor Moscow had enough influence to determine its ideological position. In 1966, Viriato da Cruz opted for exile in China, where he remained until his death in 1973.Sankara, the president of Burkina Faso from 1983-1987, is currently in the news because an investigation has just begun into his assassination. This collection of his interviews and speeches provides a window on his programmes to improve people’s lives, involving land redistribution, literacy and education, a focus on women’s rights and a massive vaccination scheme. Revered as Africa’s Che Guevara, Sankara defied neocolonial control by France, the former colonial power, and the US. He described debt, presented as aid, as “neocolonialism, in which colonisers transformed themselves into ‘technical assistance’. We should say ‘technical assassins’.” Maybe I’m just more of a broad sweep kinda guy. However, there are some genuinely interesting passages in here, buried beneath mountains of minute, day-to-day details about various telephone conversations between ambassadors and CIA assets, right down to the personal idiosyncrasies and dress of the people involved. It’s almost like Williams wanted to turn this into a true-story spy novel. For someone who was looking for a heavy-duty historical analysis, it’s very disappointing. Williams writes in a scattered way, with plots and characters being introduced or returned to at inexplicable times, making the narrative and, more importantly, the larger message hard to follow. The overall feeling is being snowballed with facts and names. At times, Williams is good at clearly stating her conjecture for what is it. She is also good at pointing out distortions of or gaps in the historical record. At other points, however, she makes declarative statements without providing evidence. I'm generally inclined to believe her narrative but her occasional failure to provide support makes the book read like a polemic.

As a post script I also think it is maybe a little odd to have a review of the book written by professor Nzongila-Ntalaja whose work and observations are most extensively quoted therein. Dag Hammarskjold and the Decolonisation of Africa: Looking through a telescope at Ndola airport, 17-18 September 1961 In 2016 Williams published Spies in the Congo: The Race for the Ore that Built the Atomic Bomb. The focus was on Shinkolobwe, the world’s biggest uranium mine, in the Congolese Katanga province. Of crucial geostrategic importance, in the 1940s it supplied the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bombs, which devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Shinkolobwe remained the main resource in the American nuclear arming of the 1950s. White Malice I mean all those Bildungsromane of the late 18th and early 19th century. Russian classical writers...Colloquium: The United Nations and End of Empire: Revisiting the Role of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold Susan Williams is a historian and author, based in London. Her latest book is White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa, published in 2021. [1] [2] Her other publications include: The People's King: The True Story of the Abdication, a book about the abdication of Edward VIII, published in 2003; [3] and Colour Bar: The Triumph of Seretse Khama and His Nation, published in 2006, [4] on which the 2016 film A United Kingdom is based. [5] [6] A noticeably absent Bad Guy in the text is Joseph Davies, a lawyer and federal bureaucrat who served as ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1936 until 1938, about which he wrote a pro-Stalin memoir called Mission to Moscow. Davies had been a prosperous corporate attorney and Democrat Party fundraiser when he married the fabulously rich Marjorie Merriwether Post (General Foods and Post Cereals) in 1935. You don’t need to read Davies’ book, just look at the film version starring Walter Huston. Joe goes all goofy and goggle-eyed when he’s talking to Stalin, and Stalin explains why he was executing all his old Bolsheviks and trusted generals. Basically, these miscreants were plotting against the state, they were sabotaging factories, they were taking food out of the mouths of innocent babes. The film shows us vignettes of these arrests: people seized on the street, or at the factory they’re sabotaging. The important aspect of the Davies narrative is that he was not being devious or following some Communist Party discipline. There’s also some good stuff about MK-ultra, and the post-WW2 politics of Uranium, which centered around the Shinkolobwe mine in the Katanga province of the Congo. It is difficult to know how great an impact the CIA truly had on the Congolese civil war, as it is difficult to know whether its plot to assassinate Lumumba ultimately had any success. According to the Congressional Church Committee, which began to investigate CIA malfeasance in the 1970s, the CIA did not kill him. But Williams distrusts the committee's findings. She focuses a full chapter on justifying her belief that American intelligence had a clandestine hand in Patrice Lumumba's death. Although she cannot prove this point — her argument hinges, ultimately, on a CIA asset's gas-reimbursement paperwork, a finding too small to be conclusive — she effectively calls the Church Committee's findings into question.

The Hammarskjöld book had a huge impact. It prompted Lord Lea of Crondall to lead an enabling committee that in 2012 set up the Hammarskjöld Commission tasked to assess new evidence pertinent to the plane crash. That panel’s report led former UN secretary-general Ban Ki Moon to invite Mohamed Chande Othman, the former chief justice of Tanzania, to conduct a full inquiry into the incident. Not by coincidence, the book revisits the circumstances of Hammarskjöld’s death and the relevance of Katanga. More room is devoted to a step-by-step account leading to the elimination of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of an independent Congo. Imagine how much more important uranium was, seen through the eyes of the US at the height of the cold war in the 1950s and ’60s. Susan Williams leaves little to the imagination in examining the diabolical actions of the CIA in pursuit of US policy with particular reference to newly independent Ghana and the Congo. That is especially true in the aftermath of Lumumba’s assassination; an overabundance of secrecy still prevents a full accounting. But what records have been pried from the agency’s hands detail a multitude of CIA aerial operations in the Congo involving planes owned by agency front companies and pilots who were themselves CIA personnel. During a period of upheaval, the agency appears to be everywhere in the country at once. “But,” Williams writes, “it is a confusing situation in which the CIA appears to have been riding several horses at once that were going in different directions.” The agency “supported [Katangan secessionist president Moïse] Tshombe’s war on the UN; it supported the UN mission in the Congo; and it supported the Congolese Air Force, the air arm of the Leopoldville government.”What a joy to open this book and find that whatever the author’s White Pill is supposed to be, it somehow involves Ayn Rand (AR). It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand (1971, by Jerome Tuccille) was the name of an actual book that came out when I was in my teens and going through my own brief Objectivist period. The book is a funny saga about the author’s time as a militant libertarian. I’m sure it meant a lot to people who came of age in the late 1960s and were getting tired of Randianism by 1971, but you may find it dreary and overly granular today. At the same time the CIA was worried about the Soviets getting their hands on the premium uranium mine in Katanga province, which has announced it was breaking away as well as South Kasai (where the civil war is still raging). But the CIA wanted to get rid of Nkrumah who had the idea to united Africa as a "United States of Africa" with everyone working together to improve their countries without ending up in the West or Red Camps. Since I don’t feel comfortable tanking the rating of this book just because I couldn’t get into it, (which is a shame, I was really interested in this subject!) I’m going to leave it alone, but I probably would have given it one or two stars.

Talking Head in the third episode of this BBC 2 television series, looking at documents held by the UK National Archives

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The U.S. went to some lengths to conceal this, maintaining that their uranium came from Canada and, in the Second World War, labelling barrels of uranium being exported from Congo as cobalt. It is plausible, Williams argues, that this practice of talking about cobalt as code for uranium continued after the war, which reveals discussions in the CIA and U.S. government about securing continuing access to the uranium mine in Congo’s Katanga province in the face of Congolese independence. Katanga’s secession from Congo after the election of Lumumba in 1960 is unlikely to have been a coincidence. Neocolonialism