White Malice
The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa
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4.6 • 8 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Filled with “fascinating information, original research, and bold ideas” (NPR), a revelatory account of how African Independence was systematically undermined by the US
In 1958 in Accra, Ghana, the Hands Off Africa conference brought together the leading figures of African independence in a public show of political strength and purpose. The charismatic Kwame Nkrumah, who had just won Ghana’s independence, led a determined appeal for Pan-Africanism. Young, idealistic leaders across the continent, as well as African Americans seeking civil rights at home, heeded his call. Yet, a moment that signified a new era of African freedom simultaneously marked a new era of foreign intervention and control.
In White Malice, Susan Williams unearths the CIA’s covert operations from Ghana to the Congo to the UN, which frustrated the attempts of Africa’s new generation of nationalist leaders to establish democratic governance. These revelations dramatically upend the conventional wisdom that African nations failed to establish effective, democratic states on their own accord. As the old European powers moved out, the US moved in.
Drawing on original research and recently declassified documents, Williams introduces readers to idealistic African leaders and to the secret agents, ambassadors, and even presidents who deliberately worked against them, forever altering the future of a continent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The quest for African unity was undermined by America's imperialist machinations, according to this labyrinthine study, which focuses on the Congo Crisis and the execution of Patrice Lumumba in 1961. University of London historian Williams (Spies in the Congo) chronicles Lumumba's rise to power as Congo's first prime minister following independence from Belgium in June of 1960, and his rapid downfall amid an army mutiny, a Belgian invasion, a secession movement backed by Western mining companies in the province of Katanga, and a coup launched by future dictator Joseph Mobutu. It's a chaotic saga with many antagonists, but Williams focuses on the U.S. government, which suspected Lumumba of pro-Soviet leanings and wanted control of the Shinkolobwe uranium mine in Katanga. She documents how the CIA funneled support to Mobutu, bribed Congolese politicians to oppose Lumumba, and plotted to assassinate him using poisoned toothpaste, but her allegations of skullduggery sometimes outrun the evidence, as when she speculates that the agency may have played a role in the premature deaths of other African leaders and the novelist Richard Wright. Hampered by Williams's styling of Lumumba as the great hope for Pan-Africanism and an eye-glazing tangle of code names and shadowy ties, this is a reductionist take on a complex tragedy.
