White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa

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There was a lot of stabbing last week. A lot of nonwhites are stabbing Whites, with intent to kill.... 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. Paper given at a conference organised in the House of Lords, London, by UNA Westminster on questions relating to Dag Hammarskjöld’s death.

In fact, the agents Nkrumah feared were already present. Not long after the event began, Ghanaian police arrested a journalist who had been hiding in one of the conference rooms while apparently trying to record a closed breakout session. As it was later discovered, the journalist actually worked for a CIA front organization, one of many represented at the event. 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. 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.

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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. Once any White society accepts that all the races are equal, that so-called racism is a real and... This book has one of the most misleading titles of all time. It seems like it’s going to be a sweeping geopolitical history of post WW2 Africa in relation to the Breton-Woods institutions, US state department, and CIA. Something along the lines of William Blum’s Killing Hope, but with a somewhat narrower focus. Nkrumah possessed an acute understanding of the threat and of the people behind it. Only months after his speech, Lumumba was assassinated by a Belgian and Congolese firing squad, opening the door to decades of pro-Western tyranny in the country. 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.

This does not appear to be the behaviour of a power concerned solely to prevent the USSR from gaining more influence in Africa. In fact, it is clear from Williams’ account that the U.S. would have behaved in a similar fashion if there had been no Cold War and no Russian menace at all. The problem from the U.S. point of view was not the USSR, but the threat posed to U.S. interests by movements which weren’t going to be satisfied with neocolonialism but which wanted genuine independence. Racism and imperialism The good parts make this book worth it, though. The sections on how the US covertly and overtly abused the United Nations, for example, we’re eye-widening to say the least. The CIA, in partnership with a Swiss company, sold encryption devices to dozens of nations at the UN, which secretly allowed them to spy on sensitive conversations among senior state officials and diplomats for decades. In addition, the FBI subjected UN workers in New York to extensive interviews, anti-communist probing, and surveillance, despite the UN’s extraterritoriality and with blatant disregard for the UN charter. New Spiritualities of Survival among Refugees in Northern Nigeria: Interview with Dr Matthew Michael Neocolonialism takes various forms, including the sponsorship of culture. This study of the CIA during the cold war reveals the story of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA front based in Paris, which was active on five continents, including Africa. Among an astonishing breadth of activities, it subsidised conferences, cultural centres, books and magazines, including Encounter in London. “Soon enough”, exclaimed the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka in disgust, “we would discover that we had been dining, and with relish, with the original of that serpentine incarnation, the devil himself, romping in our postcolonial Garden of Eden and gorging on the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge!” A mainstream version of events might have it here that the CIA plots to assassinate Lumumba were forestalled by local Congolese action and that the U.S. therefore bore little responsibility for his actual murder. As Williams sets out here, however, there is evidence for a CIA presence at the location where Lumumba, Mpolo and Okito were killed, in the form of an expense claim for travel there. It therefore appears that there was more direct CIA involvement in the actual event than has often previously been recognised.Dag Hammarskjold and the Decolonisation of Africa: Looking through a telescope at Ndola airport, 17-18 September 1961 In connection with the publication of her book Who Killed Hammarskjold, Susan was interviewed on Newshour, BBC World Service.