WHITE MALICE: THE CIA AND THE COVERT RECOLONIZATION OF AFRICA - SUSAN WILLIAMS

Another enormous CIA book; the quest to fully CIA-pill myself continues. This is one of the “serious” ones, existing opposite of things like THE FRANKLIN COVERUP, being written by a “legitimate” professor and coming complete with literally hundreds of pages of notes, an extensive bibliography and supporting facts. You couldn’t accuse this book of being paranoid conspiracy stuff. But even at 600+ pages the title is a bit misleading since the book is more narrow-focused than the subtitle would suggest. It would take an encyclopedia-length series of books to even quickly recount all the evil shit the CIA has been up to in Africa since their formation. This book focuses on Africa from the end of WWII until Nkrumah’s overthrow in ‘66 with most of the action revolving around Lumumba and the Congo. The Lumumba situation is interesting since people feel like they understand what happened, that maybe the US did something wrong, but Williams does a great job really showing the extent of the US’s involvement. In fact, tons of the relevant information is quite new, since it was culled from JFK files that were released in 2017-2018, the last time we were allowed to learn anything at all about a still existing government agency that, apparently, is allowed to do literally whatever they want anywhere in the world and we, again literally, are never allowed, even after all the people involved are dead, to know what actually happened. Not for nothing but Biden just used the pandemic as an excuse to not declassify more JFK files that were scheduled to be released this year. I’m sure there is nothing embarrassing w/r/t the CIA in these files, they simply didn’t have the time to release them. It’s amazing to think about how correct and ahead of the curve Nkrumah was. I recently read his magnum opus, Neo-Colonialism, and this book is basically the compendium with the receipts. He was right about everything, the Imperialists really were colluding with large corporations, mostly in mining/extraction, and especially surrounding the uranium deposits in the Congo, to divide, undermine and overthrow any self-directed progress the people of Africa were trying to make. However involved you think the CIA was in Africa at this time, it was worse. There’s a zillion small details to pick up in this book, which connect to the other CIA stuff I’ve read. There’s stories about MKULTRA poisoner Gottlieb flying to Congo with some sort of virus to kill Lumumba, there’s stories about CIA officers putting Lumumba’s corpse in their car to drive around. There’s fascinating connections to SAIMR, the South African group that definitely committed war crimes/atrocities across Africa and who stand accused of even darker stuff. They, SAIMR, also seem to be involved in the assassination of Hammarskjöld, along with the CIA. Williams wrote another book on that subject that got the UN to reinvestigate the “plane crash” which is ongoing. The CIA did trick the UN, along with numerous nations like Ghana, into using a device called the CX-52 to send coded messages, which they, of course, built a backdoor into in order to read whatever these nations or bodies wrote. There’s an amazing through line about the CIA’s use of Black Americans to infiltrate and catch the Africans off guard. They used Louis Armstrong concerts to gain access to areas they would have had difficulties getting to without, they put in a Black Ambassador right before they coup’d Nkrumah to muddy the neocolonial optics, they funded organizations like the American Center for African Culture and the African-American Institute, one of the groups they worked with the recruit and sheep-dip agents, The African Airlift Project, brought Obama’s dad to the USA, people like Richard Wright were both spied on and funded secretly by the CIA. It’s a fascinating thread that is still present today. Look at how Obama was able to leverage his Blackness to convince African nations to let the US build an archipelago of bases (and black sites) across the continent and establish AFRICOM. Or the way MI6 and the CIA are training death-squads in Kenya. Or what the US did to Libya. If you have any interests in Africa or world history post-1945 you must read this book, it is essential and provides vital context to basically every news story that come out of Africa in the last 60 years. Even at 600+ pages it barely touches topics like the US’s involvement with maintaining apartheid in South Africa (the CIA got Mandela arrested), or the mercenaries we sponsored all across the continent, or what we did in East Africa (especially, and on-goingly, in Somalia), or the extent of our involvement in Angola, or the ways that aid is used as an extension of our wicked foreign policy. Focusing in on Lumumba and Nkrumah was a wise choice, it’s a fascinating story that comes to a dramatic conclusion and shows how the continent was poisoned and neo-colonized immediately after independence. The Federal system for all of Africa that Nkrumah was suggesting remains a beautiful dream. I can’t recommend this book enough. ‘66 covert actions.