NEO-COLONIALISM: THE LAST STAGE OF IMPERIALISM - KWAME NKRUMAH

It’s pretty easy to see why the CIA harassed, then attempted to murder, then coup’d, then drove to exile, then continued to harass and attempted, again and again to murder, this guy. “Officially” the US State Dept. cancelled $25million in aid over this book’s publication, proving Nkrumah’s point and causing actual suffering. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book by a head of state that is so good. Nkrumah manages to be right about everything that’s going on in 1965 when he wrote this book, and is really on his Cassandra shit w/r/t what has happened in Africa over the subsequent 50 years. The book is really 2 parts. The first couple of chapters and the last chapters are, in a modern context, the most interesting part of the book. They’re the broadest and most theoretical and help explain, extremely clearly, the general contours of his argument. Basically, Nkrumah argues that the extractive relationship between the richer nations and Africa as a whole, which has been going on for the last ~500 year, did not suddenly change during the mid XX century. In fact, Nkrumah would argue that neo-colonialism is worse than what it replaced, “In the days of old-fashion colonialism, the imperial power had at least to explain and justify at home the actions it was taking abroad.” This, like so much of the book, has only gotten more true. The US has bases in 40 African countries at this point and they don’t even bother to justify it. I doubt most Americans have any idea. And he’s right about his grimmest predictions, such as, “Investment under neo-colonialism increases rather than decreases the gap between rich and poor countries.” The Alston Poverty report from the UN last year proved that the 50 years of “development” that has occurred has not noticeably dropped the most dire sort of poverty, the less than $2/day category, outside of China, a country that was not subject to the same sort of neo-colonialism that Africa was. The middle section of the book, if rewritten today, would be called receipts. Actually, I very much wish that someone would go back through and do this level of analysis and break down the current extraction regime in African. Nkrumah goes through, industry by industry, say, coal or diamonds or tin, and breaks down, often including literal flowcharts, and explains who owns which mines and who owns the companies that own those companies, and how these are invariably traced back to US/European organizations, and finally how much money their extracting vs what they invest. It gets even darker than that when he ties in Lumumba and his experience taking on these forces. Again, it’s amazing that a President of a major nation had this much expertise on this particular subject, he is really much braver, smarter and more heroic than I knew, but I longed for an updated version. This level of exploitation still takes place but the contours are different and I’d like to know more about them. Finally, I was taken by his attempts to explain the mechanics of neo-colonialism on the exploiter countries, like the one I’m from, “The developed countries succeeded in exporting their internal problem and transferring the conflict between rich and poor from the national to the international stage.” I’ve been thinking about this more and more in relation to China, and their effect on labor in the US, as well. Irregardless, at least the first couple and last chapter should be required reading, I can’t believe I wasn’t shown it in college. Has a leader, of any sort in any nation, written a better book than this? 29 AFRICOM bases across Africa

That report I mentioned: https://chrgj.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Alston-Poverty-Report-FINAL.pdf