White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa

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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. Historian Susan Williams grew up in Zambia. Like other scholars of her generation raised in former settler societies of southern Africa, she empathises with the continent’s people.

Well research book that provides excellent insight into the short period following decolonization in which the CIA intervened in what could have been a prospering democratic Congo. Eye opening as much of the US is indoctrinated to believe that we are a stalwart for Democracy, when in fact, the US will always only stand for US interests, regardless of what form that takes. In this case, it took the form of replacing a left-leaning Democratically elected official with a ruthless military dictator. Research Summary and Profile Research interests: Civil Rights, Colonies & Colonization, emigration & immigration, Communications, Communities, Classes, Races, Contemporary History, Cultural memory, Gender studies, Globalization & Development, Human rights, International Relations, Metropolitan history, Modern History , Political Institutions, Politics Regions: Africa, Asia, Caribbean, Europe, North America, South America, United Kingdom Summary of research interests and expertise:

Facts, not fiction

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!”

The Century Association of New York: speaker along with Roger Lipsey, biographer, and Andrew Gilmour, Political Director, Executive Office of the Secretary General So the CIA had a two pronged strategy, get rid of Nkrumah and place some one more amenable and compliant in his place who wouldn't insist on "helping" the other new nations create real government and cooperation across Africa. In the Congo they wanted to put Kasavubu in power so as to have a better chance of controlling the resources of Katanga province (uranium and diamonds). Prize Recipients". Windham Campbell Prizes 2023. Windham Campbell Prizes . Retrieved 21 April 2023. Interview on Newsday - BBC Africa, BBC World Service - about Spies in the Congo.On BBC World Service. Villains in the book include many of the famous apologists for the Stalin era, including Walter Duranty, who spent years denying the famines and death squads in his reports to the New York Times. Harold Laski is here, too, crueler and snider than he’s usually portrayed. He has to be there; after all, he was Ayn Rand’s model for Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead. [2]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. Published in Talking Humanities, curated by SAS, a series of scholarly articles marking the 2018 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in London But the book also gives space to the stories of idealistic Westerners who supported the agenda of a free and independent continent.

The differences between the Soviet and American approaches to Cold War intervention in the Third World are striking. Both used ‘intimate’ relationships between intelligence agents and anti-colonial activists to shape the outcome of decolonisation. But while many of Telepneva’s mezhdunarodniki considered their work a ‘sacred duty’, Williams’s CIA agents were largely indifferent to the effects of their actions. A CIA staff manual from 1954 recommended ‘a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface’ as the simplest way to cover up a murder. Poison was better still. Sidney Gottlieb, a biochemist who had overseen the CIA’s drug experiments, developed a kit to poison Lumumba and planned to travel to Léopoldville to hand it over to Devlin. But Devlin realised he wasn’t likely to get close enough and cabled his minders requesting a rifle instead. ‘HUNTING GOOD HERE,’ he wrote, ‘WHEN LIGHTS RIGHT.’ All this is tied together by the interventions by the CIA and its predecessor, the Office for Strategic Services, often in cahoots with the British MI6. The detailed accounts offer insights into the secret operations then. The display of mindsets and their consequences do not require theory or analytical comment. The facts speak for themselves. It is clear that the CIA had been investigating ways of killing Lumumba for some time, including raiding the house in which he was sheltering in Stanleyville after Mobutu’s coup, or poisoning him with botulinum, to mimic the effects of diseases common in Congo. The latter was part of the operations of Stanley Gottlieb, a chemical specialist who worked with the CIA on a range of possible technologies for ‘assassination or incapacitation’, as well as even murkier technologies like mind-control drugs (p.506). It was Gottlieb who worked on the various toxins the CIA plotted to use against Castro.The second half of The White Pill is mainly about the last few decades of politics in Great Britain and America. I’m not quite sure what the theme is here, but it appears to be a big cheer for libertarian-conservative politics. Yay, Maggie Thatcher! (Cursed in the press a few years earlier as Milk Snatcher, when as Education Secretary she axed free milk at school for 11-year-olds.) Go, Ronald Reagan! Malice seems to like Thatcher more, and disapproves of the American invasion of Grenada in 1983. Grenada was a member of the British Commonwealth, but America clearly had a more vested interest there even if (as I vaguely recall) the Americans were mainly medical students who couldn’t get into a med school at home. The Secret Archive: What is the significance of FCO’s ‘Migrated Archives’ and ‘Special Collections’?