Cold War, Africa and CIA’s poisoned acts

A revelatory history of how postcolonial African Independence movements were systematically undermined by one nation above all the US.

In 1968 in Accra, Ghana, the Hands of Africa conference brought together the leading figures of African independence in a public show of political strength and purpose. Led by charismatic Kwame Nkrumah, who had just won Ghana’s independence, and his determined call for Pan-African was heeded by young idealistic leaders across the continent and by African Americans seeking civil rights at home. The new era of African freedom simultaneously marked a new era of foreign intervention and control.

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.

Ghana’s first Prime minister Kwame Nkrumah, and president,  who was overthrown in a coup in 1996, wrote in a book two years after, “ Examples of CIA activity in Africa would provide material for a book of their own”,

Based on his comments, Susan Williams, a University of London lecturer and Africa expert in White Malice, explains how CIA  who set up dedicated Africa division in 1959, deliberately tipped up several young African states  taking their first hesitant steps as independent nations.

She focuses on two interlocking stories, the rise and fall of Nkrumah, the pan African father figure of the continent’s liberation struggle, and the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s first prime minister. Bother men presented as heroes whose ideas, motives and righteousness are almost beyond questioning.

The two leaders even contemplated a union between their countries in the pan African spirit.

In White Malice, Williams uses archives, declassified documents and transcripts to weave together her story.

In a 1960s speech, President Dwight Eishenhower,  gave a warm speech at the UN in which he argued for the right of young African states, including Congo to govern themselves. In private “the president expressed his wish that Lumumba would fall into the river full of crocodiles.”

CIA interference in Congo and Ghana becomes a metaphor for neocolonialism across the continent.

The African leaders were prone to fall under a Soviet spell, but Williams suggests that Washington misread talk of pan-Africanism and non-alignment as a fateful drift towards the communist bloc. CIA director Allen Dulles referred to Lumumba as “a Castro or worse”. The second was fight for control of African resources particularly Congo’s uranium. The vice president Richard Nixon is quoted as saying  “some of the people of Africa have been out of trees for about 30 years. We must recognise although we cannot say it publicly, that we need the strong men of Africa on our side.”

Washington’s backing of Mobutu Sese Seko, who misgoverned Congo, which renamed Zaire, for three disastrous decades, was a case in point.

 Nina Simone the great American singer and civil rights activist, particularly in the African-America music festival in Nigeria, unaware that it has been bankrolled by the CIA. Wole Soyinka, who went to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, is shocked to discover that he also unknowingly accepted the agency dollar.

If the CIA sees Red under every bed, then Williams sees manipulative hand of CIA in every glove. We learn that the CIA “co-opted abstract expressionism in their propaganda war against Russia, the artworks produced under the movement showed that “America was the land of free” where as Russia was locked up “culturally speaking”.  In Daphne Park an MI6 agent who arrived under cover in Leopoldville, now Kinshasa, as the first consul at the

British embassy.” A large bespectacled lady usually with cigarette ash on her ample bosom, her frumpy appearance hid a malicious force. Years later Park explained her modus operndi to a television documentary. ” You set people discretely against one another, they destroy each other, we don’t destroy them”.

Williams describes what the CIA, and by extension the west, was up to in Africa.  

White Malice: The CIA and the Neo-colonisation of Africa by Susan Williams, Hurst £25 / Public Affairs $35, 688 pages.