By Dr Henning Melber, PhD, The University of Pretoria — The Conversation, 9 February 2022
Susan Williams’ new book White Malice — The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa adds to her track record on African history. Almost a forensic account, its more than 500 pages ruthlessly reveal through factual evidence the unsavoury machinations of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Africa during the Cold War until the late 1960s. While scholarly analyses of this era have increased, this is the first detailed account disclosing a Western dirty war through detailed quotes from original documents and by those involved.
The book revisits the circumstances of UN Secretary General Hammarskjöld’s death in a 1961 plane crash near Ndola in then Northern Rhodesia, which Williams’ earlier research suggested was no accident. More room is devoted to a step-by-step account leading to the elimination of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of an independent Congo, and the removal of Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah from office. 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. Both agencies shared access to encrypted messages used in confidential communication by Hammarskjöld and other high-ranking UN officials — which the CIA celebrated as “the intelligence coup of the century.”
CIA operations were not confined to plots ending in brute force. Some were cultural programmes, including stipends to South African writers in exile and the sponsoring of cultural festivals in Africa — unbeknown to many artists and scholars who received CIA sponsorship. Williams documents CIA-funded concerts by Louis Armstrong, who toured 27 African cities in 11 weeks during late 1960 while Lumumba’s end was near. The story is definitely not fiction. This article has been republished under Creative Commons licence.