White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa

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There’s also some good stuff about MK-ultra, and the post-WW2 politics of Uranium, which centered around the Shinkolobwe mine in the Katanga province of the Congo.

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. Both agencies shared access to the encrypted messages used in confidential communication by Hammarskjöld and other high-ranking UN officials. As quoted by Williams (p. 290), the CIA celebrated this as “the intelligence coup of the century”. Her previous book (2016) was Spies in the Congo: The Race for the Ore that Built the Atomic Bomb (the sub-title in the USA is America’s Atomic Mission in World War II),which looks at espionage in the Belgian Congo during the Second World War, in the context of global power struggles, the European colonial presence in Africa, and the competition for strategic raw materials. Organiser with Dr Mandy Banton of a seminar to launch a new book by Professor Henning Melber. Speakers were David Simon(Royal Holloway) and Marion Wallace (Africa Curator, The British Library).The Secret Archive: What is the significance of FCO’s ‘Migrated Archives’ and ‘Special Collections’? Colour Bar: The Triumph of Seretse Khama and His Nation, Allen Lane, 2006. ISBN 978-0-7139-9811-5 – on the founding president of Botswana

In 2016 Williams published Spies in the Congo: The Race for the Ore that Built the Atomic Bomb. The focus was on Shinkolobwe, the world’s biggest uranium mine, in the Congolese Katanga province. Of crucial geostrategic importance, in the 1940s it supplied the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bombs, which devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Shinkolobwe remained the main resource in the American nuclear arming of the 1950s. White Malice Published in Talking Humanities, curated by SAS, a series of scholarly articles marking the 2018 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in London A Special Issue of The Round Table, co-edited by Williams with Dr Mandy Banton (SAS) and Professor Elizabeth Shepherd (UCL) and with an introduction by all three editors

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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. Williams’ new book seems like the third in a trilogy. Its title, White Malice, captures the racist arrogance of power, unscrupulously destabilising and (re-)gaining control over sovereign states as a form of colonialism by other means. A colloquium co-organised with Mandy Banton (ICwS) and David Wardrop (UNA Westminster). Speakers included Dr Kenneth Kaunda, First President of Zambia (by video). The Round Table was chaired by Lord (Paul) Boateng, a member of the Rifkind Committee on the future of the ICwS. Since I don’t feel comfortable tanking the rating of this book just because I couldn’t get into it, (which is a shame, I was really interested in this subject!) I’m going to leave it alone, but I probably would have given it one or two stars. Review of White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa by Susan Williams (PublicAffaris, 2021)

It is obvious that U.S. would be worried about increasing Russian influence in Africa, but on occasion, the U.S. also seemed happy enough to push leaders it had already decided were a problem closer to the USSR. When Lumumba travelled to the U.S. in the summer of 1960, to try to enlist U.S. help to get Belgian troops out of Congo, for example, he travelled there in a plane supplied by the USSR. This was not a pro-Russian gesture, but simply the result of the U.S. refusal to make one of their planes available to him. It was nevertheless seized on by the U.S. media as evidence that he was a communist and therefore an enemy of the USA. Similarly, when Nkrumah embarked on a nuclear-power programme for Ghana, he first approached Canada to obtain a reactor. He turned to the USSR only after the U.S. had forced Canada to turn him down. The U.S. went to some lengths to conceal this, maintaining that their uranium came from Canada and, in the Second World War, labelling barrels of uranium being exported from Congo as cobalt. It is plausible, Williams argues, that this practice of talking about cobalt as code for uranium continued after the war, which reveals discussions in the CIA and U.S. government about securing continuing access to the uranium mine in Congo’s Katanga province in the face of Congolese independence. Katanga’s secession from Congo after the election of Lumumba in 1960 is unlikely to have been a coincidence. Neocolonialism Susan Williams is a historian and author, based in London. Her latest book is White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa, published in 2021. [1] [2] Her other publications include: The People's King: The True Story of the Abdication, a book about the abdication of Edward VIII, published in 2003; [3] and Colour Bar: The Triumph of Seretse Khama and His Nation, published in 2006, [4] on which the 2016 film A United Kingdom is based. [5] [6] Paper presented at ‘Sowing the Whirlwind’: Nuclear Politics and the Historical Record, a conference held by ICWS/SAS Convenor with Dr Mandy Banton, of one-day international conference to mark the 50th anniversary of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld's death, 2 September 2001. The conference was organised jointly with the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, Uppsala, Sweden, and the United Nations Association of the UK, Westminster Branch. The evening before, a welcoming event was hosted by the Swedish Ambassador, Ms Nicola Clase, at her official Residence in London.

The killing of Lumumba

Silencing and Lies: The death of Hammarskjöld, Congolese uranium, and the annexation of history', lecture given to the Dag Hammarskjöld Programme, Voksenaasen, Oslo, Norway And not to be overly long-winded on the subject of Roald Dahl, Malice writes that Dahl was mainly known in 1944 for having been a Royal Air Force (RAF) pilot who got shot down and badly burned in a crash in Libya early in the war (not in Greece, as Malice says). But no, he had been publishing short stories that were well received, and he wrote a popular kiddy book called The Gremlins, which Walt Disney planned to make into an animated film (but didn’t, because of RAF oversight restrictions). [4] Religion, Performance and Queer Artists of Colour in South Africa: Interview with Dr Megan Robertson White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa, PublicAffairs, 2021. ISBN 978-1-5417-6829-1

When Nkrumah learned of Lumumba’s assassination, he felt it “in a very keen and personal way,” according to June Milne, his British research assistant. But horrifying as the news was to him, the Ghanaian statesman was hardly surprised. It is difficult to know how great an impact the CIA truly had on the Congolese civil war, as it is difficult to know whether its plot to assassinate Lumumba ultimately had any success. According to the Congressional Church Committee, which began to investigate CIA malfeasance in the 1970s, the CIA did not kill him. But Williams distrusts the committee's findings. She focuses a full chapter on justifying her belief that American intelligence had a clandestine hand in Patrice Lumumba's death. Although she cannot prove this point — her argument hinges, ultimately, on a CIA asset's gas-reimbursement paperwork, a finding too small to be conclusive — she effectively calls the Church Committee's findings into question.A large bespectacled lady, usually with cigarette ash on her ample bosom,” Williams says her “frumpy” appearance hid a malicious force. Years later, Park explained her modus operandi to a television documentary: “You set people discreetly against one another . . . They destroy each other, we don’t destroy them.”