A revelatory history of how post-colonial African Independence movements were systematically undermined by one nation above all: the US.
In 1958 in Accra, Ghana, the Hands Off Africa conference brought together the leading figures of African independence in a public show of political strength and purpose. Led by the charismatic Kwame Nkrumah, who had just won Ghana's independence, his determined call for Pan-Africanism was heeded by young, idealistic leaders across the continent and by African Americans seeking civil rights at home. Yet, a moment that signified a new era of African freedom simultaneously marked a new era of foreign intervention and control.
In White Malice, Susan Williams unearths the covert operations pursued by the CIA from Ghana to the Congo to the UN in an effort to frustrate and deny Africa's new generation of nationalist leaders. This dramatically upends the conventional belief that the African nations failed to establish effective, democratic states on their own accord. As the old European powers moved out, the US moved in.
Drawing on original research and recently declassified documents, and told through an engaging narrative, 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.
The Shinkolobwe Mine in the Belgian Congo was described by a 1943 Manhattan Project intelligence report as the "most important deposit of uranium yet discovered in the world." So long as the U.S. remained in control of this mine and its supply, it had a world monopoly on the primary material needed to build an atomic bomb. The uranium from this mine was used to build the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Given the possibility that the Germans were also working on an atomic bomb, it was a priority for the U.S. to prevent Congo's uranium from being smuggled to Germany. This task was given to the newly created Office of Strategic Services, later known as the CIA. Although much has been written about ALSOS, the secret intelligence mission created to investigate the German atomic project, so far nothing has been written about the intelligence mission at the source of uranium-the Belgian Congo. Spies in the Congo is based on a mass of newly released (and formerly top secret) archive material in the U.S., the U.K., and Belgium; personal testimonies; and a range of audio visual materials, including a set of eight mm films taken by the lead spy.
