White Malice

The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa

Susan Williams

11 min read

1m 2s intro

Brief summary

White Malice reveals how Western powers, driven by a desire to control Africa's vast mineral wealth, systematically subverted the continent's post-colonial independence movements. It focuses on the CIA's covert operations, from cultural manipulation to political assassination, that targeted visionary leaders like Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah and the Congo's Patrice Lumumba.

Who it's for

This book is for anyone interested in the hidden history of the Cold War, decolonization, and the geopolitical forces that have shaped modern Africa.

White Malice

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Ghana and the Start of Independence

In 1957, Ghana became the first Black-majority African country in the modern colonial era to win independence from European rule. The moment carried weight far beyond one country. Across Africa and the Black diaspora, it felt like proof that colonial rule could be defeated and that a different future was possible.

The celebrations in Accra drew people from many parts of the world, including African American leaders who saw Ghana’s freedom as closely tied to the struggle against racism in the United States. The new nation stood as a direct challenge to the old colonial story that empire had been generous or civilizing. Behind that story had been a system of deep racial inequality, economic extraction, and routine humiliation.

Ghana’s independence also changed the political map of the Cold War. African countries were no longer just territories controlled by Europe. They were becoming independent states that could choose their own path, and both the United States and the Soviet Union understood that this would matter greatly.

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About the author

Susan Williams

Susan Williams is a historian and a senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. Her work focuses on twentieth-century Africa, decolonisation, and the Cold War, often exposing the influence and interference of Western powers in the continent's autonomy. Williams's pathbreaking research, which draws on declassified archives, has triggered new United Nations investigations and earned her the 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction.