U.S. Neocolonialism in Africa

Most volumes on this list were written in Moscow by Soviet institutes and translated for export. This one was written in Moscow by an American.

It carries a foreword by Henry Winston, National Chairman of the Communist Party of the USA, and its author writes, as he puts it, from the vantage point of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations - IMEMO, the great Soviet foreign-policy institute. The book is dedicated to Amilcar Cabral and to all fighters for national liberation and socialism, and Winston's foreword offers it as a weapon in the struggle of some four hundred million Africans.

Much of what it documents is real, and some of it is documented well. The mechanisms it anatomises were the actual machinery of Western domination in post-independence Africa: the Firestone rubber concession in Liberia, secured in 1926 behind a government a League of Nations inquiry found to be practising forced labour and semi-slavery; the Kaiser aluminium complex on the Volta; the pattern by which political independence without economic independence leaves a formally sovereign state trapped in unequal trade and primary-commodity dependence. His chapter on aid catches the lever in the act, tracing how American grain sales for local currency were used to extract political and military concessions, and how the trade collapsed when they were refused.

On the murder of Lumumba he is, in essentials, correct.

The body of the text closes in 1972; an afterword signed March 1974 carries it to the October war and Cabral's assassination. It stands five weeks before the Carnation Revolution swept the Portuguese empire away.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.