Most of the Progress volumes in this series were written in Moscow by Soviet institutes and translated for export. This one was written in Moscow by an American. U.S. Neocolonialism in Africa carries a foreword by Henry Winston, National Chairman of the Communist Party, USA; it thanks, for their "inspiration," Gus Hall and Winston himself, and, for their "personal interest," James S. Allen of International Publishers; and its author, who signs himself "Stewart Smith," describes himself as a "progressive American economist" writing "from the vantage point of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow," the great Soviet foreign-policy institute known by its Russian initials, IMEMO. The book is dedicated "To Amilcar Cabral and all dedicated fighters for national liberation and Socialism." What we have, then, is an American Communist's book, produced inside the Soviet research apparatus, aimed — Winston's foreword says so — at "all those people of the United States—white and black—who are concerned with this struggle," and offered to the African liberation movements as, in Winston's phrase, "a weapon in the struggle of some 400 million African people for liberation." Assert nothing about the man beyond that: the book states what it states, and the rest is not ours to supply.
Date the text, not the spine. The copyright page reads 1974, but the argument has two layers. The Preface is signed "Moscow, July 1972" and sets the "cut-off date 1971, in a few cases 1972." That is the body of the book. Bolted onto it is a fifth part, an "Afterword," signed "March 1974," which carries the story forward to the Paris accords on Vietnam of January 1973, the US–USSR agreement on the prevention of nuclear war of June 1973, the October 1973 Arab–Israeli war, and the assassination of Cabral in January 1973. So the core is a 1972 text and the final layer a March 1974 one — and, unusually for this series, there is almost no translation lag to discount: this English edition is contemporary with its own argument. It closes one month before the Portuguese empire fell. When Smith writes in March 1974 of "continued political-military victories of national liberation movements in the Portuguese colonies," the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon that would liquidate those colonies was five weeks away; Angola and Mozambique would be independent within eighteen months. The book stands, precisely, on the eve.
Begin with the credit, because this is a book whose criticism is worthless if the reader is left thinking it is a fabrication. It is not. Much of what U.S. Neocolonialism in Africa 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. Smith traces the US corporate stake — Firestone's rubber concession in Liberia, secured in 1926 behind a government that a 1931 League of Nations inquiry found to be practising "widespread forced labor 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, primary-commodity dependence, and aid conditioned on political compliance. His chapter on aid catches the lever in the act: US "aid-financed sales of grain to the UAR for local currency were used as a lever in an effort to pry political and military concessions," and "when these were not forthcoming, aid-financed trade dropped precipitously." That is neocolonialism described exactly — the substitution of the loan and the commodity for the gunboat.
On the two great crimes of the period he is on solid ground. The murder of Patrice Lumumba he narrates without flinching and, in its essentials, correctly: that "US agencies undoubtedly had a direct hand in getting Mobutu, Adoula and Kasavubu to depose and arrest Lumumba," who was then "unconscionably handed over, together with Maurice Mpolo … and Joseph Okito … to Tshombe, Munongo, Kibwe, Kimbe and Mutaka—to be murdered by his arch-enemies." Written in 1972, that was an accusation; the United States Senate's own Church Committee would confirm the CIA's assassination plotting against Lumumba three years later. On the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah in February 1966 he assembles the economic siege that preceded it — the collapse of the cocoa price, the withholding of Western credit until the coup, and then the "feverish granting of international credits (previously withheld)" the moment Nkrumah was gone. And on Southern Africa he is unambiguous and right: US "critical support for Portugal, partially screened via NATO," and Washington's "buffering of South Africa as the strongest imperialist ally on the continent." The Cold-War literature that treated African decolonisation as a Soviet plot was very often an apology for the colonial power and for Pretoria; where Smith records Western and settler violence, believe him.
And he passes the test this series applies hardest, the citation test. Smith does not work from Soviet framing at second hand; he reads the American sources in the original and turns them against Washington. His footnotes run to the Department of State Bulletin, to Senate Foreign Relations Committee reports, to RAND and Hudson Institute studies of how much money it takes "to keep a country within the US orbit," to Newsweek and The New York Times, to W. E. B. DuBois and Immanuel Wallerstein. Winston's foreword advertises the method and the book delivers on it: "Relying mainly on US and other Western sources," Smith convicts American imperialism largely out of the mouths of its own officials and scholars. In a series whose reference volumes so often characterise an opponent they never quote, this is a real and creditable difference. The indictment of US neocolonialism has content, and a good deal of it would stand in any court.
The trouble is not with what the book documents but with what its category is forbidden to touch. The book's organising concept is neocolonialism — the domination of a nominally independent state by a great power through economic leverage, covert action, arms, and client regimes. It is a sharp instrument, and Smith wields it with precision. He wields it in exactly one direction. In a book issued by the Soviet state, at the height of that state's own drive for position across Africa — the treaties of friendship, the arms, the advisers, the client governments it was arming and re-arming from Cairo to Mogadishu — the possibility that great-power domination might have a Soviet form is not entertained, not rebutted, not raised. The USSR appears only ever as the benevolent counter-principle: the vote for the aid project the West refused, the arms the progressive state could not get in Washington, the peacemaker in the Middle East, "the necessary support and assistance to the progressive Arab states in their most trying times," in the Brezhnev pronouncement Smith quotes as authority.
The asymmetry is at its cleanest where the same mechanism appears on both sides of the page. Aid-as-leverage, when Washington practises it, is imperialism — the grain used "as a lever." Aid, when Moscow extends it, is solidarity, and Smith says so in as many words, staging "how the political-economic composite of Socialist assistance contrasts with that of the United States" through "the now classical events surrounding the financing of the Aswan Dam": Soviet credit at "low-interest rates—2.5%" against the West's "4-7% and more," repayable in the borrower's own exports, tied to plant and training rather than to political concession. The economic facts may well be as he gives them; Soviet terms often were softer. But the analytic vanishes at the border. The question the book puts to every American dollar — what does the giver purchase with it? — is never once put to a Soviet rouble. That the USSR too was buying position, that its aid too came with an expected orientation, is not argued and rejected; it is unthinkable within the frame.
This must be said fairly, because the frame is not simply false. Soviet arms and Soviet backing for the movements fighting Portuguese colonialism and apartheid — for the MPLA, for FRELIMO, for the PAIGC that Cabral led, for SWAPO — were, on the decisive question, genuinely on the side of African liberation, and the anti-Stalinist tradition from which this introduction is written said so at the time and says so now. This is not a case where Moscow's hand and Washington's were morally interchangeable. The point is narrower and it is about the book's method: a concept of great-power domination that has been built so that it can only ever be turned outward is not an analysis but a brief. And the reply corpus turned it the other way in the very years Smith was writing. The small Trotskyist review of African liberation, Africa in Struggle — its subtitle "in the whirlwind of permanent revolution" — described, without embarrassment, "the principles behind Soviet policy in Africa and the neo-colonial world generally": policy "guided by the need to extend Soviet influence: primarily political and strategic, secondarily economic." The phrase the book reserves for Washington — "the neo-colonial world" — the review applied to the conduct of Moscow. One tradition could name a Soviet interest in Africa; the other had defined its central category so that no such interest could be described.
There is a fossil of this buried in Smith's own pages, and it is worth exhuming because the later volumes of this series live off it. Writing in 1972, Smith reports approvingly that "the Somali Republic had felt its independence best served by rejecting, at first, a US offer of arms and planes and turning to the Soviet Union for aid." Somalia, in his ledger, is a state that chose its natural ally. Within five years the Soviet Union would abandon that ally — expel from it, transfer its arms and a Cuban expeditionary force to Somalia's enemy Ethiopia, and help reconquer the Ogaden from the very army it had built. Africa in Struggle, covering that reversal in June 1978, drew the moral Smith's frame could not hold: "This cynicism towards the class character of the state explains why it is possible for the Soviet Union to support brutal petit bourgeois regimes in Somalia and Ethiopia," where "alliances can be shifted at will—yesterday's 'progressive' becomes today's 'reactionary'." The client Smith praises in 1972 is the client Moscow discards in 1977. The two later volumes in this series that narrate that discarding — the Academy of Sciences survey USSR and Countries of Africa (Progress, 1980), which cannot bring itself to print the word "Cuban" or the word "Ogaden," and the anniversary showcase Ten Years of the Ethiopian Revolution (Progress, 1986) — are the sequel to Smith's sentence, and they confirm what the reflexivity test finds here: the category of great-power domination, in Soviet hands, never turns inward.
The deeper omission is not about the USSR at all. It is about Africa. Smith's Africa is a two-actor drama — imperialism and the national-liberation movement — and the internal life of the newly independent states, their own classes, their own workers and their own left, has almost no place in it. The "young African working class" and the "non-capitalist path" appear as promises; the possibility that a national or petty-bourgeois regime of the anti-imperialist camp might itself become an exploiter of its own people is not developed. When a "socialist-oriented" leader falls, the explanation is always exogenous: the price squeeze, the CIA, the withheld credit.
Take the case the book itself makes central, Nkrumah. Smith's account of the 1966 coup is the cocoa collapse plus Washington's hand — and both were real. But set it beside the account the Fourth International's tradition published within months of the event, and the difference is the whole argument of this series. Writing in the International Socialist Review in the summer of 1966, Henri Vallin ("Nkrumah's Downfall," ISR vol. 27 no. 3, whole no. 176) granted everything Smith grants — "there is therefore no doubt about the basic structure of Ghana's economy being neocolonial," and imperialism was indeed glad to be rid of Nkrumah — and then said what Smith will not. The regime had rotted from within: "ever-increasing bureaucratization of the Convention People's Party," "severe repression of trade-union autonomy," "rampant corruption among the government and the party functionaries," "growing privileges to the party and state bureaucracy" — a policy "based upon lack of confidence in the masses," which "could only heighten the apathy" in which a colonels' conspiracy could succeed. The coup, Vallin concluded, exposed "the historical failure of the petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders, who, while paying lip service to socialism and while taking some genuinely anti-imperialist measures, proved unable to destroy either the state machinery or the economic props of neocolonialist power … because they feared to mobilize the masses on a broad scale." That is not a softer analysis than Smith's; it is a harder and a more complete one, and it was in print six years before he wrote. On the house test of whether the reply corpus scored the hit first and better, it plainly did: it saw the imperialist crime and the internal decay, where the official book could see only the crime.
Vallin also named the doctrine, and the naming reaches to the root of what Smith is defending. Nkrumah's Ghana, he wrote, was the attempted realisation of "that strange animal, a brain child of Nikita Khrushchev and other leaders of the Soviet bureaucracy, the 'national democratic state' … neither a bourgeois nor workers state, as proclaimed in the new party program adopted at the twenty-second congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union." This is Smith's own theory. When Smith writes of African leaders "looking to a non-capitalist Path to Socialism," and lists Lumumba, Touré, Keïta, Nyerere and Nkrumah as its bearers, leaning (in his account) on the young working class and the peasant masses, he is stating the doctrine of "non-capitalist development" — the claim that a backward country, with barely a proletariat, can cross over to socialism under a "revolutionary-democratic" leadership guided by the Soviet Union. It is the same doctrine that Rostislav Ulyanovsky, Moscow's chief theorist of it, states whole in Present-Day Problems in Asia and Africa (Progress, 1980), and the same doctrine that Ten Years of the Ethiopian Revolution applies to a committee of army officers. This series meets it again and again, and the answer to it is always the same text, in print since 1930. Trotsky's second thesis in The Permanent Revolution states the counter-case directly: "With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses." The quarrel was never over whether Africa must be freed. It was over whether a petty-bourgeois or military regime, tied to Moscow and standing in for a working class too small to rule, could administer socialism into being from above — or whether that formation would resolve, under pressure, back toward the market or into the hands of its own colonels. The reversals that Ulyanovsky could only call "betrayal," and that Smith could not foresee at all, are what the permanent-revolution analysis predicted, and they are what the record delivered.
The point cuts back to Cabral, to whom the book is dedicated. The Fourth International supported the same movements Smith supported — the PAIGC, FRELIMO, the MPLA — and it did so, as Africa in Struggle put it, precisely in order "to combine our support to the MPLA, FRELIMO, and the PAIGC with an analysis of the direction of their political development." That last clause is the one Smith's book cannot write. It can support a movement; it cannot analyse its development, because its frame contains no vocabulary for a liberation movement that might, in power, turn on its own workers. The movements were owed both the support and the analysis. Smith gives the first with his whole heart and withholds the second by construction.
One feature of the book belongs unmistakably to 1973–74 and should be named for what it is. Israel occurs in these pages some hundred and fifty times, far more than any African state, and Smith's treatment of it as a strategic instrument of the United States — armed with Phantoms and Skyhawks, deployed as "a battering ram against progressive Arab states" and "a means of further penetrating Africa" — has a real object: the American–Israeli alignment in the region was a fact, and African states were breaking relations with Israel in 1973 for reasons Smith reports accurately. But the framing runs with the Soviet campaign of its exact moment. Smith closes by endorsing the Organization of African Unity's Tenth Assembly of May 1973, which "condemned colonialism, racism and Zionism," and the non-aligned conference's call "to boycott Israel" — the amalgam of Zionism with colonialism and racism that Soviet diplomacy was then pressing and that would surface at the United Nations in 1975. It is the same current that produced this catalogue's Caution: Zionism (Ivanov, 1970). A reader should take the documented US–Israeli strategic relationship for what it is and register the framing around it for what it is: not independent analysis but the house line of the hour.
Read U.S. Neocolonialism in Africa as what it is at its best — a densely sourced, contemporary, radical American account of the economic and covert machinery by which the United States sought to dominate a decolonising continent, honest enough to convict Washington from Washington's own documents. On the aid-and-dependency trap, on Lumumba, on the Nkrumah siege, on US support for Portugal and Pretoria, it is a real source, and the anti-imperialist analysis at its core has content that the American radical and Fourth-Internationalist traditions shared. Its author believed what he wrote and stood, on the largest question, with the liberation of Africa.
But read it aware of the shape its convictions imposed. Its central category, neocolonialism, is a searchlight wired to point only outward: it illuminates every purchase Washington made with its dollars and cannot see what Moscow bought with its roubles, though the two later African volumes in this series record Moscow buying and re-selling its clients in the Horn within the decade. And its Africa is a continent of two forces, in which the liberation movement has enemies but no internal life, no class contradictions of its own, and no left that a "progressive" regime might crush — so that when Nkrumah fell, Smith could see the imperialist hand and not the bureaucratic rot that the Fourth International's press had described, more fully, six years before. The reply is not a hostile one. It supported the same movements against the same empires. What it insisted on, and what this book was built not to provide, was the second half of the sentence: support for the fighters, and an analysis of where they were going.