You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. I'm joined today by Kevin O'Coss, who has a piece in the current issue of the LRB on the Cold War in Africa.

Kevin is a member of the Salvage Editorial LRB on the Cold War in Africa. Kevin is a member of

the Salvage Editorial Collective, and his first book, Red Africa, is due from Verso in October.

His piece in this issue is a review of two books, White Malice, the CIA and the Neo-Colonization

of Africa by Susan Williams, and Cold War Liberation, the Soviet Union and the Collapse of the

Portuguese Empire

in Africa by Natalia Telapneva. Also joining us is Jeremy Harding, a contributing editor at the

LRB, whose books include Small Wars, Small Mercies, journeys in Africa's disputed nations,

and border vigils keeping migrants out of the rich world. Hello, both, and thank you for joining me today.

Hi, Tom. Thank you for having us. So there used to be, or perhaps there still is, a story about

decolonisation in Africa. We could maybe call it the wind of change interpretation of history.

According to which, beginning with Ghana in 1957, nations across Africa won their independence as the

European former imperial powers withdrew from the continent over the next decade or so. But as you

make clear in your piece, Kevin, that isn't quite what happened, is it? Yeah, I guess this is the kind

of narrative that is popular because you do have this wave of decolonization. We're talking, starting with Ghana in 57.

You've got Guinea achieving independence in 1958.

Then you've got what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, independent in the 1960, Kenya in 1963.

So there is this kind of wave of decolonization that makes us feel like this is a process that has swept the continent along. But then, you know, as pointed out as I point out in the piece, it's South Africa, Rhodesia, southwest Africa for a long time remained under white minority rules still for quite a long time after that wave of decolonization.

So despite the kind of formal withdrawal, first of all, of imperial powers, there continued to be

these countries which exercised white minority rule. But then I think what comes out in Susan

Williams' book, for example, in white malice quite a lot, is this process of neo-colonialism. So despite the end of

formal colonization, these nations remained somewhat formally dependent on outside influences. And I think

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