Thread by @cobbo3

The CIA saw Congo nationalist Patrice Lumumba as “a [Fidel] Castro or worse”, and moved in with dollars and a hitman instructed to assassinate Lumumba with poisoned toothpaste - THREAD 1/14
historyextra.com/period/20th-ce…

The money secured the loyalty of Col. Joseph-Désiré Mobutu. His soldiers detained Lumumba, who was murdered soon afterwards. Mobutu was America’s man. He amassed a personal fortune estimated at several billion US dollars by stealing the nation’s wealth 2/14

The 1956 Suez Crisis (the invasion of Egypt by Israel, followed by the UK and France) is widely remembered as a critical event in post-war British history, which helped bring to an end the era of Britain as a global empire and superpower 3/14

Many Africans returned home from World War 2 full of new ideas, and began to question the old imperial order. In Kenya’s villages, young demobbed soldiers expressed their new confidence by scoffing at their chiefs and elders 4/14

During the 1950s Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, British intelligence MI5 investigated possible Soviet involvement but, when questioned, bewildered locals asked: “What does a Russian look like?” and “Can Russians speak Swahili?” 5/14

In the early 1960s the KGB cultivated Kwame Nkrumah, charismatic first prime minister then president of independent Ghana, only to discover (by breaking Ghanaian wireless codes) that he and his cronies were squirrelling away Soviet subsidies 6/14

The CIA wrote off Nkrumah as “a vain opportunist and playboy”, and in 1966 were believed to have been involved in a coup that toppled him from power 7/14

In 1954 the Algerian National Liberation Front began an uprising that triggered an eight-year partisan war of attrition against colonial France in which more than a million died, most of them Arabs 8/14

By 1959 the US was convinced that “democratic” Africa was fragile & prepared to embrace authoritarian but reliable alternatives. It welcomed the rule of Gen. Ibrahim Abboud, who had seized power in Sudan. The pattern was set for the next 30 years of proxy rivalry in Africa 9/14

By 1969 Tanzania President Julius Nyerere, had accepted equipment worth over US$640,000 from the US for his police force. But he also accepted Soviet weaponry for his army. This was prudent: at this stage there was no knowing who would win the Cold War 10/14

By 1975, some 36,000 Cuban reservists with artillery, tanks and missile systems were serving in Angola, while Cuban doctors, teachers and technicians replaced their Portuguese counterparts who had returned home 11/14

Castro’s commitment to Angola was integral to a strategy that would extend the struggle for independence to neighbouring South West Africa (later Namibia) and Rhodesia (today, Zimbabwe) 12/14

By the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union was facing an economic crisis, losing a war in Afghanistan & overstretched in Africa. Angola alone owed the Soviet Union $5bn, which it could not repay 13/14

The Cold War in Africa ended in 1990. The USA won on points. But Africa was left, traumatised, to pick up the pieces & face the problems created by the corrupt dictatorships that were the Cold War’s lasting legacy 14/14