Finished up
Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad by Michaela Wrong. The book uses the murder of the former Rwandan spy chief Patrick Karegeya by the Rwandan government as a frame to explore the history of Rwanda, the Great Lakes Region of Africa, how the Rwandan government hoodwinked the international community into viewing them as a model state, and embarked on an assassination and intimidation campaign to silence anyone opposed to a single-party Tutsi controlled government. Excellent book, albeit a bit confusing at times due to the nature of the material and how little known much of it is outside the region.
The book also saw the author banned from Rwanda, so given the state of the Rwandan government, that is basically a seal of quality!
Starting on Susan William's
White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa, and I'm not super impressed. She wrote a good book on the death of the UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, even if the did manage to completely miss a major point of Ludo de Witte's account of the assassination of Lumumba despite quoting him with approval.* A quick check of the chapters suggests the book is almost entirely focused on the early years in Ghana and some aspects to the Congo Crisis of 1961, with a brief and ad hoc accounting of other allegations against the CIA with minimal coverage of Rhodesia, the
Safari Club, or Angola. In other words, she trolled through some declassified US cables. While focusing on the CIA may have been an intentional choice, she knows full well from her previous book on Hammarskjold how the British and French were certainly up to no good in Africa, and for much of the Cold War, African skullduggery was dominated by the British and French with Americans extending support to them, not America in the driving seat. She's a British author too, so no reason for her to ignore MI6 or Britains informal commercial empire in Africa.
While I don't know enough about Ghana to comment, if one is interested in the Congo, just check out Ludo de Witte's
The Assassination of Lumumba or Lise Namikas'
Battleground Africa. Williams had better come out with some really good information for limiting the book to the CIA. I would have vastly preferred to learn about
francafrique, which to my understanding offers a much better example of 'recolonization' than America and the CIA.
*Specifically, de Witte showed through UN cables that Hammarskjold was actively trying to get Lumumba out of the picture and was telling UN forces to stand aside so Lumumba could be captured and beat to death. However, Williams keeps presenting Hammarskjold as some sort of champion of national liberation movements (and Lumumba in general).
I'm pretty sure I have a copy of the Hobbit somewhere. Instead of our nightly movie, I'm going to make him read it to me. 
