To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
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Real-life le Carre plots in dogfight over 75 per cent pure uranium
A unique, comprehensive coverage of the more recent history of imperialist exploitation of the Congo, writes JOHN GREEN
HELL HOLE: The Shinkolobwe uranium mine during the 1940s
[Public Domain]
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
Spies in the Congo — The Race for the Ore that Built the Atomic Bomb
By Susan Williams
Hurst £16.99
TWO excellent novels have been set in the former Belgian Congo and exposed the CIA’s involvement in the country’s affairs: Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and Ronan Bennett’s The Catastrophist, set in the Congo just before independence, with the rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba, but to date there has been no comprehensive, non-fiction coverage of the more recent history of imperialist exploitation of the Congo.
Spies in the Congo is the untold story of one of the most tightly guarded secrets of the second world war: the US’s desperate struggle to secure enough uranium to build its atomic bomb.
Here, Williams tells the intricate tale of a special unit of the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, that was set up to purchase and secretly remove all the uranium from the Shinkolobwe mine in the Katanga province of the Belgian Congo that the US could get its hands on.
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The horrors in the Congo have much in common with Gaza’s genocide, most notably the financial and military support of the US, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
The Congolese independence leader’s uncompromising speech about 80 years of European colonial brutality and injustice went round the world in 1960, and within months, he had been executed by Belgian and CIA-backed forces, writes KEITH BARLOW