• Piero Gleijeses

In 1975, seeing how a communist victory in Angola’s civil war would boost the morale of Vietnamese freedom fighters, Henry Kissinger wanted to plan a covert operation against the MPLA.

• Aubrey Bloomfield

Morocco is one of the United States’ oldest allies, so when it occupied Western Sahara in 1975, the right to self-determination of the Sahrawi people mattered little.

• Gerald Horne

In the 1970s, Kissinger believed that the liberation of southern Africa from white-minority rule represented a Cold War setback.

• Brooks Marmon

A new film about American civil rights icon Bayard Rustin overlooks his later conservative turn, evident in his attitudes to anticolonial resistance in Africa.

• Alex White

In the 1960s, two African nationalist magazines shared a name — but declassified files reveal that they were on opposite sides of a literary Cold War.

• Nicholas Grant

In his writings and speeches, Nelson Mandela exposed the links between American power, capitalism and racism.

• Sean Henry Jacobs

Vintage clips, from 1961, of Nelson Mandela, ZK Matthews, Helen Joseph, among others, on a Dutch TV program talking liberation from white supremacy.