I blame it all on the CIA.

The Africa Research Group was formed as an outgrowth of an investigation which I, as a Ramparts magazine reporter, had undertaken to flush out some tentacles of covert US intervention south of the Sahara. It turned out that identifying CIA involvement was simpler than evaluating its underlying political thrust or gauging its impact. That sort of assessment required a fairly sophisticated understanding of African political economy as well as US foreign policy. It was clear that a group effort could be a more productive way of studying this phenomenon than any individual enterprise.