This review begins with some confessions. Firstly, I acknowledge that it’s taken an embarrassingly long time to get round to reading renowned Marxist historian Walter Rodney’s seminal text, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Even after purchasing it at an academic conference in Kenya last summer, it took me the best part of a year to get going. That’s closely related to my second confession. On reflection, I was subconsciously intimidated to approach Rodney’s text. Similarly, after decades of writing critique, I still feel somewhat unqualified to review How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. I’m neither an economist nor an historian for a start (although my lack of expertise has not prevented me from giving my layperson’s perspective in the past).

This imposter complex has nary allayed with reading the book. Rodney’s text is both wide and deep in its scope, with systematic explorations of the African continent before, during, and after colonialism. He draws parallels with other contexts from the Global South such as Central and South America and the Indian subcontinent. At roughly 260 pages, it is hardly a tome. At the same time, Rodney’s rigorous scholarship is not something to be merely perused. Yet another confession: it took longer to get through How Europe Underdeveloped Africa than I like to admit. Much of this has to do with the fact that it’s very much an extension of my doctoral studies. Unlike most other extra-curricular reading, it doesn’t allow me to detach sufficiently. More like homework than pleasure. Ironically, I believe I’d have been able to engage better with the text if I weren’t already constantly in academic mode. However, what I’ve gained from the process is, of course, invaluable. Rodney’s insights are making their way into my own scholarship.

With the resurgence of colonialism-apologists like Nigel Biggar (assuming they ever went away) and an emboldened Far-Right on both sides of the Atlantic mythologising an imagined ‘pure’ European Christendom that became ‘great’ on its own merits, Rodney’s book continues to be depressingly topical half a century after it was original published.

Born in Georgetown in British Guyana in 1942, Walter Rodney grew up in an activist family associated with the socialist People’s Progressive Party. A pan-Africanist ‘revolutionary scholar’, as described by his comrades, Rodney never lost the sensibility that politics should be transformative for the masses. A dazzlingly gifted academic, these convictions remained as he climbed the echelons of the academy.

He rejected the bourgeois trappings of a university career, one where he said and wrote the right things without truly risking anything. Rodney’s politics and organising in the Caribbean, particularly his involvement in Guyana’s Working People’s Alliance (WPA), attracted the ire of the authorities. It cost him professional advancement, his family’s security and ultimately his life. Friends and comrades pleaded with Rodney to leave Guyana but he eschewed the escape routes readily available to him. The Guyanese government purportedly oversaw Walter Rodney’s assassination in June 1980, whilst he awaited trial for bogus arson charges. The work of the WPA was considered such a threat to the Guyanese establishment, that Rodney’s death was only the most high profile in a series of state-sponsored murders.

Laced with sometimes laugh-out-loud mordant wit, Rodney’s treatise How Europe… is spread over six detailed chapters, beginning with a discussion on what development means, moving through an overview of African socio-political and economic evolution before colonialism, through to the far reaching effects of European encroachment and how it has shaped the world we live in. Each chapter concludes with a list of references and recommended reading with additional notes from the author on their strengths and/or weaknesses.

For Rodney ‘…development cannot be seen purely as an economic affair, but rather as an overall social process which is dependent upon the outcome of man’s [sic] efforts to deal with his natural environment…Development means a capacity for self-sustaining growth.  It means that an economy must register advances which in turn will promote further progress’ (1972/2019:5,96)

Using brief case studies from across the world of how feudalism evolved, sometimes directly into capitalism, Rodney posits that a confluence of factors and particularities led to some countries moving from communalism and/or feudalism to capitalism.

 For a select few states, like in Western Europe, Japan and the US, imperialism became the expansionist outworking of their iteration of capitalism.  Rodney argues consistently throughout the book that in Africa’s case, incursions by Europeans, with the collusion of indigenous opportunists and ‘middle men’ from South Asia and the Middle East, led to arrested development. Colonialism interrupted whatever systems would have organically proceeded African  feudalism(s). The Continent was not ‘backward’ prior to colonial interference, as would later be propagated through racist ideology. Any development as we understand it in contemporary terms, would not have been uniform across the continent, varying across region and based on the material needs of the local population…

‘…Under communalism, every African was assured of sufficient land to meet his own needs by virtue of being a member of a family or community. For that reason, and because land was relatively abundant, there were few social pressures or incentives for technical changes to increase productivity…Most African societies fulfilled their own needs for a wide range of articles of domestic use, as well as for farming tools and weapons…’ (1972/2019:38-39).

According to Rodney, one of the core defining factors of economic underdevelopment is that the affected countries ‘…do not (or are not allowed to) concentrate on those sectors of the economy which in turn will generate growth and raise production to a new level altogether…In fact, it can be shown that the underdeveloped countries are the ones with the greatest wealth of natural resources and yet the poorest in terms of goods and services presently provided by and for their citizens’ (1972/2019:18).

Rodney attributed much of this lack of goods and services at the time to a concentration of colonial administrative, paper-pushing jobs that were superfluous to the needs of the larger population.  Beneficiaries of these bureaucratic roles didn’t reinvest in industries like agriculture or manufacturing that might have nourished the broader economy.

More generally, Rodney makes the point that development and underdevelopment are not independent but concomitant processes.  Underdevelopment is the obverse of development.

Europe could not have made the advances it did without the wealth it amassed at Africa’s expense. This became a vicious circle in which European states could re-invest blood-soaked gains in technology that allowed, amongst other things, greater exploitation of the African continent and other colonised regions, further widening the development gap. This extractivism took on many forms over the centuries, even before the comparatively brief era of colonial rule. The most obvious is transatlantic slavery and its deleterious effects on Africa. In addition to the unimaginable trauma suffered by those captured as well as those left behind, the mass removal of able-bodied women and men would have obvious devastating impacts on population growth, which would have a knock-on effect on local economies. Whilst some regions on the continent were not directly affected or involved in the trade, and even managed to thrive for a time in spite of it, the consequences rippled across the continent in some form, Rodney contends.

Meanwhile, even European countries not directly involved in the trade enjoyed its produce and ancillary benefits. Financial institutions in Italy for example, made returns on the funds they put up for slaving expeditions undertaken by the future major (and minor) European colonial powers.

Some of the worst banking behemoths still in operation today came to prominence during the era of imperialist expansion. The Barclay brothers established their bank with the spoils of slavery. Much of the surplus wealth made from mineral extraction in Congo and taken out of the country was managed by French bank, Société Générale, already a monopoly at the time.

Once resources were extracted from the continent, they were sent overseas to be processed and manufactured. What wasn’t circulated in Western metropoles was resold to Africans – often of poorer quality and/or beyond the budget of the large peasant population. Items that weren’t extraneous to local needs, squeezed homegrown artisans out of the frame as these goods flooded the market.

Rodney points to the slave trade for embryonic forms of ‘pseudo-integration’ of African economies. If local economies were interconnected along certain geographical spaces, it served exclusively to facilitate the transfer of human and non-human cargo to the coast to be exploited by Europeans overseas. The free trade zone is a modern version of this phenomenon… ‘…made to order for the penetration of multinational corporations…’ (1972/2019:102).

Under colonial coercion, indigenous farmers were forced away from diversifying their crop which met local needs, and paid poverty wages to focus on so-called cash crops like peanuts and cotton for Western consumption.

Colonialists exploited local African workers even more than those in the metropoles, seeing an opportunity to fatten the profit margin by paying those in the peripheries poverty wages.

This is not an exhaustive list of how Europe profited from colonial extraction to Africa’s detriment. And yes, again, it is depressingly familiar. The patterns of (neo)colonial exploitation have scarcely changed. As a pan-Africanist, Walter Rodney chose to focus on the Motherland. Yet, notwithstanding the particularities of the transatlantic slave trade, the colonial playbook was employed far and wide.

Apologists like Biggar would cite roads, thoroughfares and educational institutions as examples of what the oppressed gained from colonialism. Rodney reminds us that even these so-called advantages were unevenly spread, since they were not constructed with the flourishing of the local population in mind.  Colonial infrastructure was limited to the routes that served European trade. At the same time, the riches accrued off the back of African suffering were in part being reinvested into more ambitious infrastructure in Europe, including burgeoning welfare systems.

Whilst making a meticulously-researched and substantiated case for how European imperialism (and eventually the US) contributed to Africa’s chronic underdevelopment, Rodney does not deny Africans of their agency nor perpetuate a simplistic oppressor/victim binary.

‘…None of these remarks are intended to remove the ultimate responsibility for development from the shoulders of Africans. Not only are there African accomplices inside the imperialist system, but every African has a responsibility to understand the system and work for its overthrow’ (1972/2019:26).

When discussing the transatlantic slave trade, for instance, Rodney underlines how local slavers helped keep it afloat. They consistently undermined the efforts of African leaders who sought to resist the trade. This is what befell Tomba of the Baga people, in modern day Guinea-Conakry. His attempts at defeating the trafficking of his people through collective effort were sabotaged by indigenous and mixed-heritage slave traders working in lockstep with Europeans. Rodney would nevertheless return to the basics of supply and demand. Local opportunists conspired to trade their people in order to meet the European demand. African leaders did not first approach their European counterparts offering their people’s free labour.

As a Marxist, Rodney also had a nuanced analysis of the interplay between imperialist economic expediency and the racist ideology it eventually engendered.

‘Occasionally, it’s mistakenly held that Europeans enslaved Africans for racist reasons.  European planters and miners enslaved Africans for economic reasons, so their labour power could be exploited…Europeans at home and abroad found it necessary to rationalise that exploitation in racist terms as well. Oppression follows logically from exploitation, so as to guarantee the latter.  Oppression of African people on purely racial grounds accompanied, strengthened, and became indistinguishable from oppression for economic reasons’ (1972/2019:82)

Any analysis that uncouples the sociology of race from class is bound to be inadequate. For one thing, it overlooks that elites will join forces across colour lines to preserve their own class interests.

Of particular disturbing salience to the current moment is Rodney’s observations about the correlation between Capitalism, Imperialism and Fascism. The contemporary Far-Right want to disguise their cosy relationship with Big Capital by making populist noises.  However, the likes of Le Pen, Farage and of course Trump ultimately care more about satisfying corporate donors than their working class constituents.

‘Fascism is a deformity of capitalism.  It heightens the imperialist tendency towards domination which is inherent in capitalism, and it safeguards the principle of private property.  At the same time, fascism immeasurably strengthens the institutional racism already bred by capitalism’ (1972/2019:182).

Rodney’s treatment of the presence of Christianity in Africa is well-handled, not all lazily attributed to colonialism. He acknowledges the deep roots of the faith in Northern and Eastern Africa, although he does not overlook that European missionaries became a useful vehicle for colonial expansion. Rodney also recognises some good that was done by individual missionaries, such as those who intervened in superstition-based infanticide.

Elsewhere however, this kind of balance is lacking. He has an over-romanticised view of the Soviet Union, with no critique of Stalinism or the Bloc’s own expansionist ambitions. His examples of female empowerment pre-colonialism are most applicable to those of already high social status such as royalty, something he also acknowledges briefly but is worthy of further analysis. There is some recognition that polygamy was exploitative. Yet, in contrasting it with the monogamy the missionaries taught, a certain idealisation remains that ignores its deep patriarchal bias.  Polygamy is not the only – or even the most constructive – extended kinship alternative to the exclusive nuclear family model promulgated by colonialists. More generally, Rodney does not do much of, if any, analysis on the ways colonialism affected Afrodescendant women in particular.

Rodney’s book nevertheless provides a forensic diagnosis on how we arrived at so many of the inequalities we see today. The question then and now is, how to move forward.  Despite the excellent work of reparations campaigners, the reality of this kind of compensation for ex-colonies is a long way off. With a rightward drift dominating so much of world politics, a willingness to address the injustices of the past seems distant.

The routine scapegoating and dehumanisation of migrants from the Global South bears witness to this hardened and unrepentant attitude. Trump’s tariff wars and Western states’ cuts to foreign aid are bitter reminders that Africa cannot rely on the goodwill of its former colonial masters and their successors. It is beyond the remit of my expertise to proffer concrete policy proposals. One thing that nonetheless seems ever-more urgent is greater cooperation across African states, beyond the seemingly toothless AU and some shared economic zones.  There is a need to harness and wield whatever collective leverage there is available in order to resist the neocolonial trade and finance policies that are continued tools of oppression.  Setting aside the mere revolutionary soundbites of which the likes of Ibrahim Traoré are wont, and the more democratic visions of sovereignty of the, alas, now stalled political dream in Senegal, there is a general lack of the leadership necessary to make this a reality. Yet.

The full version of this review was first published on the I Was Just Thinking…blog