These promotions will be applied to this item: Some promotions may be combined; others are not eligible to be combined with other offers. Donate $5000 to help LARB continue to push literary boundaries and, along with all the perks listed above, we’ll credit you as a donor on our website and in our Quarterly Journal. The structural dependency that came to characterize the political and economic relation between Africa and Europe is to be traced back to a foundational moment for the modern history of the African continent: slavery. Despite such qualms, this book remains a pathfinding piece of Marxist scholarship, a work of great empirical rigour, but also one of immense dignity and pathos. Most importantly of all Rodney’s systematic unfurling of all these processes decisively dispels the enduring myth that – despite its brutalities – colonialism nevertheless yielded a progressive modernisation of the continent. Most crucially, “underdevelopment is not absence of development” the author notes. Once the Americas had been opened up, and once the indigenous peoples there had succumbed in their millions to the genocidal activities of the Europeans and the diseases they brought in their wake, a need to find new blood to invigorate the labouring population became a pressing one on the part of the conquerors. 312pp., £16.99 pb This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again. • 1972, London: Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications (ISBN 0-9501546-4-4) The concept of metropole and dependency automatically came into existence when parts of Africa were caught up in the web of international commerce.’ (87) European traders and merchants were able to ‘bamboozle’ African rulers of a ‘certain status and authority’ with their luxury wares so that the latter provided more and more slaves and ‘even began … to raid outside their societies as well as to exploit internally by victimizing some of their own subjects.’ (91) Thus the success of the transatlantic slave system depended on some level of collaboration between European commercial interests and African elites. The book brings together in a broad narrative the history of the African continent from a … Even Apartheid’s end in South Africa was stipulated on the fatal compromise wherefore gold and diamond mines were not nationalized (as Mandela’s African National Congress had demanded) as a concession to the white ruling class that owned them. There was an error retrieving your Wish Lists. Rodney notes that while impossible to calculate the impact of the slave trade first, and colonialism after, has virtually deprived Africa of any developmental opportunity, condemning it to a subsidiary role. By re-positing economic exploitation at the center of his analysis, Rodney is able to comprehend and examine the persistence of the colonial paradigm and its racist superstructure. In any event, Rodney’s description of the great civilisations of old Africa is one which combines high culture, technological innovation, city building, art and education – with glittering powerful elites and ruthless aristocratic dynasties and more often than not the intensive and debilitating exploitation of those at the bottom. Reclaiming Africa’s Stolen Histories Through Fiction, Alessandro Spina’s Anti-Colonial Hospitality, Then and Now, Soviet Pseudoscience: The History of Mind Control, “Another University Is Possible”: Thoughts on Student Protests and Universities in Postcolonial Africa. Or some centuries later, and far to the South, Great Zimbabwe, another monument to the history and the grandiosity of city building in old Africa: ‘One of the principal structures at Great Zimbabwe was some 300 feet long and 220 feet broad, with the walls being 30 feet high and 20 feet thick.’ (77). “Under colonialism, the ownership was complete and backed by military domination. (97). Therefore there was what can be called “technological arrest” or stagnation or even regression…. Though militarily victorious on most fronts, anti-colonialism could not shake off the more insidious chains of economic dependency on which neocolonialism still thrives. It would otherwise be difficult to explain why some of the poorest nations in terms of natural resources are among the richest on earth; their wealth was derived from the violent appropriation of other countries’ wealth. Please try your request again later. Email me when others comment on this review. Please try again. Despite this, he continued his political work and attended Zimbabwe s independence celebrations in May 1980. This shopping feature will continue to load items when the Enter key is pressed. “[C]olonial powers sometimes saw the value of stimulating the internal tribal jealousies […] so that the march towards broader African national and class solidarities could be stopped and turned back,” Rodney points out. Rodney then attended the School of Oriental and African Studies in London where, at the age of 24, he received his PhD with honors in African History. Before a bomb ended his life in the summer of 1980, Walter Rodney had created a powerful legacy. Prime members enjoy FREE Delivery and exclusive access to music, movies, TV shows, original audio series, and Kindle books. The latter therefore denotes a relationship of exploitation, of one country by another in the colonial case, or one class over another in any case. And as Angela Davis notes in her foreword to the volume, even gender relations suffered an involution as a direct result of colonialism. This pivotal work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, had already brought a new perspective to the question of underdevelopment in Africa. The comparative analysis of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa does not exclusively focus on its titular assumption, but on its reverse deduction too. The two phenomena are by no means natural or dependent on the superior ingenuity of one particular people or race. Once individual states had been overwhelmed, land and resources were sold off at bargain basement prices. The classic work of political, economic, and historical analysis, powerfully introduced by Angela Davis In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. The final section of the book concentrates on the rapacious colonialization – ‘the scramble for Africa’ – which the European powers subjected Africa to at the end of the 19th century and into the run up to the First World War. The Los Angeles Review of Books is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. He is recognized as one of the Caribbean s most brilliant minds. URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/16990_how-europe-underdeveloped-africa-by-walter-rodney-reviewed-by-tony-mckenna/, This review is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License, Your email address will not be published. Your email address will not be published. It is not in any sense an idealised portrait. Furthermore, while Western economists theorized the free market and its legendary advantages, in Africa capitalism bypassed democracy and went straight to its monopolistic stage with no institutional obstacles. Intra-African trade was almost always centred on the rivers and waterways inland, so that ‘African canoes on the river Nile and the Senegal coast were of a high standard, but the relevant sphere of operations was the ocean, where the European ships could take command.’ (90) In addition the Europeans controlled many of the trade routes which led to Asia and thus Africa’s trade with the outside world was increasingly monopolised by Europeans. While the dominant discourse around postcolonial reparations tends to be conducted in strict ethical terms, Rodney’s work compellingly links racial inequality with social injustice. European commercial interests were able to create the pattern of triangulation which would define the next several centuries: ‘They engaged in buying cotton cloth in India to exchange for slaves in Africa to mine gold in Central and South America. In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. Donate $2500 to support LARB’s public events series, increasing community access to our ongoing literary conversation, and, along with all the perks listed above, we’ll gift you two VIP tickets to an event. Secondly, Rodney is, in the current writer’s view, far too uncritical about the Stalinist states of the USSR, China and North Korea which he repeatedly lauds as genuinely socialist. Africa is at the very center of global economic interests, with major powers still scrambling over its highly lucrative resources. This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Suffice to say, the work, and its author, deserved far better. Unlike his counterparts, however, Rodney involved the working class, including the Rastafarians (one of Jamaica s most marginalized groups) in this dialogue. The continent that barely survived the European conquest was one deprived of subjectivity, both cultural and political. You’ll receive the Digital Edition of the Quarterly Journal, and a Reckless Reader card that offers discounts to participating bookstores, as a gift of our thanks. Even when tackling the ancillary apparatuses of colonial rule such as culture and education, the relation between white supremacy and the exploitation of resources is always brought to the fore. At the same time, Rodney draws attention to numerous examples of heroic resistance on the part of states and communities whose ability to resist was nevertheless meagre in light of European technological supremacy. The failure to achieve social justice resulted in a deeply polarized country where, aside from a small black bourgeoisie, class and racial divisions still run deep into South African society. Something went wrong. Rodney s voice was also heard in the U.S. and Europe. Four LARB-selected books + access to conversation on each book with LARB editors + all the perks of the print membership. The historical context – the legacy of slavery, the decimation of local industry, the narrowing of productive technique, the interruption of internal trade, the uprooting of labour and life from local communities, the extraction and exsanguination of a plethora of natural resources – worked to abrogate the ‘capacity for self-sustaining growth’ on the part of indigenous Africa while at the same time providing a concentrated boost to European development which would culminate in the humming, high-powered engine of the industrial revolution and the most brutal impetus to global empire the world had ever seen. In this classic book, Rodney makes the unflinching case that African “mal-development” is not a natural feature of geography, but a direct product of imperial extraction from the continent, a practice that continues up into the present. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale. Material disparity obviously led to political, cultural, and, most crucially, educational inequality. Digital Quarterly Journal + archive + member card for participating bookstores + our weekly newsletter and events invitations. Unsurprisingly, the answer to the plight of Africa came from Africans, not from benevolent, guilt-stricken Europeans. Walter Rodney wrote How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (HEUA) in his late twenties while a lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. There was a problem loading your book clubs. 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