RODNEY, Walter

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications, London & Dar-es-Salaam 1972

 

CONTENTS

 

Preface.

I. Some Questions on Development.

        What is Development.

        What is Underdevelopment.

II. How Africa Developed before the Coming of the Europeans, up to the Fifteenth Century.

        A General Overview. Some Concrete Examples. Conclusions.

III. Africa's Contribution to European Capitalist Development — The Pre-Colonial Period.

        How Europe Became the Dominant Section of a World-Wide Trade System.

        Africa's Contribution to the Economy & Beliefs of Early Capitalist Europe.

IV. Europe and the Roots of African Underdevelopment to 1865.

        The European Slave Trade as a Basic Factor in African Underdevelopment.

        Technical Stagnation & Distortion of the African Economy in the Pre-Colonial Epoch.

        Continuing Politico-Military Developments in Africa, 1550 to 1585.

        The Coming of Imperialism and Colonialism.

V. Africa's Contribution to the Capitalist Development of Europe — The Colonial Period.

        Expatriation of African Surplus and Colonialism.

        The Strengthening of the Technological & Military Aspects of Colonialism.

VI. Colonialism as a System for Underdeveloping Africa.

        The Supposed Benefits of Colonialism for Africa.

        Negative Character of the Social, Political and Economic Consequences.

        Education for Underdevelopment.

        Development by Contradiction.

Postscript by A.M. Babu, former Minister of Economic Affairs and Development Planning (Tanzania).

 


1. Walter Rodney was a West Indian Marxist historian from Guyana, assassinated (victim of a bomb) in 1982. He is best known for How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, a book reprinted twice and published by three different publishers in U.K., Africa and U.S.A. respectively.

The book has been widely read by university teachers and students, especially in Anglophone Africa and no doubt in those universities of the U.S.A. where African Studies are popular. Rodney spent some years lecturing in the University of Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania.

2. The book owes its popularity to its powerful and eloquent denunciations of the injustices inflicted upon Africa by Europe in the period 1500 to 1960, that is, from the time of the first regular contacts of Europeans (the Portuguese and then the Spaniards) with Black Africa until the end of the colonial period, if not beyond (i.e. the so-called neo-colonial era). The atrocities committed against Africans during the notorious trans-Atlantic slave trade (from the early 16th century to the middle of the 19th century) are a major feature of the book, and this trade in human beings is given a Marxist interpretation, that is, presented as part of the development of international capitalism (emerging from feudalism), in accordance with Lenin's view that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism.

3. Rodney denounces both European capitalism and European racialism, accusing the European exploiters of Africa of deliberately interfering with and impeding the natural development of Africa so as to gain control of the continent's natural resources both human and non-human. He includes in his denunciations those Africans who collaborated with the Europeans whether during the slave trade or in neo-colonial times —, for they too belong to the bourgeois or comprador exploiting class.

4. The hero of the book is the long-suffering working class (both peasants and urban workers), the silent and voiceless millions whom first the European capitalists and then international capitalism together with the African ruling class have consistently prevented from "making their own history".

5. A further reason for the book's appeal is the author's considerable knowledge of African history and his skill in using this knowledge to discredit those many European writers of the past who considered Africans primitive and who echoed the notorious statement of Hugh Trevor-Roper (an Oxford University historian) that "Africa has no history". (1948)

6. Rodney's earlier works include West Africa and the Atlantic Slave Trade (East African Publishing House, Dar-es-Salaam, 1967) and The History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1970), while later he published History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 (Heinemann, London, 1981) which won the 1982 prize of the American Historical Association for the best book on the U.S.A., Latin America and the Caribbean.

7. Rodney was strongly influenced by an earlier generation of West Indian or Afro-American anti-colonial and Pan-African writers, e.g. Edward Blyden, George Padmore, W.E.B. du Bois, C.L.R. James and Franz Fanon, the last two of whom made considerable use of Marxist ideas, notably Fanon. Common to all was the concern to restore the lost dignity of the African race in the face of European racialism. James (cfr. The Black Jacobins) and Fanon (cfr. The Wretched of the Earth) were in addition strongly hostile to Christianity which they saw as a tool of the exploiting colonialists.

8. Rodney's most serious academic work — in fact his refurbished doctoral thesis — The History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800 — is considerably more restrained than How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, no doubt due to the demanding conditions of a British university doctorate. On the positive side the book may be said to be a good attempt — on the basis of a considerable variety of documents — to understand from an African viewpoint the nature of indigenous Upper Guinea society both just before contact with the Europeans and as it came to be affected by European influence during the period under study. The book reveals the devastating effect of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on African communities and the shameful participation or acquiescence in the trade of a variety of Europeans supposed to be Christian and — in the case of the Portuguese and Spaniards — also Catholic. Rodney does quote a number of Catholic missionaries (e.g. Capuchins and also two bishops of Cape Verde) who protested against the slave trade, but on the whole he is highly critical of what he regards as the hypocritical behaviour of the European Christians, including the Sacred Congregation of the Propaganda Fide. This last body — according to Rodney, making use of some documents of 1685-1686 found in the Archivio di Propaganda Fide, Rome — replied to the protesters that "slavery was inevitable if the plantations were to survive" (Rodney's words). Rodney concludes: "The question was posed: What price profits? and the answer was that no moral price or human suffering was too high to pay for the monetary gain from the trade in slaves and from the extension of capitalist production into the New World" (p.121).

9. This last sentence is indicative not only of Rodney's sense of moral indignation — common to all his writings — but also of the Marxist framework within which he interprets events. For him economic factors are always paramount, as also is the factor of class. He makes a point, for instance, of saying that in the 16th century amongst all the peoples of the Upper Guinea Coast "the regime of private property is firmly established" and that "as with the ownership of land, so with the distribution of the products — there was manifest inequality" (p.35). Furthermore, "what prevailed on the Upper Guinea Coast, and was to prove more significant than the tribal divisions, was the class differentiation, based on the distinction between those who had the power and authority within the state and those who did not" (pp. 33-34) Later on Rodney asserts: "The Atlantic slave trade was deliberately selective in its impact on the society of the Upper Guinea Coast, with the ruling class protecting itself, while helping the Europeans to exploit the common people. This is of course the widespread pattern of modern neo-colonialism; and by the same token the period of slave trading in West Africa should be regarded as protocolonial" (p. 117).

Another manifestation of Marxist influence on Rodney is his statement at the end of the Preface: "... I have sought to ensure that the integrity of the evidence was respected at all times, for this has always to be demanded from those who practise the writing of history. Beyond that, the interpreter is himself nothing but a spokesman for historical forces" (p.ix). Similarly in the Preface to How Europe... Rodney rejects the custom of the author assuming responsibility for "all the mistakes and shortcomings" in his book on the grounds that this is "sheer bourgeois subjectivism" and that "responsibility in matters of these sorts is always collective..." (p.8).

10. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is a much less scholarly and much more ideological work. Rodney openly professes his materialist conception of history and his debt to Marx and Engels, not to mention to contemporary Marxist writers such as Fanon and Che Guevara. (In fact he gives a short recommended reading list at the end of each chapter, always including some Marxist works.)

Particularly blatant is his stereotyped Marxist interpretation of the history of Europe in which he misses no opportunity of comparing unfavourably the capitalist with the socialist countries. The following quotations can indicate better than any commentary to what an extent Rodney subordinates historical truth to the requirements of Marxist ideology:

a) In Europe "The peasantry had been brutally destroyed and the labour of men, women and children was ruthlessly exploited. Those were the great social evils of the capitalist system... Inside of the British, French and German economies, the polarisation of wealth was between the capitalists on the one hand and the workers and a few peasants on the other" (p. 149).

b) Fascism, which is "a deformity of capitalism... extols authoritarianism and the reactionary union of the church with the state. In Portugal and Spain, it was the Catholic Church — in South Africa, it was the Dutch Reformed Church" (p. 216). Rodney of course makes no mention at all of the persecutions of the Church by the State in Italy under Mussolini in the 1920's and 1930's, or in Germany under Hitler in the 1930's, or in Spain likewise in the 1930's.

c) "Meanwhile (i.e. 1890-1960), Socialism was inaugurated, lifting semi-feudal semi-capitalist Russia to a level of sustained economic growth higher than ever experienced in a capitalist country. Socialism did the same for China and North Korea — guaranteeing the well-being and independence of the state as well as reorganising the internal social arrangements in a far more just manner than ever before" (p. 245).

11. Rodney's distortions of history are not confined to Europe, Russia and the Far East. He also distorts African history, especially when Christianity is involved. Talking of Christian Nubia in the 9th to 11th centuries Rodney refers to "the ruins of large red-brick churches and monasteries which had murals and frescoes of fine quality". He comments: "Several conclusions can be drawn from that material evidence. In the first place, a great deal of labour was required to build these churches along with the stone fortifications which often surrounded them. As with the pyramids of Egypt or the feudal castles of Europe, the common builders were intensely exploited and probably coerced" (p. 61). This is a truly insidious piece of propaganda writing: the material evidence obviously cannot of itself indicate either the existence of exploitation or the lack of it, nor is there any reason why the building of these churches in Nubia at that time should necessarily resemble the building of castles in medieval Europe or pyramids in ancient Egypt, even assuming there was exploitation in the two latter cases.

12. Any possible doubt as to Rodney's hostility to the Catholic religion is dispelled two pages later (p. 63) when he discusses the Maghreb (after Carthaginian times): "The region had subsequently been an important section of the Roman and Byzantine empires; and before becoming Muslim the Maghreb had actually distinguished itself as a centre of non-conformist Christianity which went under the name of Donatism". Rodney studiously avoids mentioning the far more famous and historically significant contributions made to the history of the Maghreb — and to the world — at that time by Tertullian, St. Cyprian, and especially St. Augustine — an equally African contribution. (See Christopher Dawson, "St. Augustine & His Age" in A Monument to St. Augustine, Sheed & Ward, London, 1930).

13. Such prejudice is of course not surprising, given Rodney's Marxist attitude to religion: "Religion is an aspect of the superstructure of a society, deriving ultimately from the degree of control and understanding of the material world" (p. 42).

14. Indeed Rodney prepares the ground in a subtle way in his opening chapter for his materialist interpretation of history. In "Some Questions on Development" he tells the reader: "In historical terms, man the worker was every bit as important as man the thinker, because the work with tools liberated men from sheer physical necessity, so that he could impose himself upon other more powerful species and upon nature itself" (p. 10). "Through very careful study, it is possible to comprehend some of the very complicated links between the changes in the economic base and changes in the rest of the superstructure of the society" (p. 12). "In the natural sciences, it is well known that in many instances quantitative change becomes qualitative after a certain period... Similarly in human society it has always been the case that the expansion of the economy leads eventually to a change in the form of social relations. Karl Marx was the first writer to appreciate this, and he distinguished within European history several stages of development..." (p. 13).

Rodney bends over backwards to avoid any suggestion that what specifically differentiates man from the other animals is his possession of the spiritual faculties of intellect and will. One wonders how Rodney imagines man could have invented tools by which to dominate nature unless he possessed intelligence. Marx' materialist explanation of human progress is in fact a very crude theory, not least because it ignores or grossly underestimates the objective religious factor in human life as exemplified in the history of every known human culture, however primitive it might seem in its material aspect. (For a very balanced and profound treatment of the different factors that go to make up a culture and explain cultural change, see the works of Christopher Dawson, especially The Age of the Gods and Progress and Religion, Sheed & Ward, London, 1928 & 1930 respectively).

Starting from such standard Marxist premises (i.e. historical and dialectical materialism) it is in no way surprising that Rodney consistently attributes every event in history to the operation of blind material forces mediated by the necessarily selfish actions of a given social class. It is easy, of course, to put the European capitalists and slave traders into playing such a role, since undoubtedly many Europeans and European nations did at one moment or the other exploit others, particularly Africans, for material advantages. But there was nothing inevitable about it: they were not obeying any historical force, but rather letting their lower passions gain control of their will and intellect. Nor was it simply a class affair: to some extent the slave trade cut across class differences, and indeed — as the two world wars clearly showed — national and ethnic loyalties are usually more important historical factors than social class. Men are always free to do either good or evil — terms which, incidentally, Rodney hardly ever uses. Furthermore, Rodney never gets to grips with the meaning of poverty, preferring rather to hide behind vague expressions such as "human social development" while accusing the capitalists of impeding this development. He accuses the "bourgeois scholars" of making "no mention...of the exploitation of the majority which underlay all development prior to socialism" (p. 20) and tells that "majority" that "to advance, they must overthrow capitalism" which "at the moment stands in the path of further human social development" (p.17).

Nowhere of course does Rodney explain to the reader why socialism can succeed better than capitalism, that is, on the theoretical level, and he carefully avoids going into any detail about the actual history of modern socialist states. One does not have to be a capitalist to know that in their efforts to impose socialism, that is, Marxist socialism, countries like the U.S.S.R., several Eastern European countries, China, and right now Ethiopia — to mention but a few — have trampled ruthlessly not only on the rights but also on the very lives of thousands and even millions of their own citizens. The writings of Alexander Sozhenitsyn give a good insight into the real conditions of living in Russia during the last 50 years under Marxist-Leninist communism — a writer just as critical of capitalism. One could mention his small book The Mortal Danger subtitled "How Misconceptions about Russia imperil America". A very sophisticated book on Marxist-Leninist ideology is that of Alain Besançon called Les origines intellectuelles du Léninisme translated into English under the title The Rise of the Gulag. This work also gives a deep insight into the realities of the Soviet system as it has developed in the last two centuries. As for modern China, one might mention the recent book of one of the world's leading Sinologists, J.K. Fairbank, entitled The Great Chinese Revolution, 1800-1985. If Rodney had shown one tenth of the academic seriousness of the above writers in discussing the modern history of Russia and China, one would be more inclined to take him seriously. As it is, he shows himself to be as naïve as he was biased.

Some other works which can also be recommended are A. de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Vol. I, Part 2, chapter 10, which deals with the situation of the black race in the U.S. in the early 19th century, as well as Rusia y el Oriente de Europa by Bohdan Chudoba (Rialp, Madrid, 1980) which deals with U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe, especially in chapters 4 & 5. Understanding Europe, by Christopher Dawson (Sheed & Ward, London, 1952) also deals with Russia and Eastern Europe, especially chapters 5 & 6.

15. An intelligent and open-minded reader will not be deceived by Rodney's Marxist ideology. Nevertheless since many objective historical facts are woven into Rodney's analysis and the entire work is fired through by an intense feeling of moral indignation, many readers, especially young people, will naturally be very impressed and not notice the grave lacunae — no mention at all of God or of transcendental values, for instance, and travesty of many historical facts.

However, some 25 years after Independence few Africans are likely to accept in an unqualified manner so sweeping a statement as: "The most profound reasons for the economic backwardness of a given African nation are not to be found inside that nation. All that we can find inside are the symptoms of underdevelopment and the secondary factors that make for poverty" (p. 30). Apart from many other considerations — such as the great variety and complexity of the situations of the different African nations of today—, there is also the fact that some peoples, e.g. the Cattle Fulani of Nigeria and the Masai of Kenya and Tanzania, are simply not interested in the kind of development and modernity popular in Western countries and in modernised Africa: they prefer their own traditional style of life and to be left alone.

16. Conclusion: This is a dangerous book — perhaps more so than the more philosophical type of Marxist work — since it propounds Marxist ideas in the context of the presentation of concrete historical events, and events which are obviously taken very seriously by a great many people, especially Africans and Black Americans. It has the attraction of simplifying a great mass of historical detail and of appealing to the reader's moral indignation. In this respect Rodney very much resembles Marx and Engels who a century earlier made so much capital out of the injustices being suffered by many working people during the English Industrial Revolution. But like Marx and Engels too, Rodney seems to propose no solution to the problems he discusses except violence and hatred.

 

                                                                                                                  J.W. (1981)

 

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