Forty years of 'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa'
Nigel Westmaas
2012-06-15, Issue <
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/589> 589
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http://fahamubooks.org/book/?GCOI=90638100164710>
http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/589/90638100164710M_2_tmb.jpg
Walter Rodney's seminal work remains a compelling and persuasive living
history and totem of critical resistance to the exploitation and
underdevelopment of the African continent.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of Walter Rodney's
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Every now and then in history a scholarly
enterprise emerges that breaks new ground and provokes an impact that
exceeds the confines of narrow academia. Walter Rodney's seminal work in
combination with his other projects performed precisely this function for
Africa and beyond. Its publication and reception exemplified the strains and
fissures in the scholarship focused on the continent at the time. It would
go on to become one of the most influential books in the 'Third World'.
When it emerged in 1972 the book was hailed in Dar-es-Salaam as 'probably
the greatest book event in Africa since Frantz Fanon'. Wole Soyinka, the
African novelist went further. He suggested that Rodney was one of the first
'solidly ideologically situated intellectuals ever to look colonialism and
exploitation in the eye and where necessary, spit in it'.
The book's publication led to a veritable revolution in the teaching of
African history in the universities and schools in Africa, the Caribbean and
North America. Its content became contagious and was an element in the
developing world historical sociology stream in embryo in the USA in the
1970s - more specifically the 'world systems analysis' framework. Rodney's
doctoral thesis - A History of the Upper Guinea Coast had earlier set the
parameters and standard for this later decisive intervention in African
historiography.
Rodney compiled How Europe Underdeveloped Africa from extensive archival
research systematically identifying causes and outcome of the historical
turbulence on the African continent. In doing so he identified the world
capitalist system, both mercantile and modern, as the principal agency of
underdevelopment of the African continent for over five centuries.
The book covers a wide range: an introductory discussion on the concepts
'development and underdevelopment'; the state of Africa prior to European
entry; Africa's contribution to capitalist development; the effects of
colonial education and impact of missionary activity; the collective nature
of African organisation; and of course the exploitation of African resources
during the colonial era and consequent 'underdevelopment.'
AFRICA'S CONTRIBUTION TO EUROPEAN CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT
According to Rodney, Europeans went through several phases of desire in
Africa: first it was gold, through ivory and camwood to human cargo
(slavery). He sketches the slow conquest and penetration due to shipping
superiority and the slow breakup of African kingdoms and states in the
16th-17th century leading to the Portuguese slave trade and decision-making
role for Europeans in Africa. While dissecting the slave trade he drew
parallels between the rise of the European seaport towns of Bristol,
Liverpool, Nantes, Seville and the Atlantic slave trade.
In a passage that vividly explains the impact of Europe on Africa and its
subsequent underdevelopment Rodney asserted that: 'the European slave trade
was a direct block, in removing millions of youth and young adults who are
the human agents from whom inventiveness springs. Those who remained in
areas badly hit by slave capturing were preoccupied about their freedom
rather than with improvements in production'.
Rodney pursues the notion that colonisation gave Europe a technological edge
and addresses the exploitation of African minerals important for making
steel alloys, manganese and chrome, including columbite - critical for
aircraft engines. Significantly, in the course of this orbit of exploitation
there was incessant African resistance. But European firearms, after
reaching a certain phase of effectiveness, as in the use of the Maxim
(machine gun) against the Maji Maji and the Zulus and others, in concert
with the use of Africans in colonial armies tipped the military balance in
favour of Europe and subjugated a continent.
UNILEVER, FIRESTONE AND THE EXPLOITATION OF A CONTINENT
Throughout the text Rodney provides compelling evidence of European greed,
naming traders and businessmen whose titles would later became associated
with global conglomerates. David and Alexander Barclay were 18th century
slave traders who Rodney said were 'engaging in the slave trade. and who
later used the loot to set up Barclays bank'. Today Barclays is one of the
most powerful banks in the world yet its website sanitises its past role
with little or no acknowledgement that its founding profits stemmed from the
African slave trade. Contemporary corporate culture with its beneficent
public relations outlook took generations to perfect. As Rodney eloquently
describes, there was a point in time when colonialists and settlers held
nothing back in their language of domination. Colonel Grogan, a white
settler in Kenya, bluntly said of the Kikuyu: 'We have stolen his land. Now
we must steal his limbs. Compulsory labour is the corollary of our
occupation of the country'.
Rodney also attacks the notion, which unfortunately still persists, that
there is some universal nexus or equal relationship between 'hard work' and
great wealth, a myth peddled in the West today. In his tome Rodney swats
away this 'common myth within capitalist thought that the individual through
hard work can became a capitalist'.
In like vein Rodney connects America to the exploitation of Africa,
especially with the links between the Firestone company and Liberian rubber.
According to Rodney, 'between 1940 and 1965 Firestone took 160 million
dollars worth of rubber out of Liberia; while in return the Liberian
government received 8 million dollars'. He traces the evolution of companies
like Unilever as major beneficiaries of the exploitation of the African
continent. Beginning with soap, William Lever began to produce Lifebouy, Lux
and Vim and margarine. A merger in 1929-30 resulted in Unilever taking its
current title and expanding with the material coming from products such as
copra, groundnut oil, palm oil, and oils and the fats of animals. Today
Unilever is one of the biggest corporations in the world now responsible for
everyday indispensable brand name products such as Dove, Closeup toothpaste,
Lipton's tea, Q tips, Vaseline, Cutex, Slimfast, Klondike, Ben & Jerry's ice
cream, Ponds, Sunlight, Breeze, and Vim of old.
CRITICISMS
Even as How Europe Underdeveloped Africa struck a chord among many
academics, students and general readership on several continents it has been
subjected to several critiques over time. It is certainly evident that the
text is short on gender analyses and the role of women - only a few pages
bear on women in Africa and the context of their exploitation and
resistance.
One critic suggested that despite its pretensions to be Marxist analysis the
text actually fails on that count. This critique explains that How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa 'fails because it tries to persuade an African
audience of the relevance of dependence theory by making it mesh with the
simplistic version of the past already popularised by nationalist
historians'. Another critic Caroline Neade, argues that Rodney identified
Africa as 'passive victim' of European colonisation. But there is a lot in
the book which would render this criticism unfair. Rodney quite
conspicuously emphasised African technological development at a given point
in history prior to European intervention and African resistance to European
penetration is given vigorous treatment and agency in the text.
Other scholars generally sympathetic with Rodney nonetheless find fault with
some of his other arguments. Lansine Kaba for example, whilst hailing the
importance of the work for African scholarship, is critical of the 'sweeping
generalization' and placement of Sudanic kingdoms as feudal states and
Rodney's description of traditional African economies as subsistence
economies. Similarly, others have decried Rodney's 1972 book as too
'polemical'. Yet Rodney was the non-traditional historian and 'polemic' that
reached a wider, popular audience was essentially his goal. In his own words
Rodney declared that the main purpose of the text was to 'try to reach
Africans who wish to explore further the nature of their exploitation rather
than to satisfy the "standards" set by our oppressors and their spokesmen in
the academic world'.
LIVING HISTORY AND RODNEY'S METHOD
One of the more important themes that distinguished Rodney as an historian
with a difference was the issue of 'living history' a concept apparent in
the methodology of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Rodney explains:
Many historians are afraid to deal with living history and I can understand
why, because sometimes it is dangerous, especially in Africa. The moment
that the social scientist begins to reflect too closely on the present, he
or she is subversive in the Third world. It is safer to be with the mummies
and the bones.
Rodney's productive and activist zeal for history is well established.
Andaiye reflected on his propensity for writing: 'He wrote everywhere - in
the car if he wasn't driving, standing on the street corner, on the stelling
waiting to board the Berbice ferry, waiting for public meetings to begin in
Linden, on the Corentyne, in Leonora, in Buxton, often surrounded by
police'. This anecdote gives an indication of the type of historian Rodney
was: a living breathing embodiment of the seamless collusion between work
and activism, people's causes and the use of history as clarification and
intellectual armour and not restricted to an inert academic excursion.
This makes Rodney one of the main critics of the positivist tradition in
historiography. The positivists consider humanities or the natural and
social sciences as solely derived from sensory experience. Consequently, the
logical and mathematical treatment of any data is seen as exclusive and
authentic. Positivism, which prevailed in the humanities, and in the social
and natural sciences, remained dominant until historians like Rodney, the
feminist movement and oral history advocates among others punctured its
limitations and pretensions.
RODNEY'S BOOK TODAY
After Rodney's assassination in 1980 his work continued to grip the
imagination of Third World and Pan-African scholarship. Evidence of the
book's lasting value is the fact that at least eight editions have been
published over time. Furthermore it is still widely utilised, even with
academic challenges to its content, as a critical reference point on the
historiography of Africa.
But there is still difficult road ahead as memories are short even in the
age of express communication. More and more we are hearing from young people
in Guyana, the Caribbean and Africa, who, on being introduced to his life
and work typically come up with the refrain: 'Who is Rodney?' Issa Shivji,
Professor of Law at Dar University placed this amnesia in context as he
reflects on today's reality. During Rodney's time, he said, 'we swore by
wafanya kazi na wakulima (workers and peasants); now we all aspire to become
wawekezaji na walaji (investors and consumers). Or more correctly wakala na
wawekezaji (investors' agents or compradors)'.
In the final analysis, for the Guyanese historian, writing and activism was
a strategic and heartfelt response to the need for history, while
maintaining academic rigour, to break with certain conservative traditions.
In other words, history was a liberating tool. Like Frantz Fanon's Wretched
of the Earth and Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa remains one of the most compelling and persuasive
books to emerge from the bowels of critical resistance to the exploitation
of small countries.
If Rodney were to rewrite How Europe Underdeveloped Africa he would
doubtless, given the scholar within, reconfigure sections, tighten certain
arguments and perfect the narrative. But his overall thesis would stand. The
overt fangs that slave traders and corporate giants like Barclays, Unilever
and Firestone openly displayed in early profiteering and exploitation of the
continent have been replaced by charming corporate public relations smiles
and handouts. Yet the profits sequestered from Africa over several
centuries, as effectively argued by Rodney, still stand as a foremost if not
exclusive source and substance of Africa's underdevelopment. In short,
Europe and North America assisted substantially in the rape and
underdevelopment of a continent rich in human and natural resources.
Received on Sun Jun 17 2012 - 01:08:02 EDT
