[Civsoc-mw] The Persisting Relevance of Walter Rodney’s “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”

[Tony Tontholani]

What constitutes development, and, conversely, what exactly do we mean by underdevelopment? This is the question Rodney feels compelled to answer before venturing further in his militant diagnosis of Africa’s ills. He stresses how development should not be seen merely as an economic phenomenon but rather as an overall social process shaping and being shaped by the way societies came to be ideologically structured. Most crucially, “underdevelopment is not absence of development” the author notes. If anything it’s a by-product of it, its (in)direct consequence. There cannot be development, that is, the accumulation of wealth and expertise derived from the exploitation of natural resources and human labor, without its flip side — underdevelopment. 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. The two phenomena are by no means natural or dependent on the superior ingenuity of one particular people or race. Development and underdevelopment are politically determined, at the heart of their correlation we inevitably find exploitation. 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. 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. “Under colonialism, the ownership was complete and backed by military domination. Today, in many African countries the foreign ownership is still present, although the armies and flags of foreign powers have been removed.” Foreign aid and loans were in fact already replacing military coercion in the ever-evolving and innovating business of colonial theft.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-persisting-relevance-of-walter-rodneys-how-europe-underdeveloped-africa/#!



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