Forty years of 'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa' http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/82937 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.
{Nigel Westmaas is
assistant professor of Africana studies at Hamilton College, New York
state. This article was first published by Stabroeknews.com.}
