Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa: Its Relevance to Contemporary Issues 50 Years Later

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney remains as relevant today as when it was first published half a century ago. A quick look at the current state of African nations, the poverty and insecurity, diseases, political instability, and stark underdevelopment crawling in the continent would remove the doubt anyone may entertain regarding my opening statement.¹ No doubt, the depressing state of the African continent provides a textbook definition of underdevelopment.² Nonetheless, the subsisting question is why Africa remains so underdeveloped despite the continent’s enormous resources, a question Rodney posed 50 years ago and which is still being asked today.

Rodney stresses the external factor: the linkage of Africa with the West since the fifteenth century. He argues that for a comprehensive analysis of the challenges bedeviling Africa, it is important to start with the impact of the trade in human beings, often referred to as the slave trade, as well as colonialism and the divisive partition of the continent into different nation-states, which were then highly characterized by a lack of resources to stabilize or develop, and are still beset by such problems.³ Usually, when the current state of Africa’s underdevelopment is being discussed, the easy route is to place the blame on Africans for their failure to move past their colonial masters’ actions and inactions for many years and the inability to develop their countries despite the several opportunities available to them since the beginning of their independence. On the surface, this submission seems enticing and well-intentioned, especially as it argues for Africans to disembark from what many have called the “blame game;” however, it does not capture or tell the truth as Rodney has formulated them. And since it is important to address the root cause of a problem before attempting to solve it, it makes sense to occasionally revisit the actions and inactions of the past and reevaluate how their impacts continue to waylay Africa’s development.

Rodney was a researcher who applied Marxist theories to the African circumstance in an original manner. In the mid-1970s, he set out the glove, moving imperialism and neocolonialism theological rationalists to analyze why and how Africa wound up in its circumstance, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa emphasizes the centrality and pertinence of Africa in world history,⁴ the effect of Africa’s assault on the creation and augmentation of European and Euro-American private enterprise, and the issues confronting the postcolonial world in this pivotal commitment. The book’s main purpose is to show that Africa’s developed institutions existed before the encounter with European colonizers and how that encounter resulted in long-term crises. As Rodney claims, understanding Africa’s decline from the late 1400s to the present depends on the authenticity of the continent’s past and the commitments made by Africans.⁵ Despite attempts to ignore, distort,⁶ and undermine African contributions, he points to verifiable data by exhibiting the presence of various African developments preceding the arrival of Europeans on the African continent.⁷

Africa was presented as a developing continent, which Rodney disagrees with; instead, he vehemently describes Africa as an underdeveloped continent, essentially drawing from the experiences of the past and, even tragically, the ongoing exploitation of its social and economic resources that the continent is both subtly and openly facing. Rodney believes that we will continue to get it wrong by describing Africa as a developing continent if we see underdevelopment as a lack of resources. He posits that we should remove the veil and consider underdevelopment as the unjust and uneven distribution of wealth and resources. Rodney’s research provoked novel but pertinent questions regarding the state of Africa’s social institutions in the nineteenth century and what impact the Atlantic slave trade had.

One of the things Rodney’s work achieved is the deconstruction and reconstruction of how history is being studied in Africa. In doing this, he introduced new perspectives on how underdevelopment is being constructed in Africa. Rodney’s proposition is that to comprehend the impacts of European activities in...