Walter Rodney’s classic 1974 text remains necessary reading for anyone who wants to understand the political-economic background to on-going political instability in Africa. The corruption, coups, and poverty that critics often attribute to endemic failures of state formation across the content are, Rodney shows, actually functions of five centuries of exploitative relationships between African nations and Europe. While classical imperialism and colonialism have given way to national independence on the one hand and neo-imperialist forms of domination via indebtedness and export-dependent economies on the other, Rodney’s central thesis, that “political instability … is a chronic symptom of … underdevelopment” remains true. (27)

Most contemporary readers will be immediately struck by the humanist foundations of Rodney’s interpretation of the process of development and the (refreshing) absence of romantically essentialized, culture-centric identity politics. Rodney maintains a resolutely political-economic analysis of colonialism that situates African development and underdevelopment within the broader sweep of human history. He begins from the materialist principle that, as Marx and Engels put it in The German Ideology, all human societies are rooted in the production and reproduction of the real conditions of life. Every human society stands or falls with its capacity to produce the means of subsistence. The symbolic dimensions that make life meaningful are not mechanically reducible to basic material conditions of life-maintenance, but they do depend upon those conditions. African societies, like all societies, are thus rooted in the intelligent use of natural resources to produce and reproduce the conditions of life. “Every people have shown a capacity for independently increasing their ability to live a more satisfactory life through exploiting the resources of nature. Every continent independently participated in the early epochs of man’s control over his environment — which means that every continent can point to a period of economic development. Africa, being the original home of man, was obviously a major participant in the process in which human groups displayed an ever increasing capacity to extract a living from the natural environment.” (4) Contemporary readers may detect traces of what they might now regard as a Marxist “Promethenianism” emanating from phrases like “exploiting the resources of nature” and “extract a living from nature,” but Rodney here is doing no more than stating necessary conditions of all life. Every single living entity converts energy from one source and uses it to fuel its metabolic processes. There can be no life, much less human life, without the use– exploitation– of natural resources. The key for human beings is to use natural resources intelligently— a qualification that the specifically capitalist form of exploitation makes impossible.

Even in 1974 Rodney was aware that the terms “development” and “underdevelopment” might imply morally problematic ideas of civilizational hierarchy. Rodney’s materialist-humanist approach to the problem confronts and dispels this worry. Rodney understands “development” in political-economic terms as the increasingly intelligent use of natural resources to produce the goods, services, and relationships that satisfying, meaningful, valued and valuable lives require. Underdeveloped societies are not necessarily morally inferior to more developed societies but only lag behind the achieved level of material and technological development. Underdeveloped societies, he makes clear, can be morally more developed that economically richer and technologically more sophisticated societies. Indeed, such is the case between African and European society: “”In some quarters it may be thought wise to substitute the term “developing” for “underdeveloped.” One of the reasons for so doing is to avoid any unpleasantness which may be attached to the second term, which might be interpreted as meaning underdeveloped mentally, physically, morally, or in any other respect. Actually, if “underdevelopment” were related to anything other than comparing economies, then the most undeveloped country in the world would be the USA, which practices external oppression on a massive scale, while internally there is a blend of exploitation, brutality, and psychiatric disorder.”(14) Rodney rejects Eurocentric interpretations of historical development without discarding the idea of progressive development as such, because a coherent critique of colonialism and imperialism presupposes it.

Rather than romanticize traditional African cultures and societies Rodney stresses the continuity between African social, economic, and political development and European societies at the time when extensive trading relationships were forged, beginning in the 15th century. African societies had attained comparable levels of material, technological, social, and political development to the European trading nations that began to establish commercial contact along the Western coast, and this fact was acknowledged by the European traders. “Africa in the fifteenth century was not just a jumble of different “tribes.” There was a pattern and there was historical movement. Societies such as feudal Ethiopia and Egypt were at the furthest point of the process of evolutionary development. Zimbabwe and the Bachwezi states were also clearly on the ascendant away from communalism.”(68) However, while the level of material and artistic culture was on par with European developments, African military and transport technology was not as advanced as in Europe. These two differences would prove decisive to Europe’s ability to subjugate African society to its own needs.

Europe’s (and before Europe, the Islamic invaders of North Africa) transportation and military advantages over African society would prove decisive to the development of the slave trade. Europe could establish a global trading regime because it had ships capable of traversing the oceans and the military power to conquer indigenous societies. As plantations began to spread in the newly colonized lands across the Atlantic the need for workers capable of enduring the brutal conditions on the plantations arose. Rodney acknowledges the moral depravity of the slave trade, but his argument remains focused on its political-economic causes. Africa, the Americas, and Europe became locked in the murderous embrace of the slave trade because European plantation owners found that the Indigenous people of the Caribbean and Brazil were not well-suited to plantation labour. African societies had long practiced settled agriculture in hot climates (40). “When Europeans reached the Americas, they recognized its enormous potential in gold and silver and tropical produce. But that potential could not be made a reality without adequate labor supplies … Africa, which … had a population accustomed to settled agriculture and disciplined labor in many spheres” was used to satisfy the demand. (68) Because of this capacity to work in environmentally challenging conditions, African bodies soon became the primary export of the continent.

The slave trade was the origin of the systematic underdevelopment of African societies. It disrupted in the most inhuman and violent way imaginable the endogenous developmental dynamics operative in African societies up to the fifteenth century. It added to the normal tensions and conflicts between neighbouring societies an extraneous cause of war; it diverted energy and intelligence from economic, political, and technological development to the rounding up and export of bodies; it brutalized everyone involved and robbed Africa of millions upon millions of youth. The slave trade harnessed Africa to European economic priorities in a way so damaging that its repercussions are still felt centuries later. “”Slaving prevented the the remaining population from effectively engaging in agriculture and industry, and it employed professional slave hunters and warriors to destroy rather than build. Quite apart from the moral aspect and the immense suffering that it caused, the European slave trade was economically totally irrational from the viewpoint of African development.” (100) When people today object to the idea of reparations for the damages of the slave trade they tend to focus on the individual level and argue that since, as individuals, no one alive today was involved with it, no one alive to day should have to pay for its consequences. Such an argument is not wholly without grounds, but it ignores the systemic implications of the slave trade as the origin of the economic underdevelopment which explains the relative poverty of African societies today.

The slave trade was also the matrix within which the contemporary form of racism took shape. As I noted, the first Europeans to establish trading relations with Africa noted the similarities rather than the differences between their own and African civilizations. It was only once those relationships became exploitative and focused on kidnapping and enslaving Africans that an ideological justification for what was manifestly inhuman treatment become necessary. Rodney eschews abstract, unhistorical, essential conceptions of “Whiteness” and “Blackness” that one often hears today invoked as explanations of racist ideology and sticks to his historical, materialist, and political economic explanation. Europeans, he argues enslaved Africans not because they were racists but because they needed their labour. The slave trade made racism, not racism the slave trade: “European planters and miners enslaved Africans for economic reasons.”(88) However, “the simple fact is that no people can enslave another for centuries without coming out with a notion of superiority, and when the color and other physical traits of those people were quite different, it was inevitable that the prejudice should take a racist form.”(88) Racism is thus an ideological thought-formation whose function was to justify the exploitation and destruction of African lives in the developing global capitalist economy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The historical development of the wide gaps between the material wealth of European and American societies on one hand and African societies on the other emerges only with the slave trade.

The end of the slave trade in the nineteenth century did not result in the re-emergence of endogenous developmental dynamics in Africa. Instead, new forms of economic and political dependence and subordination emerged. Economically, trade in slaves was replaced by trade in raw materials and export crops which were valued in Europe but useless for the satisfaction of local needs. African producers were paid a tiny fraction of the value of these goods would produce as inputs into manufacturing industries and as luxury consumables. Low prices ensured that there was little income to invest in African economic and social development and the unfinished state in which raw materials were exported impeded the development of manufacturing and the technical and scientific achievements that manufacturing promotes. Politically, independence was negated by the imposition of direct colonial rule. The borders of colonial administrations were drawn for the convenience of Europeans and ignored historical African boundaries between peoples. Economic and political dependence are the underlying historical conditions for the social instability one continues to observe in some African states today.

However, given the prevalence of democratic and liberal ideas in Europe in the nineteenth century Europeans could not admit to themselves that their “enlightened” societies could be responsible for the mass misery they observed in Africa. Instead, a racist construction of Africans as innately inferior had to be created.(89) It was against this backdrop that Europeans would marvel at the pyramids or the Benin bronzes as miracles that they could not explain because their sophistication and refinement were at odds with the racist construction of Africans as “primitives.” Rodney’s materialist humanism cuts through that sort or patronizing nonsense. “Even today there is still a tendency to consider the achievements of with a sense of wonder rather than with the calm acceptance that it was a perfectly logical outgrowth of human social development within Africa, as part of the universal process by which man’s labor opened up new horizons.” (66) Science, industry, and art take concrete shape in definite socio-cultural formations, but they are creations of human brains and hands, not cultural essences such as is implied by terms like “Western” science. There is no “Western” science any more than there is African or Indian science. There is the science that developed in Europe, Africa, India, etc. If it is science, then it contributes to demonstrable human understanding of the natural world. The science that developed in Europe was shaped by the social and historical conditions in which it developed (including the exploitative and unequal relationships between Europe and Africa), but it does not follow, Rodney rightly argues, that whatever was scientifically true in the system of thought that takes shape from Newton to contemporary physics is relative to parochial European standards.

While contemporary essentialists think that indexing science and technology to the particularities of culture serves anti-racist purposes, Rodney’s argument shows why that cannot be the case. Every time anyone anywhere one uses their smartphone, for example, they are drawing upon the combined insights of mathematical logic, electrical and computer engineering, and materials science. Unless one wants to concede that the phone works by magic, one must admit that there is genuine knowledge of how nature functions at the deepest levels (electromagnetism) embodied in the phone. If that knowledge is the product of “Western” science, rather than just science, one implies, even if one does not intend to, that the western mind is uniquely attuned to fundamental natural realities. That conclusion, and not the humanist alternative (that all scientific insight is a function of human intellectual inquiry and development) has racist implications.

Rodney is hardly soft on the destructive effects of racism and underdevelopment, but he did not argue that the way forward for Africa was to disengage from the world. “It would be extremely simple-minded to say that colonialism in Africa or anywhere else caused Europe the develop its science and technology. The tendency towards technological innovation and renovation was inherent in capitalism itself … However, it would be entirely accurate to say that the colonization of Africa and other parts of the world formed an indispensable link in a chain of events which made possible the technological transformation of the base of European capitalism. Without that link, … our very yardsticks for measuring development and underdevelopment would have been very different.”(174) Had colonization not happened Africa would have continued along the developmental path it was traveling prior to the establishment of trading links with Europe.

However, history deals with what has come to be, not with what could have been. Rodney was convinced that the solution to Africa’s problems was to assert its legitimate place in the world, to prove the racists wrong by taking control of its political and economic future. The problem with colonialism was that it “was a system of exploitation … whose essential purpose was to repatriate the profits to the so-called mother country. From an African viewpoint, that amounted to consistent expatriation of surplus produced by African labor out of African resources.”(149) The solution to that problem was political independence and integration into the global economy on fair terms that prioritized African needs over the needs of European capitalists. The former process was completed when apartheid was dismantled in South Africa in the 1990s. The later process remains to be completed and Rodney’s book, even 50 years on, remains an essential element of the political economic explanation of why that goal remains to be achieved.