47 pages • 1 hour read
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
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Key Figures
Walter Rodney
Walter Rodney (1942-1980) was a Marxist historian and grassroots labor activist from Guyana. His educational training laid the groundwork for How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Rodney attended Queen’s College, the top all-boys high school in the country, where he graduated first in his class in 1960. Rodney’s success in high school earned him a scholarship to the University of the West Indies in Jamaica (UWI), where he received an undergraduate degree in history in 1963. He then attended the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, one of the world’s leading institutions for the study of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. He earned his PhD in African history at age 24, completing a dissertation titled The History of the Upper Guinea Coast, published by Oxford University Press in 1970.
In contrast to most academics, Rodney combined his scholarship with activism to become a leading voice for the underrepresented and disenfranchised. Rodney’s father nurtured his interest in politics and working-class struggles, issues Rodney continued to engage beyond his student years. His dissertation combined his interests in scholarship and activism by challenging assumptions about Africa and proposing new frameworks to study oppressed people, an approach he repeated in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Rodney participated in government protests during his time as a professor at UWI in Jamaica. In contrast to his colleagues, however, he focused on giving a voice to the working class, including the Rastafarians, one of the most marginalized groups in Jamaica. His speeches and lectures from this period, published under the title The Groundings with My Brothers, became a key text for the Caribbean Black power movement. A vocal critic of political and economic exploitation, Rodney drew the attention of the Jamaican government, which prevented him from reentering the country after he attended the 1968 Black Writers’ Conference in Montreal, Quebec. The decision sparked unrest in Kingston, Jamaica’s capital.
Rodney returned to Guyana in 1974 to take up a professorial position, only to have the appointment rescinded. Regardless, Rodney remained in Guyana, becoming a member of the Working People’s Alliance (WPA). Over the next five years, he became a central figure in the resistance movement against Guyana’s authoritarian government. His public and private talks sparked a new political consciousness across the country. As the WPA gained popularity, it became the target of government harassment, with the police conducting raids and beating members of the group. On July 11, 1979, Rodney and seven other members of the WPA were arrested for burning down two government offices. The charges were dropped for lack of evidence, but government persecution continued. Two WPA members were killed, and others were denied the right to travel. Nevertheless, Rodney continued to speak out against those in power and to support the oppressed, as he did in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. He was assassinated by a bomb in Georgetown on June 13, 1980, possibly by the Guyanese government.
Karl Marx
Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known works are The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867-1883). The latter, composed of three volumes, is a foundational theoretical work in material philosophy, critique of political economy, and politics. In it, Marx reveals the economic patterns underpinning capitalism. Marx’s ideas were extremely influential. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is deeply informed by Marx, and Das Kapital is the most-cited book in the social sciences published before 1950. Although many scholars have criticized his work, Marx remains one of the most influential figures in history and is often cited as a principal architect of modern social science.
Marx proposes that the exploitation of labor is the driving force behind capitalism, a theory Rodney explores in his discussion of African development. Indeed, Europe’s dealings with Africa consistently hinged on the exploitation of African labor and natural resources from the trading period, through colonialism, and beyond. Marx’s idea that human societies develop through class conflict also influenced Rodney. In Chapter 1, for example, he summarizes Marx’s four stages of European development (communalism, slavery, feudalism, and capitalism), underscoring that violence accompanies each shift and that the change from one mode of production to another occurs when existing social relations can no longer effectively promote advance. Rodney then provides readers with examples of African development to demonstrate that the continent followed a different developmental path than Europe, but that each transition was still marked by class conflict. Those who owned the means of production (Europeans) were at odds with wage laborers and peasants (Africans) throughout the eras of capitalist imperialism and colonialism.
Rodney even employs Marxist terms to discuss class conflict, referring to the ruling class as the bourgeoisie and to the working class as the proletariat. For Marx, proletarian revolutionary action can bring an end to capitalism. Rodney adapts this idea, arguing that the African working class was too small and too weak to emancipate the continent from colonial rule. He replaces Marx’s working class with an educated class that “played a role in African independence struggles far out of proportion to their numbers, because they took it upon themselves and were called upon to articulate the interests of all Africans” (321). Despite adapting some of Marx’s ideas, however, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a pathfinding piece of Marxist scholarship.
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