Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa: The Continued Relevance of a Landmark Book

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has both illustrated and dramatized the ongoing North/South divide on planet Earth. The question of who has been able to obtain the vaccine and who has not; who is able to produce the vaccine, and who is constrained by corporate patent restrictions. It is not that people in the so-called Global North—Canada, the United States, the European Union, Japan—have been able to defy the pandemic and secure health. Within the Global North, there are stark divisions over who is able to get access to the vaccine and who is not, not to mention which populations are sickening and dying disproportionately— divisions that are particularly rooted in oppressions based on class, race, and nationality. Yet, when one looks at planet Earth, we see global patterns in the manner in which the pandemic has spread and brought disaster, patterns that date back to the fifteenth century, patterns that are rooted in slavery and colonialism and, ultimately, in the construction of so-called race and racist oppression. When one looks at such patterns, one inevitably returns to the continent of Africa. The challenges facing contemporary Africa make no sense in the absence of an analysis that digs into the slave trade, colonialism, and the arbitrary division of the continent into alleged nation-states, many of which lack the resources to stabilize and advance. In this context, there have been a myriad of opinions—I would hardly call them analyses—as to the root causes of the challenge. All too often, such opinions place the blame on the Africans themselves or simply treat the slave trade and colonialism as matters from the past which lack contemporary relevance. In the early 1970s, however, a book was published that threw down the gauntlet and challenged the apologists of colonialism and neocolonialism to look at why and how Africa found itself in the conditions that it did.