How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

by Walter Rodney

African development is possible only on the basis of a radical break with the international capitalist system, which has been the principal agency of underdevelopment of Africa over the last five centuries.

Development in the past has always meant the increase in the ability to guard the independence of the social group and indeed to infringe upon the freedom of others—something that often came about irrespective of the will of the persons within the societies involved.

Similarly, in human society it has always been the case that the expansion of the economy leads eventually to a change in the form of social relations.

At all times, therefore, one of the ideas behind underdevelopment is a comparative one.

All of the countries named as “underdeveloped” in the world are exploited by others; and the underdevelopment with which the world is now preoccupied is a product of capitalist, imperialist, and colonialist exploitation.

Actually, if “underdevelopment” were related to anything other than comparing economies, then the most underdeveloped country in the world would be the United States, which practices external oppression on a massive scale, while internally there is a blend of exploitation, brutality, and psychiatric disorder.

What aggravates the situation is that more people are employed in those jobs than are really necessary to give efficient service; and to crown it all, these people do not reinvest in agriculture or industry.

The incomes given to civil servants, professionals, and merchants come from the store of wealth produced by the community.

Mistaken interpretations of the causes of underdevelopment usually stem either from prejudiced thinking or from the error of believing that one can learn the answers by looking inside the underdeveloped economy. The true explanation lies in seeking out the relationship between Africa and certain developed countries and in recognizing that it is a relationship of exploitation.

The whole import-export relationship between Africa and its trading partners is one of unequal exchange and of exploitation.

In other words, in the absence of direct political control, foreign investment insures that the natural resources and the labor of Africa produce economic value which is lost to the continent.

They are meant to give some idea of the extent to which the wealth of Africa is being drained off by those who invest in, and thereby own, a large part of the means of production of wealth in Africa.

Those erroneous views are also being exposed by economists in underdeveloped countries who are discovering that the explanations offered by bourgeois scholars are explanations which suit the interests of those countries which exploit the rest of the world through trade and investment.

In the first place, the wealth created by African labor and from African resources was grabbed by the capitalist countries of Europe; and in the second place, restrictions were placed upon African capacity to make the maximum use of its economic potential—which

The Christian church has always been a major instrument for cultural penetration and cultural dominance, in spite of the fact that, in many instances, Africans sought to set up independent churches.

If economic power is centered outside national African boundaries, then political and military power in any real sense is also centered outside until, and unless, the masses of peasants and workers are mobilized to offer an alternative to the system of sham political independence.

First, the answer is that the operation of the imperialist system bears major responsibility for African economic retardation by draining African wealth and by making it impossible to develop more rapidly the resources of the continent. Second, one has to deal with those who manipulate the system and those who are either agents or unwitting accomplices of the said system.

This creates a non-scientific and metaphysical way of viewing the world, which often conflicts with the scientific materialist outlook and with the development of society.

To free those things from religious restraints, it had to be argued that religion had its own sphere and the things of this world had their own secular sphere. This secularization of life speeded up the development of capitalism and later socialism.

Numerous examples could be brought forward to show the dominance of the family principle in the communal phase of African development. It affected the two principal factors of production—land and labor—as well as the system of distributing goods.

At first, those captives were in a very disadvantaged position, comparable to that of slaves, but very rapidly, captives or their offspring became ordinary members of the society, because there was no scope for the perpetual exploitation of man by man in a context that was neither feudal nor capitalist.

The single most important technological change underlying African agricultural development was the introduction of iron tools, notably the ax and the hoe, replacing wooden and stone tools. It was on the basis of the iron tools that new skills were elaborated in agriculture as well as in other spheres of economic activity.

However, economic expansion from there on was associated with specialization and localization of industry—people’s needs being met by exchange.

a most decisive factor in the growth of industry was the changeover from domestic production to the factory system, with the guild marking an intermediary stage.

The most developed areas of Africa were those where all the elements converged, and the two sociopolitical features which were the outstanding indices to development were the increase of stratification and the consolidation of states.

Social stratification was the basis for the rise of classes and for social antagonisms.

The result in each case was that a relatively small faction held control of the land and (where relevant) cattle, mines, and long-distance trade.

The areas of Africa in which labor relations were breaking out of communal restrictions corresponded to areas in which sophisticated political states were emerging.

After all, if there is no class stratification in a society, it follows that there is no state, because the state arose as an instrument to be used by a particular class to control the rest of society in its own interests.

In no continent was feudalism an epoch of romance for the laboring classes, but the elements of development were seen in the technology and the increase in productive capacity.

The landlords exempted themselves from tax—a typical situation in feudal societies, and one which fed the fires of revolution in Europe when the bourgeois class grew powerful enough to challenge the fact that the feudalists were using political power to tax everyone but themselves.

What is clear is that the transition to feudalism had been made.

As one index to the standard of social life, it has been pointed out that public baths were common in the cities of Maghreb at a time when in Oxford the doctrine was still being propounded that the washing of the body was a dangerous act.

None of the African societies discussed so far can be said to have thrown up capitalist forms to the point where the accumulation of capital became the principal motive force.

Ghana, Mali, and Songhai grew out of their environment, and out of the efforts of their own populations; and it was only after they had achieved a certain status that their ruling classes could express an interest in long-distance trade and could provide the security to permit that trade to flourish.

That is to say, feudalism brought about a series of direct obligatory ties between the landed rulers and the landless subjects.

The division of labor between pastoralists and cultivators and the nature of their contacts intensified the process of caste formation and class stratification in the interlacustrine area.

In all of the situations examined so far, religion played a significant role in promoting the building of the state, leading away from the simple organization of the family community.

When Cecil Rhodes sent in his agents to rob and steal in Zimbabwe, they and other Europeans marveled at the surviving ruins of the Zimbabwe culture, and automatically assumed that it had been built by white people. Even today, there is still a tendency to consider the achievements 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.

However, gold is required in large quantities only in a society which produces a very large economic surplus and can afford to transform part of that surplus into gold for prestige purposes (as in India) or into coinage and money to promote capitalism (as in Western Europe).

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, but at a lower level than the feudal states and a few others that were not yet feudal such as those in the Western Sudan.

It can be said that most African societies had not reached a new stage that was markedly different from communalism, and hence the use in this study of the cautious term “transitional.”

It should also be reiterated that slavery as a mode of production was not present in any African society,

Several historians of Africa have pointed out that after surveying the developed areas of the continent in the fifteenth century and those within Europe at the same date, the difference between the two was in no way to Africa’s discredit.

When Europe and Africa established close relations through trade, there was therefore already a slight edge in Europe’s favor—an edge representing the difference between a fledgling capitalist society and one that was still emerging from communalism.

The contention here is that over that period, Africa helped to develop Western Europe in the same proportion as Western Europe helped to underdevelop Africa.

Therefore, by control of the seas, Europe took the first steps towards transforming the several parts of Africa and Asia into economic satellites.

On the one hand, there were the European countries who decided on the role to be played by the African economy; and on the other hand, Africa formed an extension to the European capitalist market. As far as foreign trade was concerned, Africa was dependent on what Europeans were prepared to buy and sell.

An excellent illustration of that is the fact that the so-called international law which governed the conduct of nations on the high seas was nothing else but European law. Africans did not participate in its making, and in many instances, African people were simply the victims, for the law recognized them only as transportable merchandise.

Since gold was limited to very small areas of Africa, as far as Europeans were then aware, the principal export was human beings.