How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

by Walter Rodney

The fact that Europe was the first part of the world to move from feudalism towards capitalism gave Europeans a headstart over humanity elsewhere in the scientific understanding of the universe, the making of tools, and the efficient organization of labor.

Soon, war began to be fought between one community and another for the sole purpose of getting prisoners for sale to Europeans, and even inside a given community, a ruler might be tempted to exploit his own subjects and capture them for sale.

In the simplest of societies where there were no kings, it proved impossible for Europeans to strike up the alliance which was necessary to carry on a trade in captives on the coast. In those societies with ruling groups, the association with Europeans was easily established; and afterwards Europe hardened the existing internal class divisions and created new ones.

Of course, it is only as a last resort that the capitalist metropoles need to use armed force to insure the pursuit of favorable policies in the dependent areas. Normally, economic weapons are sufficient.

Yet, the failure of this determined effort demonstrated that a single African state at that time could not emancipate itself from European control. The small size of African states and the numerous political divisions made it so much easier for Europe to make the decisions as to Africa’s role in world production and trade.

Europe became the center of a world-wide system and that it was European capitalism which set slavery and the Atlantic slave trade it motion.

The African contribution to European capitalist growth extended over such vital sectors as shipping, insurance, the formation of companies, capitalist agriculture, technology, and the manufacture of machinery.

Where the original European advantage was not sufficient to assure supremacy, they deliberately undermined other people’s efforts.

It is probably more significant to note that the Atlantic trade was the stimulator of consistent advances in naval technology.

Outstanding examples are provided in the persons of David and Alexander Barclay, who were engaging in slave trade in 1756 and who later used the loot to set up Barclays Bank.

In the 1830s, slave-grown cotton accounted for about half the value of all exports from the United States of America.

and ultimately the stage was reached during the American Civil War when the Northern capitalists fought to end slavery within the boundaries of the United States so that the country as a whole could advance to a higher level of capitalism.

The title of this section is deliberately chosen to call attention to the fact that the shipments were all by Europeans to markets controlled by Europeans, and this was in the interest of European capitalism and nothing else.

The resultant figure would be many times the millions landed alive outside of Africa, and it is that figure which represents the number of Africans directly removed from the population and labor force of Africa because of the establishment of slave production by Europeans.

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.

European trade goods percolated into the deepest interior, and (more significantly) the orientation of large areas of the continent towards human exports meant that other positive interactions were thereby ruled out.

the conclusion is simply that it did so in spite of the adverse effects of a process that was more damaging than cholera.

Europe benefited technologically from its external trade contacts, while Africa either failed to benefit or actually lost.

What Africa experienced in the early centuries of trade was precisely a loss of development opportunity, and this is of the greatest importance.

The European slave trade was a direct block, removing millions of youth and young adults who are the human agents from whom inventiveness springs.

The basic reason is that the very nature of Afro-European trade was highly unfavorable to the movement of positive ideas and techniques from the European capitalist system to the African pre-capitalist (communal, feudal, and pre-feudal) system of production.

The lines of economic activity attached to foreign trade were either destructive, as slavery was, or at best purely extractive, like ivory hunting and cutting camwood trees.

After all, it would not have been in the interests of capitalism to develop Africa.

Placing the whole question in historical perspective allows us to see that capitalism has always discouraged technological evolution in Africa, and blocks Africa’s access to its own technology.

The few socially desirable byproducts of elephant hunting within Africa were chicken feed in comparison with the profits, technology, and skills associated with the product in Europe.

So long as there is political power, so long as a people can be mobilized to use weapons, and so long as a society has the opportunity to define its own ideology and culture, then the people of that society have some control over their own destinies, in spite of constraints such as those imposed as the African continent slipped into orbit as a satellite of capitalist Europe.

The important thing is that they were free to develop relatively unaffected by alien influence, and certainly free from direct ravages of slave trading.

It must be recognized that things such as military techniques were responses to real needs, that the work of the individual originates in and is backed by the action of society as a whole, and that whatever was achieved by any one leader must have been bounded by historical circumstances and the level of development, which determine the extent to which an individual can first discover, then augment, and then display his potential.

They were not the only leading forces, and even where the states were territorially much smaller, there were observable advances in political organization.

Imperialism meant capitalist expansion. It meant that European (and North American and Japanese) capitalists were forced by the internal logic of their competitive system to seek abroad in less developed countries opportunities to control raw material supplies, to find markets, and to find profitable fields of investment.

The common factor underlying the overthrow of African rulers in East, West, Central, North, and South Africa was that they stood in the way of Europe’s imperial needs. It was the only factor that mattered, with anti-slaving sentiments being at best superfluous and at worst calculated hypocrisy.

It was economics that determined that Europe should invest in Africa and control the continent’s raw materials and labor. It was racism which confirmed the decision that the form of control should be direct colonial rule.

African slaves in Arab hands became domestics, soldiers, and agricultural serfs. Whatever surplus they produced was not for reinvestment and multiplication of capital, as in the West Indian or North American slave systems, but for consumption by the feudal elite. Indeed, slaves were often maintained more for social prestige than for economic benefit.

Eventually, it was no problem for the capitalist slave traders of Europe to extend political domination over the feudalist Arab slave traders and to use the latter as agents of colonialism in East Africa.

so that what was called “pre-colonial” trade proved to be a preparatory stage for the era of colonial rule. It is widely accepted that Africa was colonized because of its weakness. The concept of weakness should be understood to embrace military weakness and inadequate economic capacity, as well as certain political weaknesses: namely, the incompleteness of the establishment of nation-states, which left the continent divided, and the low level of consciousness concerning the world at large, which had already been transformed into a single system by the expansion of capitalist relations.

In 1934, forty-one Africans were killed in a gold mine disaster in the Gold Coast, and the capitalist company offered only three pounds to the dependents of each of these men as compensation.

In the final analysis, the shareholders of the mining companies were the ones who benefited most of all. They remained in Europe and North America and collected fabulous dividends every year from the gold, diamonds, manganese, uranium, etc., which were brought out of the South African subsoil by African labor.

Cash-crop peasants never had any capital of their own. They existed from one crop to another, depending on good harvests and good prices.

This meant that Liverpool firms were no longer exploiting Africa by removing its labor physically to another part of the world. Instead, they were exploiting the labor and raw materials of Africa inside Africa.

Those capitalist companies held the African farmer in a double squeeze by controlling the price paid for the crop and by controlling the price of imported goods such as tools, clothing, and bicycles to which peasants aspired.

The differences between the prices of African exports of raw materials and their importation of manufactured goods constituted a form of unequal exchange.

African peasants had absolutely no control over the freight rates which were charged, and actually paid more than citizens in other lands.

The returns on colonial investment were consistently higher than those in investments in the metropoles, so the financiers stood to benefit from sponsoring colonial enterprise.

(1) To protect national interests against competition from other capitalists. (2) To arbitrate the conflicts between their own capitalists. (3) To guarantee optimum conditions under which private companies could exploit Africans.

They satisfied their own citizens (who wanted mining concessions or farming land) and they created the conditions whereby landless Africans had to work not just to pay taxes but also to survive.

The French government had a cunning way of getting free labor by first demanding that African males should enlist as French soldiers and then using them as unpaid laborers.

If one accepts that the government is always the servant of a particular class, it is perfectly understandable that the colonial governments should have been in collusion with capitalists to siphon off surplus from Africa to Europe.

Of course, the metropolitan governments also insured that a certain proportion of the colonial surplus went directly into the coffers of the state. They all had some forms of direct investment in capitalist enterprises.

To sum up briefly, colonialism meant a great intensification of exploitation within Africa—to a level much higher than that previously in existence under communalism or feudal-type African societies. Simultaneously, it meant the export of that surplus in massive proportions, for that was the central purpose of colonialism.

It was from the Belgian Congo during the Second World War that the United States began getting the uranium that was a prerequisite to the making of the first atomic bomb.