Review: Walter Rodney, ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’
The Suffocating Nature of Colonial Capitalism
Review of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Verso, new edition, 2018), 416 pages.
Abstract
This year, 2022, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. This paper revisits this seminal text and asks whether the book is now merely a historical document or whether it has any contemporary relevance. The discussion reconstructs Rodney’s main arguments and the extent to which Western colonial capitalism, which started with Western Europe, suffocated socio-economic productivity in Africa. It argues that the old problems that Rodney addressed in his book are still with us and have in many ways intensified over the years. Africa is more underdeveloped today than it was in 1972, shattering the myth that Africa is developing. The paper concludes that the book is perhaps more relevant today than it ever was since it was published.
Reviewed by Gabriel O. Apata
Introduction
Walter Rodney published How Europe Underdeveloped Africa in 1972, to wide acclaim. Not only was the book ground-breaking in the area of African studies, it became required reading not only in universities across Africa but also in secondary schools. Many contemporary Africanist scholars, particularly those working in developmental studies, African politics and culture are treading the same grounds that Rodney trod half a century ago. Far from being a mere historical document, the book is of contemporary relevance. Many of the issues that Rodney raised and addressed in his book are still with us. The gulf of inequality between Africa and the West has widened, while poverty in Africa is worse today than it was fifty years ago. Time has not diminished the ideas propounded in the book nor the power of the argument. It is therefore timely, after half a century, to reassess Rodney’s text and to locate its place within Africa’s economic historiography.
Imperialism and Capitalism
The early part of the twentieth century saw a series of books published, many of them written by Marxist theorists, on the nature of imperialism and its impact on other societies. Hobson (1902), Hilferding (1909), Luxembourg (2013), and Lenin (1917) all linked imperialism to capitalism, arguing in various ways that imperialism was rooted in expansionism and exploitation. Later theorists such as Cohen (1971) took a similar view arguing that imperialism was essentially about power, domination and expansionism. More recently, Kohli (2020) argues similarly that British and American imperialisms have shaped the world principally through the pursuit of economic domination and expansionism. These theories of imperialism relate colonial capitalism to exploitation and expansionism.
The Indian nationalist, Dadabhai Naoroji in his acclaimed Poverty and the Un-British Rule in India (1901) wrote about how India enriched Britain in what he describes as ‘drain of wealth.’ His fellow Indian contemporary, Romesh Dutt in his Economic History of India (1909) also advanced a theory of underdevelopment in India which he linked to colonial rule. Other notable development theorists such as Paul Baran (1957), Paul Sweezy (1967) and others have explicated similar imperialist/colonialist theories of development; but Rodney’s book was perhaps one of the first to attempt to focus and to explain the African predicament of underdevelopment and its peculiarities.
Development, developing and underdevelopment
The first thing to say is that every society is to an extent a capitalist society. This is in the sense that each society has its store of capital – be it human, material, mental and social capital, as Bourdieu has indicated - some of which it trades and others which it utilises in other ways. But not every society adopts capitalism as a core doctrine of trade and commerce that is also predicated on exploitation and expansionism. Thus, the kind of capitalism that is being discussed here is colonial capitalism that took place in Africa up until the early part of the twentieth century before a new form of capitalism of liberal and global kind took over.
Although development is often viewed in almost exclusively economic terms, Rodney argues that this narrow conception ignores the interconnections between economic and socio-cultural and religious life. This view is now standard within development theories. For example, the Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen endorses Rodney’s point that development is more than economic growth and embraces freedom or ‘a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy’ (1993:3).
Rodney begins by analytically examining the question of development as a concept. He then argues that development is a universal concept since each human society seeks to improve (develop) itself and this instinct and capacity to make progress is not exclusive to any one society. But each society develops at its own pace, in its own way, and at its own time. Three related terms are then contrasted: underdevelopment, developing and developed. Rodney does not say this, but it is implied in his argument that the term developed which is often used to describe the West, implies that a final stage within the developmental process has been reached. Which of course is an error since development is an on-going, open-ended and not a finished process. There is no end to it; there is always scope for improvement. A second error is that the term developing is often used to describe places like Africa. Which is ironic since it is the West that is developing, while a place like Africa in many ways has ceased to develop. This leaves us with the concept of underdevelopment which Rodney believes is a term that is most appropriate to describe the state of Africa.
The logic of development, for Rodney, is linked to underdevelopment, not merely in comparative but also in relational terms. He claims that this relationship is dialectical in the sense that ‘the two help produce each other by interaction.’ However, it could be argued that Rodney presents a seesaw idea of development and underdevelopment in the sense that the two are causally connected, so that as one side goes up the other goes down; or, as one side gets richer the other side gets poorer. The problem is that this seesaw is broken and stuck in this lopsided position with no alternate up and down movement between both sides. The only movement that takes place is one-sided, so that the rich side continues to get richer while the poor side continues to get poorer. This is significant for Rodney’s main argument. A properly functioning seesaw is one where there is movement on both sides, where sometimes even an equilibrium might occur, such as might take the form of fairness in trade. But fairness can hardly happen within a system that has been rigged from the start to produce an outcome that is wholly beneficial to one side. So, not only did Europe impoverish Africa, but in the process, Africa also helped to develop Europe. As he puts it, ‘Western Europe and Africa had a relationship which insured the transfer of wealth from Africa to Europe’ (86).
Development not merely economic
But the alleged colonial impoverishment of Africa presupposes African development prior to colonialism. Rodney explains this presupposition in Chapter Two of the book. Here he cites Africa’s civilisations and its highly developed art and culture, philosophy, politics and economics. ‘A culture’, he writes, ‘is a total way of life. It embraces what people ate and what they wore; the way they walked and the way they talked; the manner in which they treated death and greeted the newborn. Music and dance had key roles in “uncontaminated” African society. African people reached the pinnacle of achievement in that sphere’ (37). These societies produced the great artworks of Benin and Ile Ife and since these achievements predated the colonial intervention, it could not be true that Africa prior to colonialism was undeveloped.
The pace of development might be slow, but improvement is always taking place. But slowness is a loaded, as well as a comparative term; but crucially slowness does not imply stagnation let alone regression. The tortoise is slow only when compared to the hare and not to itself. And only when both are engaged in the same race can that comparison be made. The wheel of development turns in every society until something else, often an external force, intervenes to halt its progress. Backwardness was a colonial term that was used to describe Africa; but no society is backwards except when compared to another society. Is Beethoven better than any African music? Rodney himself posed this question to illustrate this very point. The answer is no: the one is not better than the other, only different. But the language of backwardness was meant to denigrate Africa and to construct a narrative of the positive impact of colonial intervention. There is no doubt that external influences might contribute to internal development, but the relationship between Europe and Africa had been one in which most advantages had been to Europe than to Africa.
Rodney’s explanation for Africa’s underdevelopment is no doubt at variance with other theories of development such as Rostow’s (1960) famous 5 stage of development model. For a nation to develop, argued Rostow, it must undergo different stages of development that begins with (1) traditional society that subsists on primitive agrarian systems; it then moves on to (2) preconditions for change, (3) take-off, (4) drive to maturity and (5) mass consumption. But this is a Western model of development that is presented as the ideal blueprint for universal application. In order to develop, the rest must be like the West. There is no indication that Rodney was aware of this book, but it is precisely the kind of development theory that the book espoused to which Rodney’s own book was opposed. Rostow’s model has not only faced criticism but has largely been discredited. [1] But one basis for criticising Rostow can be derived from Rodney’s thesis. We must recall our earlier claim that each country develops in its own way, in its own time and at its own pace. Similarities in patterns of development might arise but there is no single model for development.
Factors responsible for Africa’s underdevelopment
What then were the factors responsible for Africa’s underdevelopment? Rodney advances two main arguments to support his thesis. ‘In the first place’, he writes, ‘the wealth created by African labour and from African resources was grabbed by capitalist countries of Europe; and in the second place, restrictions were placed upon African capacity to make maximum use of economic potential – which is what development is all about’ (30). The twin exploitation of Africa revolved around the two Ls, namely: land and labour. Note carefully, particularly the second part where he talks about ‘restrictions placed upon African capacity to maximum use of economic potential’ since this is critical to his theory of underdevelopment. This must be viewed as advancing what I describe as suffocation theory of underdevelopment.
It was not the benevolence of European nations that attracted them to Africa. It was the search for wealth that they could exploit. Indeed, some of the coastal nations of West Africa were once known by the commodities that lay beneath their soils: Gold Coast (now Ghana) was known for its gold; Ivory Coast or Cote D’voire was known for its ivory and Guinea, or Republic of Guinea was known for its gold coins from which the guinea as currency was made. The quest to own and control these resources brought Europeans to Africa.
Rosa Luxembourg (1913[2003]) had argued this expansionist idea of capitalism in the sense that the system works by expanding into new territories (spaces) that have not previously experienced capitalism. She observes that ‘capital needs other races to exploit territories where the white man cannot work. It must be able to mobilise world labour power in order to utilise all productive forces of the globe- up to the limits imposed by a system of producing surplus value’ (343). Capitalism must first destroy local subsistent economy, in order to create accumulation or surplus. To expand is to make space and to maintain that space - territorial control - by force of violence and other forms of oppression.
Henri Lefebvre’s Production of Space (1974) is perhaps relevant here. According to Lefebvre space must be viewed not as an empty expanse or void that is then filled up but as something produced. To this end, he proposes three notions of space production. There is physical (nature) or ‘perceived space’ which refers to the sphere in which people live, where life takes shape - ‘lived-space.’ The architect for instance builds houses as spaces for habitation. The second is space that relates to mental activity (logic, rationality, abstraction) or ‘conceived space’ which is represented by the way that technicians, town planners, politicians and bureaucrats plan, divide and organize space into different parts or sections. The third is social space as reflected or represented and take form of cultivation of social relations. Lefebvre describes these as the ‘logico-epistemological spaces.’ Thus, capitalism constructs spaces since it needs space to thrive and to survive.
However, there is a link between all three kinds of space production, a unity that when taken together becomes mutually and dialectically entailing. In which case, the production of one kind of space is bound to affect the other aspects in the triad. This is where economics meets philosophy, culture, tradition and religious belief. But Africa had been producing its own spaces, in its own ways, and in its own time before colonial capitalism came along and altered forms of indigenous African space production. Colonial capitalism through the bureaucratic planning and control, exploitation, utilisation (overutilisation in many cases) and accumulation, produced new spaces in Africa that changed the physical, mental and social life of Africans. Exploitation, accumulation and overutilisation of resources produced spaces of depletion.
Overutilisation and underutilisation
Overutilisation logically entails underutilisation, which in turn is a form of unmaking. Which is to say that in order to make something out of something else, something must be left unmade. To cut down a tree is to unmake the tree. The tree loses its treeness in the process of being felled for its wood, just as the wood loses its woodness once it has been carved into a chair. Thereafter, the tree no longer exists. It has disappeared. A chair now exists in its place. Yet, Lefebvre posits that ‘when we evoke ‘space’, we must immediately indicate what occupies that space and how it does so’ (12).
Although objects occupy space, but we must not assume that only a material object can occupy space. Some objects of no value at all occupy space. Ash, for instance, is a material object that occupies space, but it occupies a space where once stood a house now burnt out. Of what value is the ash compared to a house? But crucially, some spaces are occupied by nothing all. These are empty spaces which have been made empty, either by design or inadvertence. These are spaces that have been produced by extraction or destructive activities to the extent that what is left is a something that is a nothing at all, but void, a vacuum. It is waste, degeneration, deprivation, atrophy, fallowness, poverty and death. Physical desolation is a form of emptiness that could lead to mental desolation, and in turn social desolation. Whichever way it starts, it becomes all-encompassing in its effect towards atrophy. This is the implication of Rodney’s argument regarding underdevelopment. For example, Harriss (2014) partly defines development as ‘bringing out the potential that is latent in something’, while Perelman (2011) speaks of the ‘dogma that prevents the development of an economy that can nurture and tap into people’s potential’ (2011:14). This dogma, this ideology of exploitation, this failure to bring out potential or tap Africa’s vast resources for Africa not only diminishes capacity but suffocates at birth the African potential for development.
Some might argue that colonialism civilised Africa, introduced modern technology and infrastructure, Western education, democracy, bureaucracy and other notable legacies. There is no doubt that the nature of the colonial enterprise allowed complex forms of interpellation to take place, such as the construction of infrastructure or the legacy of Western education. But this must be set in context. Rodney himself addressed this question by arguing that colonial capitalism did not leave a legacy of capitalism or a culture of productivity and innovation in Africa. As he points out, ‘capitalism in the form of colonialism failed to perform in Africa the task which it had performed in Europe in changing the social relations and liberating the forces of production’ (260). Rather, the legacy of colonial capitalism was the creation of a dependency culture in which Africa came to become reliant on external stakeholders even for basic means of subsistence that it used to produce for itself. A basket case with a beggar's mentality.
Thus, Africa was dressed up in the garb of modernity which was then presented as indicative of progress and development that colonialism had bequeath to Africa. But when this idea failed the blame was placed on Africans. However, modernity was an illusion that masked the emptiness at the heart of Africa which colonisation had wrought. The so-called positive impact of colonialism cannot therefore compare to the immense value of resources that were extracted and continue to be extracted from Africa. This is because overutilisation logically entails underutilisation, while underutilisation is a form of unmaking. The extraction of value was the unmaking of Africa, just as the making of the chair was the unmaking of the tree. This is how development connects to underdevelopment of Africa. Africa was no longer productive because the potential for productivity had been suffocated at birth. This suffocation took the turn of the emasculation of intelligence, the rendering of virile bodies impotent except to the use of slavish labour and the disabling of potential or latent value. Colonial capitalism produced empty spaces by clearing out objects of value that flowed in only one direction, to the West, making the relationship uneven and lopsided.
As Lefebvre points out, ‘the space thus produced also serves as a tool of thought and of action; that in addition to being a means of production it is also means of control, of domination, of power...yet, the very agency that has forced spatial reality towards a sort of uncontrollable autonomy now strives to run it into the ground, then shackle and enslave it’ (26). Also, ‘Repressive space wreaks repression and terror even though it may be strewn with ostensible signs of the contrary (of contentment, amusement or delight)’ (144). This notion of running a place to the ground is precisely what colonial capitalism did in Africa. It was not just the landscape that colonialism altered through forms of economic extraction but the consciousness of Africans about themselves. This consciousness was one of wretchedness and anguish that Fanon so eloquently wrote about.
So, one of Rodney’s main causes of Africa’s underdevelopment was slavery. Slavery was not only one of the greatest forced migrations of people in human history, but it was also possibly the greatest evacuation of manpower from one part of the world to another. The estimated 10-12 million Africans that were removed from the continent over a period of five centuries had a great impact on African underdevelopment. The consequence of this forced migration not only depleted but deprived Africa of its ablest young men and women, the very manpower that was required for development. The transfer of labour to other parts of the world was used to develop those worlds, leaving Africa impoverished. As he puts it, ‘The massive loss to the African labor force was made more critical because it was composed of able-bodied young men and women’ (108).
But the end of slavery did not end the enslavement of Africans. Colonial capitalism merely switched the system around from labour to land, through territorial conquest and sovereign control. If slavery was the forced extraction of labour from Africa, colonialism was the appropriation of territory and the subjugation of a people within their territory. In other words, colonialism was slavery by another name. Both were pernicious and dialectically entailing in their perniciousness.
From slavery to colonialism
But the switch from slavery to colonialism later proved to be even more profitable to Europe and the Americas than slavery ever was. Whereas the slavery system was contained within small areas (plantation complexes) and revolved around specific commodities (cotton, sugar and others), colonialism turned Africa into a vast plantation complex while the resources to which colonial powers now had access and to which they laid claim vastly surpassed that of sugar or cotton. They included gold, diamond, oil, cobalt, copper, bauxite and many more. These were riches untold and unmined. Thrown into the bargain was the African as labourer. King Leopold of Belgium had his own plantation complex, which was the entire nation of Congo. There, all the resources, including human beings, became his, to have, to hold and to do with as he pleased. The Congo was Leopoldville. The violence that Leopold visited on the people of Congo was as unspeakably horrific as that which the slaves endured during the ‘Middle Passage’ and in the plantation fields of the West Indies and Americas. Then it became Belgian Congo: a country that Belgium owned. This was how much of Western Europe came to own much of Africa, lock, stock and barrel. And it has retained its suffocating iron-grip on Africa. As Rodney points out, ‘When the citizens of Europe own the land and mines of Africa, this is the most direct way of sucking the African continent. So long as foreigners own land, mines, factories, banks …then for so long would the wealth of Africa flow outwards into the hands of those elements’ (27). Nowadays the phenomenon is known as ‘capital flight.’ But there is the human flight. The concept of ‘brain-drain’ now familiar in Africanist discourse and which describes the way in which Africa’s brightest and best are drawn to the West appears to be a recent phenomenon. Rodney deals with this concept in his book. But in fact, the brain-drain phenomenon in Africa began with slavery. If the best of Africa continues to leave Africa, where are the minds that would help to develop Africa?
One-sided capital flow
The Nobel Prize winning economist Sir Arthur Lewis, who had studied the way that development works, has produced an economic model that supports Rodney’s main thesis. In his influential paper, “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour” (1954), Lewis argued along the same lines as Rodney that capitalism suffocates or stifles economic growth in poor countries. In places like Africa where the supply of labour is unlimited, the tendency is to employ armies of workers, without the need to increase wages. Lewis observed that ‘the record of every power in Africa in modern times is one of impoverishing the subsistence economy, either by taking away people’s land or by demanding forced labour or by imposing taxes to drive people to work for the capitalist employers’ (7). Thus, economic expansion occurs through the accumulation of surplus capital which is in turn reinvested. This investment further absorbs even more labour into the system ‘until the labour surplus disappears’.
In 2016 the Global Financial Integrity (GIF) and the Centre for Applied Research at the Norwegian School of Economics released a report that showed that some US$16.3 trillion have been repatriated to the West since 1980.[2] Through unfair trade, corruption, tax havens and other ways, these vast sums of money have left poorer countries and flowed into the coffers of richer ones. As Gilbert and Gulger (1982) put it, ‘To a large extent, the poor in the Third World are poor because the rich in the First World are rich.’
Many of the ideas expressed in Rodney’s book have been taken over by later scholars. For example, the Marxist scholar John Harvey has taken up this idea of imperial control and conquests in many works. He too takes up this idea of underdevelopment which he describes as ‘accumulation by dispossession’. He points out that ‘Capitalism survives … through the devaluation and destruction administered as corrective medicine to what is generally depicted as the fiscal profligacy of those who borrow’ (2003: xx). Also, a new book Africa and the Global System of Capital Accumulation (2021) edited by Oritsejafor and Cooper could be described as an update on Rodney’s main arguments in terms of showing how contemporary global economy disadvantages Africa.
Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation is relevant here. Marx had argued that primitive accumulation is an original phase in the development of capitalism which involved the separation of the people from their land and turning them into labourers as well as the violence that was applied in enforcing the extraction of and the accumulation of capital that accrues from production. This too was the initial stage of colonial capitalism in Africa before it proceeded to a further stage of greater sophistication within a liberal political world order of free trade. The idea of free trade is a delusion since trade has never been truly free, particularly between rich and poor nations, because of unfair power imbalance between the two sides. As Rodney points out, ‘When the terms of trade are set by one country in a manner entirely advantageous to itself, then trade is usually detrimental to the trading partner’ (27).
One development that Rodney did not anticipate is the rise of China not only as a global power but of its intervention in Africa’s political economy. China now owns much of Africa, and it is to China that Africa owes much of its debt. Another development that Rodney did not foresee is the impact of technology as an instrument of capitalist expansionism, which has transformed the way that capitalism operates in recent times. For example, Shoshana Zuboff in Surveillance Capitalism (2021) shows how digital technology has harvested and commodified personal data as a rich source of profit-making. Some of the richest companies in the world are not confectionaries but technology companies. In that sense we are all capitalists now either by choice or be co-option.
Conclusion
What is indisputable is that Africa is poorer in 2022 than it was in 1972. The debt it owes the developed world has quadrupled in that period, while its productive capacity has been decimated. The interest it pays to service the debts alone is half of its annual revenue, meaning that it is in perpetual debt-bondage from which it has no way of escape. Since colonialism, Africa has hardly ever recorded surplus in its trade with the rest of the world, only deficits and a debt burden that continues to increase year on year. Its most precious commodities are extracted and sold below market value while the astronomical profits accrue to external stakeholders. Today’s Africa is barely able to feed itself while it imports basic agricultural products that it once produced. Its healthcare system is near collapse while its various institutions and sectors such as education are barely functioning. But Rodney did not absolve Africans of responsibility in the development of their continent. He blames particularly the African bourgeoisie of complicity in the socio-economic malaise of Africa, a fact that has been intensified through corruption.
In summary, Rodney’s book remains a classic in many ways. Terms such as exploitation, appropriation, overutilisation, expansion and so forth are used to describe the way in which capitalism stifles economic production. Rodney for example claims that ‘capitalists do not set out to create other capitalists, who would be rivals... the tendency of capitalism in Europe from the very beginning was one of competition, elimination and monopoly’ (260). The profit drive of capitalism is predicated not only on exploitation, but exploitation that suffocates indigenous productive capacity. Like a sponge, capitalism soaks up value through extraction and accumulation and then squeezes out in terms of surplus (profit) but into its own coffers, depleting value in the host nation. For example, Perelman talks about the ‘destructive nature of Procrusteanism’ which refers to the way that capitalism handicaps, or handcuffs people by dominating them and ‘stunts worker’s potential.’ What Perelman describes as the stunting of potential is what Rodney describes as underdevelopment, and which I describe as suffocation.
[1] Juliet Jacobs “Rostow’s Stages of Growth Development Model.” ThoughtCo. February 11 2020.
[2] Global Financial Integrity (GFI), The Norwegian School of Economics. “Financial Flows and Tax Havens: Combining to Limit the Lives of Billions of People.” December 2016.
References
Baran, Paul (1957) The Political Economy of Growth. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Cohen. Benjamin (1971[2014]) The Question of Imperialism: The Political Economy of Dominance and Dependence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dutt, Romesh (1909[2001]) The Economic History of India. London: Routledge.
Gilbert, A., Gulger, J. (1982) Cities, Poverty, and Development: Urbanization in the Third World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harriss, John (2014) “Development Theories” in Bruce Currie-Alder and others (eds) International Development: Ideas, Experience, and Prospects. Oxford On-Line
Harvey, David. (2003) The New Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hilferding, Rudolf (1909[1980]) Finance Capital. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Hobson, John (1902) Imperialism: A Study. New York: James Pott and Company.
Kohli, Atul (2020) Imperialism and the Developing World: How Britain and United States Shaped The Global Periphery. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lenin, Vladimir (1917[2016]) Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. London: Wellred Books.
Lewis, Arthur (1954) “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour.” Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies.
Luxembourg, Rosa. (1913) The Accumulation of Capital. Translated by Agnes Schwarzschild. London: Routledge.
Naoroji, Dadabhai (1901) Poverty and Un-British Rule in India. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co.
Oritsejafor, Emmanuel., Cooper, Allan (editors) (2021) Africa and the Global System of Capital Accumulation. London: Routledge.
Perelman, Michael (2011) The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers. New York: Monthly Review Press
Rostow, Walt (1960) The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sen, Amartya (1999). Development As Freedom. New York: Knopf.
Sweezy, Paul (1967) The Theory of Capitalist Development. Principles of Marxian Political Economy.
Related Readings:
Apata, Gabriel (2022), Review of Atul Kohli’s Imperialism and the Developing World: How Britain and the United States Shaped the Global Periphery
Apata, Gabriel (2022), Review of Emmanuel Oritsejafor and Allan Cooper’s (eds.) Africa and the Global System of Capital Accumulation
Gabriel O. Apata is a research scholar and writer whose works cut across the humanities and social sciences. His interests include Philosophy, Sociology, Aesthetics, Religion, Post-colonial Studies, African history and politics and Diaspora Studies.
