Walter Rodney, (2018) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, London/New York: Verso, 2018, paperback (with free ebook) £11.89.

Reviewed by Andy Higginbottom

This book is a masterpiece. Walter Rodney wrote How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (HEUA) in his late twenties while a lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The book brings together in a broad narrative the history of the African continent from a perspective that is at one and the same time Pan Africanist and Marxist. Moreover, it is an original contribution to what was known as the dependency school emanating from Latin America. [1]

The re-edition of HEUA by Verso is to be fully welcomed.  As well as the Introduction to the 1982 edition, written shortly after Rodney’s murder, the new edition carries a short and inspiring Foreword by Angela Davis, which sets the scene well in stating that none of the fundamental problems addressed by Rodney have been resolved. One of these threads, Davis notes, is how the condition of African labouring women, as well as men, was pushed down by colonialism.  Davis rightly calls on the readership to pick up and ‘deepen Walter Rodney’s legacy’.   Let us now review that legacy.

HEUA takes forward the Marxist theory of dependency and underdevelopment from a Pan Africanist perspective. It is a sign of the range and depth of HEUA that there are at least three major debates that it enjoins with various historians, all apologists for European imperialism. The first debate concerns the specific destructive awfulness of the European slave trade. The second debate is over whether Europe benefitted economically from the late nineteenth century ‘Scramble for Africa’ and the colonial regimes that were installed. The third debate concerns the intersection of race and class, the position of the African working poor and the nature of their exploitation under the European colonial regimes.  In this review I will identify some of Rodney’s protagonists and the arguments in these debates because of their continuing. . . full at:

https://rdln.wordpress.com/2019/03/29/reviewing-walter-rodney-on-how-europe-underdeveloped-africa/