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“How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” is a 1972 book written by
Walter Rodney that takes the view that Africa was deliberately exploited and
underdeveloped by European colonial regimes. One of his main arguments
throughout the book is that Africa developed Europe at the same rate as Europe
underdeveloped Africa. “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” is an ambitious
masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and
colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book,
Rodney makes the unflinching case that African “mal-development” is not a
natural feature of geography, but a direct product of imperial extraction from
the continent, a practice that continues up into the present.

Meticulously researched, “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”
remains a relevant study for understanding the so-called “great divergence”
between Africa and Europe, just as it remains a prescient resource for grasping
the multiplication of global inequality today. This classic work of political,
economic, and historical analysis, is powerfully introduced by Angela Davis

In his magnum opus, ”How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”,
Rodney incisively argues that grasping “the great divergence” between the West
and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the
former. This meticulously researched analysis of the abiding repercussions of
European colonialism on the continent of Africa has not only informed decades
of scholarship and activism, it remains an indispensable study for grasping
global inequality today.

The Guyanan intellectual Walter Rodney wrote this book
directly after the 1960s wave of African independence declarations, to show why
Africa was so underdeveloped compared to the ‘First World’, and who was to
blame for this. A consistently intelligent and politically involved Marxist
thinker, Rodney was one of the second generation of black socialists to write
about African issues, after the tradition of CLR James and Eric Williams, the
former of whom tutored Rodney. “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” is
probably Rodney’s magnum opus of popular science, aimed at a general public,
and very accessible and informative.

Rodney describes in chronological sequence the development
of Africa as a continent and the way in which the Europeans interfered with it.
Going from the earliest African empires and states and their social relations,
via the first wave of slave-trading, to full-blown colonialism, Rodney shows us
how Europeans consistently attacked, pillaged, exploited, suppressed, enslaved,
divided and discriminated against Africans, and the enormous impact the various
stages of slavery and colonialism had in destroying the indigenous
opportunities for coming out of feudalism into capitalist and industrialized
societies.

It is truly remarkable, given how short a time Africa has
had to develop on its own as a modern society, how quickly African states have
been able to modernize, and how strong the resilience of the various African
peoples is to the enormous destruction they have had to endure. Rodney shows us
all this with excellent writing and sensible use of ‘bourgeois’ sources,
allowing the interested layman to gain all the necessary broad background
information on the history of European involvement in Africa.

Of necessity, the book is sometimes rather annoyingly
concise and vague about the specifics of colonial policies, destruction of
early indigenous development etc., things about which one would want to know
more. Rodney provides a reading list for more information at the end of every
chapter, but since this book is from the 1960s, it is dubious whether such
lists are still useful considering the improvements made in radical scholarship
on Africa since. The timing of the book also makes it such that there is
practically nothing on African states since independence, as most independence
declarations had happened only shortly before its publication. Moreover, Rodney
is very saccharine about the influence of the ‘socialist’ states such as the
USSR and China on Africa, which he exclusively paints in positive terms.

Certainly the Leninists have had a vastly better influence
on African development than any Western nation ever has, but the USSR and China
had their own interests to defend in Africa as well, and were not there purely
for humanitarian purposes, as Rodney sometimes makes it seem. Nonetheless, this
is a good general book on the legacy of European destruction in Africa, and it
thoroughly refutes all the common arguments in defense of colonialism in that
continent.

In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney
emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial
revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African
continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning
rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century
Jamaica’s most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his
scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international
scale. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People’s Alliance in
Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated.