Walter Rodney’s book on Africa gets a Portuguese version, but exudes anachronisms

It is comfortable to plunge headlong into the time tunnel and find a world in which the Cold War, for left-wing sympathizers, divided ideas between positive (class struggle, liberation) and negative (racism, imperialism). And imagine that a utopianly fragrant border divided the material abundance of socialist countries and stagnation in the world enslaved by colonialism and the market.

This is more or less the script presented by “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”, by activist Walter Rodney (1942-1980), murdered in Georgetown, in the former British Guiana, where he was born and served in the military. His most important book, originally published in 1972, has now been translated for the first time by Boitempo.

An initial caveat. The inequalities and mechanisms for exploiting the resources of the poorest countries have not come to an end since Rodney became a kind of martyr of left-wing blackness. But the changes that gave a new face to international relations were not the ones that the Guyanese militant expected.

Take Africa, his central field of interest—he has also taught in Tanzania. After the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), it considerably cooled the dispute for spaces of influence on the continent, which functioned as a constant ignition between the United States and the Soviet Union.

With the disappearance of the latter, African countries were sheltered from this form of geopolitical struggle. Until the commercial and project financing partnership of the new emerging world power, China, appeared.

Rodney did not live to witness this new scenario, and his book grew old because it was centered on the dependency relations of the former African colonies with their former colonial metropolises, such as Great Britain, Belgium or France.

In the last 30 years, the ideological bichromatism that divided the planet between capitalists and socialists has also collapsed — it doesn’t matter how impure these two models were.

Rodney’s book exudes almost funny anachronisms. The preface by the American Marxist Angela Davis, for example, says that it is necessary to destroy racism so that the destruction of capitalism will follow soon after. That simple.

The epithet of one of the chapters brings an excerpt from a speech given in 1964, in Switzerland, by Ernesto Che Guevara. The then Cuban minister opposes the imaginary high development rate of socialist countries to the supposed economic stagnation of developing nations. Two diagnoses at least reductive and untrue.

In other words, the central concepts of this model are wobbly, and the heavy rhetorical consistency ends up harming the central thesis of the book. Namely, that Africa became underdeveloped after, in the 16th century, the Europeans arrived with their modern weapons and their colonial evil eye.

One of Rodney’s assumptions is the existence of prosperous societies in Africa before the arrival of Europeans. They would have the necessary technology for everyone to live in abundance. The basic issue is the failure to mention a bibliography and empirical studies that support this view.

Let’s take the following sentence: “In Katanga and Zambia, local copper remained preferred over imported, as did iron in places like Sierra Leone”. This is apparently true, but the text does not refer to footnotes in which historical or economic references could support this and hundreds of other statements.

At the end of the brochure there is a 19-page section in which a laborious index brings terms that refer to each other, without the enriching intervention of bibliographies.

These also appear in a final section, but in the form of reading recommendations —initiated by Marx and Engels, of course, and with a prevalence of books in English. Authors who published in French are rarely present. And you can see that neocolonialism was a prominent theme in France in the 1960s and 1970s, for example with the texts of the Dominican priest and economist Louis-Joseph Lebret (1897-1966).

The set of snags pointed out here may generate the impression that reading Walter Rodney is absolutely not worth it. But not quite. Every text, even the undisputed classics, bears the marks of the period in which they were written.

In the case of the activist from Guyana —he graduated in Jamaica— we have access to an archaeological layer of a thought that exists today much more as a historical reference. In a way, it is essential to know the ancestry of current ideas in order to assess the reasons that led them to be outdated, as a way of thinking with your fist raised, about underdevelopment, the socialist revolution and poverty.