First published in 1972, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa describes how European regimes exploited Africa for their own enrichment while simultaneously creating insurmountable obstacles to economic, political, and social progress on the continent. In contrast to other scholars, who focus on the economic aspects of African development, Rodney considers economics alongside politics and various aspects of culture, such as religion and education. His broad approach offers insights into the relationship between European development and African underdevelopment.
About the Author
Dr. Walter Rodney was an internationally acclaimed author of several scholarly books and numerous academic articles that documented the devastating effects of slavery and colonial imperialism in Africa and the Caribbean. He extended his critical analysis to explain how those effects continued to prevent the progress of newly formed neo-colonial governments.
Walter Rodney was born in Georgetown, Guyana. In 1966 he earned his doctorate in African History from the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies when he was 24 years old. His revised dissertation “A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545 to 1800” was published by Oxford University Press in 1970.
From 1966 to 1974, he taught at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and at the University of the West Indies at Mona. He came to the attention of the Jamaican government security officers for meeting with working class groups including the Rastafarians, an anti-government sect, and criticising Jamaica’s middle-class elite and the existing government for ignoring its large population of poor and disadvantaged residents. His 1969 book “Groundings with My Brothers” includes three speeches given during those years about decolonization and Black Power.
In 1974, Rodney returned to Guyana from Tanzania. He was due to take up a position as a professor at the University of Guyana, but the Guyanese government prevented his appointment. Increasingly active in politics, he founded the Working People’s Alliance, a party that provided the most effective and credible opposition to the People’s National Congress government and aimed to “create political consciousness, replacing ethnic politics with revolutionary organisations based on class solidarity.” In 1979, he was arrested and charged with arson after two government offices were burned. The trial was deferred three times and later dropped due to lack of evidence. On 13 June, 1980, Rodney was killed in Georgetown, at the age of thirty-eight, by a bomb in his car, a month after returning from celebrations of independence in Zimbabwe. His most influential book “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” (1972) provided a new lens to examine the development of nations and remains a model of how to analyse capitalist societies and the rise of inequality.
Other books by the author
The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World
The Groundings With My Brothers
Decolonial Marxism: Essays from the Pan-African Revolution
Walter Rodney Speaks: The Making of an African Intellectual
A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800
A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 – Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture
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