How Europe Under Developed Africa.

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4 years ago

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.

Development in human society is a many-sided process. At the level of

the individual, it implies increased skill and capacity, greater freedom,

creativity, self-discipline, responsibility and material well-being. Some

of these are virtually moral categories and are difficult to evaluate –

depending as they do on the age in which one lives, one’s class origins,

and one’s personal code of what is right and what is wrong. However,

what is indisputable is that the achievement of any of those aspects of personal development is very much tied in with the state of the society

as a whole. From earliest times, man found it convenient and necessary

to come together in groups to hunt and for the sake of survival. The

relations which develop within any given social group are crucial to an

understanding of the society as a whole: Freedom, responsibility, skill,

etc. have real meaning only in terms of the relations of men in society.

Of course, each social group comes into contact with others. The

relations between individuals in any two societies are regulated by the

form of the two societies. Their respective political structures are

important because the ruling elements within each group are the ones

that begin to dialogue, trade or fight, as the case may be. At the level of

social groups, therefore, development implies an increasing capacity to

regulate both internal and external relationships. Much of human

history has been a fight for survival against natural hazards and against

real and imagined human enemies. Development in the past has always

meant the increase in the ability to guard the independence of the social

group and indeed to infringe upon the freedom of others - something

that often came about irrespective of the will of the persons within the

societies involved.

Men are not the only beings which operate in groups, but the human

species embarked upon a unique line of development because man had

the capacity to make and use tools. The very act of making tools was a

stimulus to increasing rationality rather than the consequence of a fully

matured intellect. In historical terms, man the worker was every bit as

important as man the thinker, because the work with tools liberated men from sheer physical necessity, so that he could impose himself upon

other more powerful species and upon nature itself. The tools with

which men work and the manner in which they organise their labour are

both important indices of social development.

More often than not, the term ‘development’ is used in an exclusive

economic sense – the justification being that the type of economy is

itself an index of other social features. What then is economic

development? A society develops economically as its members increase

jointly their capacity for dealing with the environment. This capacity

for dealing with the environment is dependent on the extent to which

they understand the laws of nature (science), on the extent to which

they put that understanding into practice by devising tools (technology),

and on the manner in which work is organised. Taking a long-term

view, it can be said that there has been constant economic development

within human society since the origins of man, because man has

multiplied enormously his capacity to win a living from nature. The

magnitude of man’s achievement is best understood by reflecting on the

early history of human society and noting firstly, the progress from

crude stone tools to the use of metals; secondly, the changeover from

hunting and gathering wild fruit to the domestication of animals and the

growing of food crops; and thirdly, the improvement in the character of

work from being an individualistic activity towards an activity which

assumes a social character through the participation of many.

Every people have shown a capacity for independently increasing their

ability to live a more satisfactory life through exploiting the resources of nature. Every continent independently participated in the early

epochs of the extension of man’s control over his environment – which

means in effect that every continent can point to a period of economic

development. Africa, being the original home of man, was a major

participant in the processes in which human groups displayed an ever

increasing capacity to extract a living from the natural environment.

Indeed, in the early period, Africa was the focus of the physical

development of man as such, as distinct from other living beings.

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Comments

That's very good my chum

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4 years ago

Great article

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4 years ago

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4 years ago

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4 years ago

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4 years ago

This is amazing write up we learn something from it

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4 years ago

Nice one. Need more

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4 years ago

Wonderful and very helpful post

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4 years ago

I recommend all afrcan leaders should read this article because it'll really help them in catering their individual national crises

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4 years ago

Excellent

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4 years ago

Thanks you my friend

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4 years ago