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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