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Imperialism Reading Group - How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, by Walter Rodney - Week 3
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This is a weekly thread in which we read through books on and related to imperialism and geopolitics. Last week's thread is here.
The book we are currently reading through is How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Please comment or message me directly if you wish to be pinged for this group, or if you no longer wish to be pinged.
This week, we will be reading the second section, "Some Concrete Examples", of Chapter 2: How Africans Developed Before The Coming Of The Europeans - Up To The Fifteenth Century.
Next week, we will be reading all of Chapter 3: Africa's Contribution to European Capitalist Development - The Pre-Colonial Period.
Imperialism Reading Group Ping!
Onto the second half of Chapter 2, where Rodney discusses the specific examples of Egypt, Ethiopia, Nubia, the Maghreb, Western Sudan, the Interlacustrine Zone, and Zimbabwe.
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I always love when authors get into specific examples. It's easy to talk in broad strokes about African or Europe or Asian continental and national histories and the grand development of feudalism to capitalism but there's a lot of very interesting case studies that get glossed over (understandably, or the books would be three times as long). Seeing how individual societies dealt with general trends and the contradictions that came with early feudalism in their own specific ways is fascinating.
In the Zimbabwe section: "Even today there is a tendency to consider the achievements with a sense of wonder rather than with the calm acceptance that it was a perfectly logical outgrowth of human social development within Africa [...]"
Even today you see this sort of thing when Westerners analyze other countries. I remember those mocking China's train lines to nowhere and then later being astounded when the stars just magically aligned and they decided to build a city there afterwards, as if this isn't just the result of human long-term planning.
To share an anecdote from the book:
Lol I love Rodney's backhanded remarks to Europe. They scratch a good itch
You got that right!
It's not just fascinating getting into the specific examples, it's essential for his argument of the chapter that Africa was not one monolith of scattered tribes, but a vibrant continent of peoples at different stages of development.