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Imperialism Reading Group - How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, by Walter Rodney - Week 3
(hexbear.net)
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.
I'm a medievalist guy so I love reading about any pre modern history. This section shows a great geographic and social variety of polities. Particularly interesting to me was the interlacustrine (new word for me) section and the discussion of cultural synthesis from a migrant ruling population.
To continue my comment from last week, I'm intrigued onto Rodney's line of thinking about Africa having many maturing economies which the Europeans will tap into. Slavery in particular began in the hands of militaristic Africans, but as he said it was a trickle compared to the later flows.
An interesting perspective from the conclusion was how it's hard to discuss Africa without using European comparisons for clarity. I myself appreciate them because I've read much about medieval Europe, however it reveals the deep level of colonization culture. I think more modern Africanists stray away from these direct comparisons, but like Rodney said, when he was writing the field wasn't developed enough. I should really look into modern literature on the subject later.