Walter Rodney - How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

by A. M. BABU

Are there short cuts to economic development for the underdevelopment economies? This question has occupied the attention of many interested parties during the last decade. These include university lecturers, international economists, the United Nations and its agencies, the O.A.U., planning agencies, economic ministers. Many international conferences under various sponsorship have been held during the decade and volumes of resolutions, guidelines, learning documents, and theses have been published. The end result has been negative. The developing countries continue to remain underdeveloped, only getting worse in relation to the developed countries.

By and large the question still remains unanswered. Are we going to repeat the same exercise all over again during this decade? From the look of it, it appears that we are. Already the UN has launched the Second Economic Decade with the same zeal and fanfare as they did with the first. The same appeal has gone out to the developed countries to be charitable and contribute one per cent of their national income for helping the developing countries, as if the population of the world can continue to condone poverty so that the rich can be charitable! If past experience is anything to go by, the seventies will experience the same disappointments which climaxed the end of the sixties.

What, we may ask, has gone wrong? Is it something inherent in the very nature of underdevelopment that makes development such an impossible task? Among the many prescriptions that have been offerede.g., cultural, social, psychological, even economicnone has produced any encouraging results. In fact nearly all of them have had negative results, and made bad situations worse. Are we to continue with the same experiments at the expense of the people, who, lets face it, have borne the whole burden of these experiments throughout the last decade? This is the question to which all the developing countries, especially those in Africa, must address themselves. And the sooner the better, because there is very little time left before our economies become permanently distorted and probably too damaged for any meaningful reconstruction in the future.

Dr. Walter Rodney, in this very instructive book, provides a very refreshing opening for discussions which may well lead to finding the right solution. He is raising the most basic and fundamental questions regarding the nature of underdevelopment and economic backwardness. Unlike many works of this nature, which to all intents and purposes have approached the problem with a sort of metaphysical outlook (garbed, it is true, in scientific terminology), Dr. Rodney follows the method of historical materialism, which in effect says: To know the present we must look into the past and to know the future we must look into the past and the present. This is a scientific approach. We can at least be sure that the conclusions will not be marred by subjective distortions.

It is clear, especially after reading Rodneys exposition, that throughout the last decade we have been posing the wrong questions regarding economic backwardness. We did not look into the past to know the present. We were told, and accepted, that our poverty was caused by our poverty in the now famous theory of the vicious circle of poverty and we went around in circles seeking ways and means of breaking that circle. Had we asked the fundamental questions which Dr. Rodney raises in this work we would not have exposed our economies to the ruthless plunder brought about by foreign investments which the exponents of the vicious circle theory urged us to do. For, it is clear, foreign investment is the cause, and not a solution, to our economic backwardness.

Are we not underdeveloped now because we have been colonized in the past? There is no other explanation to the fact that practically the whole of the underdeveloped world has been colonized either directly or indirectly by the Western powers. And what is colonialism if it is not a system of foreign investments by the metropolitan powers? If it has contributed to our underdevelopment in the past, is it not likely to contribute to our underdevelopment now, even if the political reins are in our hands? Put in this way the question of underdevelopment is immediately rendered more intelligible, even to the uninitiated. And this is how Dr. Rodney is directing us to pose our questions.

The inevitable conclusion is that foreign investment does not only help to undermine our economies by extracting enormous profits, but it does more serious damage to the economies by distorting them into lopsidedness, and if the process is not arrested in time, the distortion could be permanent. As long as we continue, as we have done for centuries, to produce for the so-called world market which was founded on the hard rock of slavery and colonialism, our economies will remain colonial. Any development will be entirely incidental, leaving the vast majority of the population wholly uninvolved in the economic activity. The more we invest in export branches in order to capture the world market the more we divert away from investing for peoples development and, consequently, the less effective our development effort.

And since this type of investment does not contribute much towards the development of a material and technical base internally, our economies are rendered always responsive only to what the Western world is prepared to buy and sell, and hardly responsive to our internal development needs. That is why, although most of our development plans make elaborate resource allocations for rural projects, invariably most of these resources find their way back to the urban projects and consequently accentuate the urban-rural disparities. Slums, unemployment, social maladjustment, and, finally, political instability are our most outstanding characteristics.

Almost without exception, all the ex-colonial countries have ignored the cardinal development demand; namely, that, to be really effective, the development process must begin by transforming the economy from its colonial, externally responsive structure, to one which is internally responsive. Where we went wrong is when we followed blindly the assumptions handed down to us by our exploiters. These assumptions can be stated briefly as follows: Growth in underdeveloped countries is hampered by inadequate growth in exports and inadequate financial resources and is made worse by population explosion in these countries. And the solution is prescribed as follows: Step up exports, increase aid and loans from the developed countries, and arrest growth in population.

Throughout the last decade our efforts have been to follow religiously the above prescription, and even if our own experience continues to disprove it, we still adhere to it even more fanatically! The greatest need appears to be a process of mental de-colonization, since neither common sense nor sound economics, not even our own experience, is with us in this.

Experiences of other countries that have chosen a different path, a path of economic reconstruction, is most instructive here. Take North Korea or Albania. Both these countries were underdeveloped as late as the fifties. The reason they have been able to register most outstanding economic progress is that they have decided to opt out of production for the so-called world market and have diverted their resources toward the development of a material and technological base internally.

The Pearson Commissions ReportPartners in Developmenthas been hailed, even by the developing countries, as ushering in a new era, a sort of turning point, in international cooperation for development. Even if its recommendations were to be adopted and implemented in toto it is doubtful if it would make any impact on the ever widening gap between the developed and the developing countries. This is because it has avoided tackling the most fundamental question, namely, Can development take place when our production strategy is influenced by the demands of the world market which is determined almost exclusively by the pattern of production and consumption within capitalist Europe and America? In other words, in distorting our economies to fit in with the demands of the world market, the demands of which are not always compatible with the demands of our own development, are we not, in the process, depriving our economies of the capacity for a self-sustaining growth which is a precondition to development?