The enduring relevance of Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Karim Hirji

• Publisher: Daraja Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780995347403
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

6

Criticisms of the book

The popularity and anti-imperial stance of HEUA made it a target of unsparing criticism from elitist, right wing quarters. And its method, contents and conclusions as well underwent sharp scrutiny from some progressive academics.

The key flaws of HEUA were said to be: (i) It converts history into a rigid deterministic process; (ii) it reduces human existence to the material dimension; (iii) it accords the principal, if not the sole, weight to external factors; (iv) it denies agency to the African people; (v) its terminology is too polemical; (vi) it is more like a political propaganda tract than a scholarly work; (vii) it is not a Marxist work because it side lines class relations; (viii) it is an expression of racially biased black nationalism; (ix) it does not depict the role of women in African history; and (x) it is factually inaccurate on many counts. Several of these points are interrelated.

Below I examine these criticisms in a point by point manner.

Rigidity

The claim that HEUA employs a rigid approach for elucidating history is not unique. Regularly levied onto works that derive from the Marxist method, it has its roots in a misperceived aspect of that method. Unlike for the varied branches of bourgeois social science, the fundamental tenets of Marxism are clearly identifiable. Because of that, Marxist historians are accused of applying these tenets reflexively, thus promoting a formula driven method of conceptualizing human society. The fact that many Soviet era books were written in a standardized way lends a degree of credibility to this charge.

To assess this claim, I resort to an analogy from biology. Ward and Kirschvink (2015) pose the question: What is life? One definition they put forward is that a living entity (i) metabolizes, (ii) has complexity and organization, (iii) reproduces, (iv) develops, (v) evolves, and (vi) is autonomous. Another more succinct definition of life they give is: ‘Life is a chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution’ (pp 32—35). Both definitions posit a few simple tenets. Yet, each forms a foundation on the basis of which we can capture and explain a complex biosphere comprising of millions of distinctive life processes and organisms. Those myriad of beautiful forms of nature are depicted in a systematic fashion in biology books. The message is: a simple, terse functional foundation can be consistent with a majestically varied edifice. A scientific approach to explicate an elaborate natural or social reality can be based on the tenets of such a foundation. To discover these tenets is a primary aim of science. The relevant queries are: Do they form a logical and coherent system? Are they empirically valid? Is the theoretical system based on them aligned with the trends in the natural or social domain?

Compared to the natural sciences, application of the scientific method to history has many limitations. They stem from the inaccurate, restricted and biased nature of the information available. But it does not mean that we should not apply conceptual rigor and the scientific method to history. In this discipline as well, identification of basic laws (tenets) of societal stability and change is a key task. Applying them critically to information from historical research, one can write scientific works that sparkle with creativity. Deficiencies in the raw material at hand and the complexity of the phenomenon are not a license to, as post-modernists are inclined to do, fly off on speculative, empirically dubious tangents.

Elements of creative interpretability are evident in classic Marxist works like Engels’ The Rise of the Family, Private Property and the State and VI Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia. The voluminous outputs of later Marxists like Samir Amin, JD Bernal, Gordon Childe, AG Frank, Eduardo Galeano, Eric Hobsbawm, CLR James, DD Kosambi, Paul Sweezy and Howard Zinn as well display extensive methodological and interpretive novelty and creativity. Their well-researched works interweave multiple facets of human society into elaborate but logical tapestries. Walter Rodney, as any decent venture into HEUA reveals, belongs to this group of Marxist writers who did not have a formula driven approach to the study of human society. His earlier book, History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1540 to 1800, persuasively enjoins a wide range of information to construct a narrative brimming with insightful, glittering gems.

Sterile scholarship affects all brands of history, Marxist and non-Marxist. To declare that Marxist renditions of history are, by default, formula driven signifies either lack of familiarity with this creative arena of intellectual activity, or a politically motivated diatribe, or what is most likely, both. I continue to elaborate this point below.

Facts and theory

Any endeavor in the natural or social science faces the chicken-or-egg dilemma: Commence with a theory and gather facts, or collect facts, then formulate the theory.

Most scientists declare preference for an empiricist stand on this issue: Facts first, theory next. Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s master sleuth, prescribed an identical tenet:

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

Since HEUA begins with a well-defined framework for historic analysis, it is said to be fitting facts to a preconceived, one-fits-all version of history. That accusation, like that of rigidity, is invalid. First, as noted above, a terse conceptual foundation does not necessarily make the output a fixed and dry one. Second, the facts-first view overlooks the reality that science does not emerge from a series of separate, unique events. It is not a conglomeration of discrete facts, snapshots or events about nature, society or persons. Science develops as a cumulative process, building on the work of other scientists, past and present. At each stage, an a priori theory exists. The new work may confirm, alter, augment or negate it. Many theories emerge along the way. Far from being a haphazard collection of information, science research is a systematic process guided by a preliminary understanding of the phenomenon under study. That knowledge affects the kind and volume of facts that are deemed relevant, and the design of the scheme for acquiring them.

For example, an epidemiological investigation of whether an industrial chemical increases the risk of lung cancer must account for age and smoking status, the known risk factors for the disease. The researcher begins with a theory that involves these two factors. They should be incorporated into the design of the new study, type and manner of data collection, and the analysis of the collected data.

Facts and theory follow a Hegelian dialectic. Theory guides the research process but the new data may change it, at times markedly. To separate the two aspects of science in an abstract manner is not reflective of the actuality of science.

Despite its empiric limitations, research in history follows that scheme. Consciously or not, historians proceed on the basis of some vision of the historic reality. How they perceive social change is influenced by one or another model for understanding society. That model affects the kind of research conducted, the methods of data collection, the type of data collected, and as important, the kind of data not collected. Processing and organizing the collected data, and the eventual write up is also guided by those historiographical predilections.

The Marxist and other historians differ in a principal aspect. For the former, the guiding theoretical framework is laid out clearly and openly. The status quo inclined historians, operating under an illusory claim of objectivity, utilize background tenets that are usually not explicitly stated. And when they are, they are presented in an elusive, diffuse, distorted or incomplete manner.

Take John Illife’s Africans: The History of a Continent (Iliffe 2007). In this well-regarded text, he opines that the continent’s ‘unique population history’ makes ‘demographic growth’ the basic principle for deciphering its distant and recent past. He goes further: ‘The modern histories of all Third World nations need to be rewritten around demographic growth’ (p 2). That is an unambiguous declaration of a theoretical framework: that population growth is the principal factor driving social and economic advancement. Even as its empirical and conceptual validity is open to question, and his application to African history hardly establishes its veracity, that declaration does not generate controversy. It does not elicit the charge of rigidity or putting theory before data. Why not? Because not only do many mainstream historians ascribe to that tenet but also, its application does not entail unmasking the mechanisms of the capitalist, imperialist system. Instead, it elicits the standard recipe given to Africa by Western think tanks and funders: Curb population growth and you will prosper.

Another case: MK Asante in The History of Africa (Asante 2007) decries the lack of ‘thematic centrality’ in African history. To cover that deficiency, his book utilizes the Afrocentric framework. Regarded as a leading work in that genre, the key tenets of its theory are, however, not defined with any degree of clarity.

Again, we have a paradox: On the one hand, historians lament the lack of an organizing framework. But when one is given, and especially if it is of the political economy variety, its merit is set aside. It is by definition dismissed as deterministic. The contrasting treatments accorded to Rodney, on one side, and Illife and Asante, on the other, reflect a standard practice. In history, as in the other social sciences, the Marxist approach is regularly judged according to harsher, more elusive standards. If, following Rodney, you were to declare that the modern history of Africa should be rewritten around the evolution of structures of dependency, it would instantly raise loud alarm bells in the profession: How can you prejudge history? You would be prejudged. Even a cursory examination of the evidence you have marshalled would not be done. ‘It simply cannot be true,’ the distinguished professors from the renowned ivory towers of the West would reflexively proclaim.

Those who charge Marxist writing with rigidity blithely ignore the numerous creative, flexible works produced by Marxist historians from all the corners of the globe. In relation to Africa, the reference and reading list in Freund (1998) gives a good picture of the vast scope of such creative scholarly output.

The Indian historian DD Kosambi, who exercised a significant influence on a generation of students of Indian history, is a specific case in point. In his pioneering 1956 book, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, he identifies his historiographical scheme by defining history as ‘the presentation, in chronological order, of successive developments in the means and relations of production’ (Kosambi 1956, p 1). That classic Marxist stand notwithstanding, what he subsequently does is to roundly critique Karl Marx. He calls the notion of the Asiatic mode of production, used by Marx to explicate Asian societies, seriously flawed. Nonetheless, he also asserts that the political-economy approach developed by Marx remains an eminently useful, scientific method for the study of human society. Applying that method in an innovative, multidisciplinary fashion to India, he gives us a novel, consistent, fascinating picture of the trajectory of early India. One important arena pioneered by Kosambi was the analysis of the coinage of the day to cast light on social and economic features of the social order (see Guha 2013; Kosambi 2013; Thapar 2013). Howard Zinn, who corrected the intense patriotic, elitist bias found in the standard US history texts and approached that history from the conditions and viewpoints of ordinary people, is another mesmerizingly creative Marxist historian (Zinn 1980).

HEUA is cast in the same light. Even as it employs Marx’s insights into how human history unfolds, it does not blindly apply the modes of production scheme Marx proposed for Europe to Africa. Though it utilizes key concepts formulated by Marxists like VI Lenin, P Baran and AG Frank to explain the African reality under imperialism, it does not do that in a routine manner.

Importantly, HEUA does not succumb to the strictly structural variety of the development of underdevelopment model. It attends to the internal class structures and is cognizant of the importance, dominant at times, of the superstructure in historic change. Rodney’s explanation of why, unlike Europe, China did not autonomously evolve into a developed capitalist society is one example. His analysis of the contradictory impact of colonial education in Africa shows the scientifically adaptable nature of his methodology. Overall, his book does not mimic a scheme adopted from a standard text. On the contrary, it uses available historic evidence to indicate which of the social, political or economic factors and actors played critical roles at specific geographic locations and points in time. Further, these disparate factors are connected within an overall systemic framework.

Primacy of economics

True to his Marxist stance, Rodney declares economic factors as the primary drivers of African history. He thereby is deemed guilty of not just the sin of determinism but worse, of economic determinism.

Firstly, note the fact that today most historians dealing with Africa give noticeable weight to economic factors, at least into the presentation of the situation up to the end of colonial rule. Only a rare chronicler of the past disputes the primacy of the economic motives for colonialism. Yet, what is rarely acknowledged is that this historiographical transformation in no small measure reflects the long-term influence of the Marxist historians active in the sixties, among whom Rodney was the leading light.

Second, double standards extend to this issue as well. Establishment historians are not immune from succumbing to biologic, genetic, or race based deterministic explanations. Yet, we do not hear Asante (2007) being taken to task for narrow cultural determinism or Ilife (2007) being castigated for simplistic demographic determinism. Why then does economic determinism, real or alleged, cause a widespread uproar?

Rodney’s critique of the bulk of the historians of Africa was that they not only ignored or marginalized the essential economic issues but also that when they considered the racial, tribal, religious, cultural, behavioral or environmental factors, they did so in a disjointed manner. They either failed to utilize or, at best, presented in a masked fashion, known facts about the exceedingly exploitative dimensions of the African economic reality. Hence, their narrowly framed histories served more to justify slavery, colonial domination and neo-colonialism than to enlighten us about the African past and present. They as well favored post-colonial trajectories for Africa that were essentially pro-imperial in substance.

Interestingly, it may be noted that a few heavy weight right wing analysts of societal change have advocated their own quite rigid yet empirically hollow forms of economic determinism (Rostow 1960). And these have served to rationalize past and recent Western economic inroads into the dominated nations.

Rodney’s strident expose of their pro-status quo bias decidedly unnerved the mainstream historians. And they responded with the usual diversionary tactics. Charges of inflexible economic determinism automatically arose. Dismissals of Marxist analysis of society along these lines hark back to ancient days. But such a charge was effectively rebuffed by Engels a long way back.

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase (Engels 1890).

A foundational aspect of Rodney’s economic thinking generally escapes attention. As noted earlier, following Marx, he held that human labour – routine or creative, unskilled or skilled, mental or physical – is the source of all value in human society. It is not machines, money, stocks or forces of supply and demand but, in the final analysis, productive human labour that is the source of all wealth. For Marx, this was not an emotive declaration but one backed by rigorous analysis. And by placing that role onto a broader segment of the population instead of on the genius of a few entrepreneurs, he converted economics into a profoundly humanistic discipline. In comparison, modern bourgeois economics, driven by arcane mathematical models whose meaning even the experts cannot explain and whose practical and predictive utility is strongly in doubt, is founded on amoral, elitist, profit-loss propositions that are fast driving the human race towards a global catastrophe. Rodney, to his credit, adopted the economic theory based on logic, fact and humanistic morality.

Those who judge the Marxist method simply based on documents produced by ossified political parties have an axe to grind. Taking a broader look, it is evident that this method is versatile enough to accurately capture the essence together with the specificities of diverse, complex social and economic realities. Far from being a rigid method, it has ample latitude for linking facts to interpretation in a diversity of ways.

The dominant bourgeois ideology functions to confound and conceal the economic reality of capitalism and imperialism. An attempt to bring it into the open, especially when it also deals with the immediate past and the present situation, encounters a barrage of shrill charges from multiple influential quarters, academic, media based and political. And no matter how often the charges are shown to be without a foundation, they are repeated ad nauseam as gospel truth. HEUA has regularly been a prime target of such an unfounded, politically motivated tendency.

External factors

Another oft aired criticism of HEUA is that it explains all the slave trade and post-slave trade era transformations in Africa by attaching the principal, if not the sole, importance to external forces and actors.

It is true that HEUA takes capitalism as an international system and views imperialism as basically an economically driven phenomenon. Though it notes the associated political, military, cultural and social components as well. The structures of external dependency established in the dominated nations and the resultant class structure constitute the pillars of imperial domination. Evolving over time, they facilitate extraction of the economic surplus from the dominated nation to the dominant nation, from lower classes to the upper classes, and underpin other forms of domination.

Imperialism fosters underdevelopment. But that does not imply absence of economic expansion. It denotes the institution of processes and rules that organically link the local economy and society to entities and forces operating in external economies. Economic growth is not identical to economic development. The latter is not feasible without weakening the structures of dependency. Yet, the situation is not always static or one-sided. At some historic junctures, external d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• The book
• The global context
• A grand reversal
• Rodney the revolutionary
• Rodney and historiography
• Criticisms of the book
• Rodney in the classroom
• Contemporary relevance
• Hope and struggle
• Photograph from the archives
• Acknowledgements
• Major writings of Walter Rodney
• References
• About the author