European military equipment proved superior to African when the initial colonisations were met by limited resistance. 1884: Africa DividedĪfter 1884, the continent was divided up between the British, French, Belgian, Portuguese, Italians and finally the Germans. In this blog, I deal with African colonialization in the last part of the 19th Century, excluding Southern Africa. The story I am telling here is of how Europe underdeveloped Africa and set the stage for this to happen. The entire continent with their small nation-states still struggles as one of the poorest areas of the world. They all kept the boundaries created during colonialism. This was partially due to their struggles against colonial rule and partly due to the decision taken by the USA to have economic access to the world. 80 years after being divided, the new countries were provided with relative Independence. Those borders set in 1884 had little rationale but continue to have long-term consequences and these relatively small geographical areas would have difficulties in development.

We take for granted today the boundary lines which divide countries. This meticulously researched analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa has not only informed decades of scholarship and activism, it remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.The Colonisation of the African Continent from 1884 to 1960 Introduction

In his magnum opus, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney incisively argues that grasping 'the great divergence' between the west and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. James’ Black Jacobins, Eric Williams’ Capitalism & Slavery, and W.E.B.

This hugely influential work of political theory and political history, now powerfully introduced by Angela Davis, “remains as relevant as when it was first published-a call to arms in the class struggle for racial equity” ( Los Angeles Review of Books).Ī powerful analysis of European colonialism in Africa that stands alongside pan-Africanist classics like C.L.R.

How europe underdeveloped africa verso