the book how europe underdeveloped africa

Here Walter makes the case quite convincingly that African underdevelopment (as at the early 1970s) is entirely the fault of Europeans who were themselves slaves to capitalism, he approached the topic using cool, calm logic (I felt that more sentences needed to end with exclamation marks than were used! Or maybe I just like exclamation marks!) bringing to light facts that many many people would like to keep hidden. This is the first time that I've read something of this sort i.e. Now for the book 'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa' by Walter Rodney was a wonderful read, eye opening, mind shattering, these are not words I use for just anything, very casual and yet so radical at the same time. I zoomed through the book (which was really not all that long) and now I have completed it. Fast forward to July and I've run out of reading material then I remembered that I've downloaded some 400 page book on Africa somewhere on my phone so I decided to read it, best decision I've made all year.

At first glance I was discouraged because the book looked very pedagogical like it would be full of highfalutin economics jargon, now I'm not a philistine but at the time I did not feel like reading someone's doctoral thesis, I shelved it. It got me thinking, Africans have the same cognitive ability as Europeans there is no question about that but then why are we so underdeveloped? I then remembered this book and found a free PDF of it online. All I could tell him was that at sometime in Berlin, Europe shared Africa into disorganised fragments that did not take Africans themselves into account and that started a chain of events that culminated in our sad plight. That day a colleague at work and I were discussing Africa's merits as compared with the rest of the world, we talked about colonialism and tried to piece together a layman's history of Africa and while we tried to pontificate about why Africans are backward the way we are, it dawned on me that I knew a lot less about the underlying reasons for our comparative backwardness than I thought. The book remained in the periphery of my mind until this last Africa day on the 25th of May. I first heard about this book on the Channels book club TV show (give it a watch if you can it's very good) where some writer ( I'm afraid I've forgotten his name now) suggested that viewers read this book to gain a bit of insight into the African situation. 'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa' by Walter Rodney.

The book how europe underdeveloped africa