Walter Rodney

A previously unpublished collection of Rodney's essays on Marxism, spanning his engagement with of Black Power, Ujamaa Villages, and the everyday people who put an end to a colonial era Early in life, Walter Rodney became a major revolutionary figure in a dizzying range of locales that traversed the breadth of the Black diaspora: in North America and Europe, in the Caribbean and on the African continent. He was not only a witness of a Pan-African and socialist internationalism; in his efforts to build mass organizations, catalyze rebellious ferment, and theorize an anti-colonial path to self-emancipation, he can be counted among its prime authors. Decolonial Marxism records such a life by collecting previously unbound essays written during the world-turning days of Black revolution. In drawing together pages where he elaborates on the nexus of race and class, offers his reflections on radical pedagogy, outlines programs for newly independent nation-states, considers the challenges of anti-colonial historiography, and produces balance sheets for a dozen wars for national liberation, this volume captures something of the range and power of Rodney's output. But it also demonstrates the unbending consistency that unites his life and work: the ongoing reinvention of living conception of Marxism, and a respect for the still untapped potential of mass self-rule.

Essays from the Pan-African Revolution

Decolonial Marxism

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A considerable body of writing is now coming into existence on the topic of the consequence of the Atlantic slave trade on Africa; and much of it purports to show that earlier views of the completely negative impact of the trade are ill-founded.

Indeed, some individuals are preoccupying themselves with highlighting the many beneficial effects of the slave trade on Africa. The white-washing trend is another facet of the distortions produced when capitalism tries to provide itself with moral justification. Apologists rely on such flimsy arguments as 'Africans benefited by getting European goods' and 'new food crops were introduced' - as though Europe had to be enslaved before it got to enjoy the potato from the Native American Indian. This genre of scholarship stresses the fact that certain African kingdoms grew stronger during the centuries of slaving, and it assumes that the connection was a positive one. The truth is that some areas continued to develop and they did so in spite of slave trading; although all who participated were warped to a greater or lesser extent, and all were reduced to a state of dependence.

One of the most profound facets of the cultural arrogance of European colonialists in Africa was their boastfulness about technological accomplishments and their contemp-ruous attitude towards what they considered as African non-achievements in that sphere. They (Africans) had no plough, no wheel, and no means of transportation except human head porterage and dugout canoes on rivers and lakes. These people had built nothing, nothing of any kind in material more durable than mud, poles, and hatch!' The above words of a British colonial governor are relatively mild specimens of the technological superiority syndrome. Such statements sprung from and strengthened the racist assumption that African people were incapable of the discovery and application of scientific laws. Yet, the evidence suggests that it was the connection between Europe and Africa which aided the technological maturation of the former, while inducing a period of technological marking time and even regression in Africa. Furthermore, the issue of inventiveness is subordinate to the diffusion of techniques. Europeans did not invent the wheel - it spread from China. Both because of the structure of international trade and because of the conscious decisions of European states, Africa was robbed of the opportunity to benefit from the scientific heritage of man.

The most animus factor undermining attempts to achieve independence and development in the Third World has been the rise of new forms of exploitation and domination within the global capitalist economy. One of them is tourism. It has a nasty history in the Caribbean, particularly in Cuba, but in more recent times it is becoming very extensive. By 1969, tourism was one of the biggest economic factors in Tanzania of all places. Someone observed that, just as in Latin America there used to be 'Banana Republics', so international imperialism was threatening to transform Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania into the 'Wildlife Republics'. Every effort was made to attract tourists to look at the animals, and the animals assumed priorities higher than human beings.

Certainly, tourism in all its aspects is proving to be one of the new areas of expansion of the imperialism economy. It is a new way of confirming the dependence and subjugation of Third World economies, being seen in its most arrant and vicious forms in the Caribbean territories. Several islands in the Caribbean have been transformed into backwaters of the world economy; they are no longer central to the development of the world economy, because they have lost the priority that they had a long time ago when Sugar was king. It is a relatively simple task to transform them into cesspools, which is what the tourism economy is all about.

Besides there is the factor of racism which is all pervasive throughout the Third World, which is particularly strong where black people live in Africa and the Caribbean.

It is a unifying factor. Imperialism has used racism in its own interest, but it turns out to be a double-edged blade, and the very unity that is engendered among black people - the unity of common conditions and common exploitation and oppression - is being turned around as a weapon to be used against imperialism.

One of the principal differences between slave trading and colonialism is that the latter introduced the hegemony of capital within African societies. Slavery began the destruction of the coherence of African social formations without offering any alternatives. Colonialism actively pursued the destruction while counterposing a new coherence of capitalist structures in which eleven social formations and modes were reconstituted to confirm capitalist market relations and ultimately wage relations. Slavery began the incorporation of Africa into the periphery of the world-system without any notable intrusion of capitalist forms inside Africa itself.

The emphasis on non-violence overlooks the fact that the concept of violence in any operational sense includes also the threat of violence and the example of violence; and, within the colonialist camp, additional confusion is deliberately generated to obscure the fact that colonialism was violence in a form hardly less distilled than slavery. Colonialism was violently imposed on Africa, and it was violently maintained. Land-grabbing was violence, forced labour was violence, tax collection was violence. Certain juridical fictions emanating from the colonizing power placed only the briefest of lion-clothes to cover the nakedness of violent colonial oppression. 

It is, for example, palpably obvious that the French learned from defeats in Vietnam that they should quit the whole of Indochina 'peacefully', rather than perish at other Dien Bien-Phus.

ln a similar vein, It was noted that African children in the forests would normally know the names of dozens of trees at an early age and would confound the European visitor who could not tell one leaf from another. The point here is that a European-educated African was just such a stranger and ignoramus in his own land. It is this break in the continuity of the historical movement in Africa that I am consistently referring to as 'underdevelopment' in an active sense, and it embraces economic, political and cultural fields.

Everywhere on the African continent, education originating with the colonialists was meant to ensure mental and physical enslavement. To a large extent it did carry out this function. But every aspect of Africa's subjugation also contained the coeds of revolution since capitalism in its colonial guise could not satisfy even the minimal aspirations of the African people. The more cash crop farming there was the more likely it became that there would be peasant revolts. The larger the wage-earning sector, the more likely it was that there would be rhe revolt of organized labour. Dissatisfaction with education and with the opportunities for education was at the forefront of colonial grievances and it helped to weld together the vast majority of the population to address themselves to the principal contradiction between themselves as the colonized and the Europeans as colonizers. No other facet of the African experience so clearly illustrates the dialectic of oppression and resistance. Historical underdevelopment is a key aspect of the story, while the rebirth of freedom is the other. 

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