“A call to arms in the class struggle for racial equity”—the hugely influential work of political theory and history, now powerfully introduced by Angela Davis (Los Angeles Review of Books). This legendary classic on European colonialism in Africa stands alongside C.L.R. James’ Black Jacobins, Eric Williams’ Capitalism & Slavery, and W.E.B. Dubois’ Black Reconstruction. 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. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. 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 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. 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. 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 fact that 50% of the world's currently impoverished is African is a calculated result of European and American neocolonialism in Africa, a concept Dr. Walter Rodney could only began to analyze. What he did thoroughly recognize is that "in order to understand present economic conditions in Africa, one needs to know why it is that Africa has realized so little of its natural potential, and one also needs to know why so much of its present wealth goes to non-Africans who reside for the most part outside of the continent." I wrote this book for two reasons. One, Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is arguably the most brilliant and influential book I've personally ever read. As a social studies teacher, I can't teach a world history, economics, or global issues lesson without somehow referring to it. Same thing goes for many of the books I've written. However, with all due respect to Dr. Rodney who himself even realized that "ideally an analysis of underdevelopment should come even closer to the present than the end of the colonial period in the 1960s. The phenomenon of neo-colonialism cries out for extensive investigation in order to formulate the strategy and tactics of African emancipation and development. [How Europe Underdeveloped Africa] does not go that far," but How Europe and America Are Still Underdeveloping Africa does. Moreover, several current issues related to neocolonial underdevelopment in Africa, which are again beyond the scope of Rodney's original volume, need special emphasis, such as the tyrannical role of the International Monetary Fund and its Structural Adjustment Policies, the assassinations of several socialist African leaders like Muammar Gaddafi, water privatization, the external debt crisis, global warming, environmental racism, the scramble for African oil, genetically modified food with "Terminator" technology, land grabbing for agrofuel production and export, AFRICOM, endemic African-on-African violence, joblessness, food insecurity and imported food dependency, father hunger, endemic HIV/AIDS, toxic waste colonialism, and hazardous drug trials led by and for the principal benefit of Western pharmaceutical companies. Two, is the impact of the image of Africa accepted by African-Americans on our collective self-concept. The image of Africa internalized by African-Americans largely determines our self-concept and self-confidence, and if that image is egregiously negative, then we, especially African-Americans, should have access to the true reasons why this image exists. The situations that this negativity is based on are often blamed on corrupt, rapacious, immoral African leaders and the haplessly apathetic African masses, with little if any mention of the fact that European and American governments and multinational corporations are still intentionally underdeveloping Africa.

Extracting profit explains why Africa, in the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century, has undergone an economic boom. This period of “Africa rising” did not lead to the creation of jobs but has instead fueled the growth of the extraction of natural resources and an increasingly-wealthy African ruling class.

Whether Africa is developed or not, depends on how and what one addresses. Development is relative. Nonetheless, the fact is: Africa developed Europe; and thereby became underdeveloped. Addressed academically, the notion of development creates many questions amongst which are: Development in what? Whose development? Development for whom? Who defines development? In this volume, the development dealt with is polygonal; and touches on politico-economic sequels which also affect the social aspect. No doubt. Africa is abundantly rich in terms of resource and culture. Paradoxically, however, Africa is less developed economically compared to Europe thanks to the history of unequal encounters, among other reasons. We cannot emphasise enough the fact that Africa’s underdevelopment is the price of the development of Europe which is based on historical realities gyrating around Europe’s criminal past wherein slavery and colonialism enabled Europe to spawn its future capital and investment. How can anyone quibble about Europe’s development resulting from perpetual plunderage of Africa with impunity committed by European treasure-hunting adventurers? This volume prescribes Africa’s restorative recompense as the only way forward for the duo and the world.

Originally published: Monthly Review Press, 1967.

Since the end of colonization Africa has struggled with socio-economic and political problems. These challanges have attracted wealthy donors from Western nations and organizations that have assumed the roles of helper and deliverer. While some donors have good intentions, others seek to impose their ideology of sexual liberation. These are the ideological neocolonial masters of the twenty-first century who aggressively push their agenda of radical feminism, population control, sexualisation of children, and homosexuality. The author, a native of Nigeria, shows how these donors are masterful at exploiting some of the heaviest burdens and afflictions of Africa such as maternal mortality,unplanned pregnancies, HIV/AIDS pandemic, child marriage,and persistent poverty. This exploitation has put many African nations in the vulnerable position of receiving funding tied firmly to ideological solutions that are opposed tothe cultural views and values of their people. Thus many African nations are put back into the protectorate positions of dependency as new cultural standards conceived in the West are made into core policies in African capitals. This book reveals the recolonization of Africa that is rarely talked about. Drawing from a broad array of well-sourced materials and documents, it tells the story of foreign aid with strings attached, the story of Africa targeted and recolonized by wealthy, powerful donors.

After a lifetime's close observation of the continent, one of the world's finest Africa correspondents has penned a landmark book on life and death in modern Africa. It takes a guide as observant, experienced, and patient as Richard Dowden to reveal its truths. Dowden combines a novelist's gift for atmosphere with the scholar's grasp of historical change as he spins tales of cults and commerce in Senegal and traditional spirituality in Sierra Leone; analyzes the impact of oil and the internet on Nigeria and aid on Sudan; and examines what has gone so badly wrong in Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo. Dowden's master work is an attempt to explain why Africa is the way it is, and enables its readers to see and understand this miraculous continent as a place of inspiration and tremendous humanity.

Half a century after independence poverty and disease continues to ravage more than 70% of the inhabitants of the most resource rich continent of the world. State corruption persists as the only industry with steady growth while those that should offer employment to the majority inhabitants of the continent are on the decline. How Africa Underdevelops Africa presents an exegesis of how corruption and its numerous effects are playing out in Africa. With the myth of Asias rise here demystified, Africa has no longer just the Western world to learn from, it could and should necessarily borrow from the social capital values of the East to ensure even distribution of the wealth which at the present rests with an avaricious few who with their cronies tag themselves leaders of Africa.

Mahdi Amel (1936–87) was a prominent Arab Marxist thinker and Lebanese Communist Party member. This first-time English translation of his selected writings sheds light on his notable contributions to the study of capitalism in a colonial context.