From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject Walter Rodney’s Lost Book: One Hundred Years of Development in Africa
Date October 18, 2021 3:50 AM
  Links have been removed from this email. Learn more in the FAQ.
  Links have been removed from this email. Learn more in the FAQ.
[The book, and lectures that comprise it, give a powerful
impression of an activist and thinker engaged with challenging and
wide-ranging issues such as the continent’s history, slavery,
independence, and projects of radical socialist development. ]
[[link removed]]

WALTER RODNEY’S LOST BOOK: ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT IN
AFRICA  
[[link removed]]


 

Leo Zeilig
September 13, 2021
Liberated Texts
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ The book, and lectures that comprise it, give a powerful impression
of an activist and thinker engaged with challenging and wide-ranging
issues such as the continent’s history, slavery, independence, and
projects of radical socialist development. _

,

 

One of the most astonishing books that Walter Rodney – the Guyanese
revolutionary and historian – ever wrote was published several years
after he was assassinated on 13 June 1980. The story of this book and
how it came to be published is almost as remarkable as the life of the
revolutionary himself. In 1978, Rodney was working as a full-time
activist of the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) in Georgetown, the
capital of Guyana. The WPA was a revolutionary organisation seeking to
unite the African and Indian working class in the highly divided
country, then run by the brutal Forbes Burnham. Rodney was the
group’s principal organiser and intellectual, and to support himself
and his family, and to fundraise for the WPA, he travelled overseas to
teach and work.

One trip to Germany in 1978 shows us how his last book came to be.
Rodney travelled from Guyana to Hamburg in April of that year. He was
already the celebrated and outspoken author of _How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa_, and his arrival was eagerly anticipated. He
had been invited by the radical German scholar, Rainer Tetzlaff, to
teach a course on the history of African development at the University
of Hamburg.

The lecture course Rodney was employed to teach was titled, ‘African
Development, 1878-1978’, and comprised, according to the one-page
programme, ‘(i) a brief introduction to development concepts; (ii) a
survey of African colonial economies with special reference to East
and West Africa; and (iii) an examination of post-colonial
developments in Kenya and Tanzania.’ According to the brief
programme there were going to be twelve lectures, comprising, ‘The
debate on development concepts in Africa’ and ‘Post-colonial
development strategies’.1 [[link removed]]

The book – still unknown by most people familiar with Rodney’s
work – was published from these lectures, which were recorded on
audio cassettes, and transcribed in 1984 (and included the
question-and-answer sessions with his students).The entire course was
then compiled and turned into a small, photocopied book entitled, _A
Tribute to Walter Rodney: One Hundred Years of Development in
Africa_.2 [[link removed]] The book was placed in
the library at the University of Hamburg and distributed to a number
of comrades and students. Copies also ended up in Peter Lock’s
private collection, a colleague and comrade of Rodney and Tetzlaff at
the University of Hamburg, who had helped organise the lectures.

A Revolutionary Course

The lectures and resultant book are perhaps the best example of the
dizzying breadth of Rodney’s scholarship, reading and activism,
synthesized into a single document. The course also showcased
Rodney’s astonishing ability to communicate. His capacity for
clarity and description – a rare and vital ability among scholars
and activists – which had been developed from his work
‘grounding’ – literally meaning to sit on the ground, listen and
discuss among the poor in Jamaica in 1968 from which his first
book, _The Groundings with my Brothers_, emerged. Speaking to
students at the university is one thing, but Rodney was also working
as a political organiser among sugar, rice, timber, and coconut
workers.

Working across disciplines, and addressing different audiences
including students, workers _and_ children, Rodney developed a rare
ability to effectively communicate complex ideas. The course, Tetzlaff
and Lock explained in 1984 – in the preface to the book –was ‘an
entirely new enriching experience when the students of the Institute
for Political Science and the Seminar of History at the University of
Hamburg were offered an intellectual discourse with an authentic
representative of the Third World’.3
[[link removed]]

Rodney opens the lectures by challenging two distinct views of African
history. One represented by Hugh Trevor Roper – an establishment
British historian and racist, who saw pre-colonial African history as
primitive and basic. The second view, Rodney explained, sees the
colonial period as ‘insignificant, almost irrelevant.’ These
historians arrive at this position by ‘saying that African history
and African development must be seen in a totality, that African
history is almost ageless…’.4 [[link removed]]

Unsurprisingly Rodney rejects both positions. The second view which
sees colonialism as insignificant, a ‘flea-bite’, argued that
Africa had already ‘moved away from the colonial heritage’. These
were arguments made by both academics and politicians, who saw
Europeans as simply ‘visitors’ and now that they had formally left
the continent, Africa could re-establish its ‘authenticity’.

By the late 1970s, the idea of ‘authenticity’ – the return to a
‘real’ and ‘proper’ African culture and history – had been
taken-up and established as official government discourse in different
parts of the continent, justifying often draconian and dictatorial
policies. Congo’s President, Mobutu Sese Seko, used to his own
advantage the so-called ‘recourse to authenticity’ in 1971,
renaming the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zaire that year. His
own change of name and title, and the names of towns and streets
reflected this ostensible ‘authenticity’.5
[[link removed]] While the official proclamation of
Patrice Lumumba as a national hero, a man Mobutu had been involved in
murdering, was all part of an attempt to forge a new African national
identity true to its glorious historical past. These efforts were part
of an endeavour to increase the resources available to the state and
drive out ‘foreigners’ through use of ‘nationalist’ slogans.
The class of state bureaucrats and businessman were the chief
beneficiaries of this policy – a process Rodney discussed in
devastating detail.6 [[link removed]]

The second stage of these state-led reforms in the Congo was the
institutional and economic consolidation of ’Zairianisation’,
which was initiated with the ‘take over’ of the bureaucracy and
the ‘nationalisation’ of sectors of the economy previously in
private or corporate (Belgian), hands into either private Zaïrean
ownership or state ownership. This change tended to encourage the
development of two different, and conflicting, social formations. The
process saw small and medium businesses, mainly in the transport and
service sectors, transfer from expatriate private ownership to
Zaïrean private ownership. One of the major forces behind this
process was a concern to gain greater control for the political elite
over the resources of the Zaïrean economy, so that the profits
generated could more easily be appropriated; another was to extend the
range of resources under nominal state control, and to increase the
profits available to a ‘bureaucratic elite’. This was the reality
of the second type of history Rodney had identified – the ‘return
to an ageless African history’. As he explained explicitly, ‘I
feel that the talk of authenticity has generally been associated with
this desire to suggest [that] … colonialism really did not make much
of an impact’.

Rodney moves onto his ‘third framework of analysis’, which sees
colonialism not as a minor moment in the continent’s history, but a
‘major intervention’ on Africa’s politics and societies. As he
describes to the students, ‘colonialism in spite of being in Africa
for a mere 70, 80 or 100 years, made a tremendous impact and that
impact is visible and will continue to be visible on the African
continent…’

Rodney’s own work on the continent’s history is most closely
aligned to this third approach. In Rodney’s words in Hamburg,
‘colonialism reinforced tendencies that had already begun with the
trade in slaves … for those sections of the African continent which
were involved in the trading of slaves, it represented their first
major involvement in the world economy and that with the coming of
colonialism that involvement was going to be intensified in very many
ways’.

Understanding African History

Rodney’s fluency when surveying the five centuries-long history of
Africa in these lectures is remarkable. Though never lost in the
details, he examines the movements of resistance within a Marxist
framework – for example, the decades it took the Portuguese to
pacify resistance in Guinea – to imperial competition for African
territory that led to the Berlin conference in 1884 and the colonial
scramble on the continent.

Rapidly he moves quickly on to examine the solidarity between colonial
liberation movements and the ‘labour movements and left-wing
movements of the colonialising powers themselves.’ While this
solidarity did exist, it was highly uneven, so ‘one notes … that
the French communist party was the largest communist party in Western
Europe … was itself ideologically tied to its own bourgeois state
apparatus with regard to colonial rule…’.7
[[link removed]]

What gives Rodney’s lectures such a dynamic and living energy is
that he was often interrupted by the audience with questions and
queries. On Algeria, for example, one student, asked: ‘There are
opinions many of which go back to the writings of Frantz Fanon which
say that the use of violence or the armed struggle is a necessary
pre-condition for a real independence, and you have already indicated
that there are other ways of struggle…’

Rodney responds, ‘…I think Fanon himself of course was aware of
the different possibilities of access to Independence …But what we
have to take as the premise is this: African people as such, did not
make the decision about armed struggle or no armed struggle; that
decision was really dictated by the character of colonial rule …’
Rodney was not simply a teacher in Hamburg but a militant whose own
activism in Guyana at the time would raise the possibility of armed
struggle. He was responding – and lecturing – as a
scholar _and_ militant involved in
the _on-going_ post-independence struggle for liberation in the
Caribbean.

To Tanzania

One of the most significant parts of Rodney’s course were his
lectures on Tanzania – an important focus for this review. Tanzania
at the time was led by the socialist Julius Nyerere, and the country
represented for many an alternative and radical path to socialist
development in the Third World. Partly autobiographical, he starts by
telling his students, ‘My own experience with those who have really
loved Nyerere’s words or read descriptions or discussions of
Tanzanian socialism is normally when they come to Tanzania …. they
experienced a certain amount of shock.’ In Hamburg he was speaking
about a large community of fraternal scholars, and fellow travellers
who came to the country with a romantic notion of ‘Nyerere’s words
… [and] Tanzanian socialism.’  Rodney had worked with his family
in Tanzania from 1966 to 1974, he knew the country and its politics
intimately.8 [[link removed]]

Yet what these foreign socialists experienced, and saw for themselves
when they arrived, was shocking. Rodney continues, ‘they had already
begun to imagine the society transforming itself into a socialist
society of plenty, when in fact, we are dealing with an underdeveloped
society where poverty and destitution is as much the common run as you
would find in any one of the African territories which may not
necessarily be claiming to be moving towards socialism.’ Moving
quickly on to consider Tanzania’s history and political economy,
Rodney explains to his listeners that the real explanation of this
‘underdevelopment’ was caused by the fact that Tanzania ‘began
at the rear.’

Rodney then proceeds to provide a detailed analysis of independence
and dependency in the country – while continuing to engage with the
audience, ‘That is another thing you have to learn when you are
looking at third world countries, when you see companies and firms
that begin with Tanganyika this, or Sudan this or Nigeria this,
don’t entertain any illusions that they belong to Tanzania or Sudan
or Nigeria, in fact that is precisely the moment when you have to
become suspicious because foreign firms like to decorate their
companies with the names of these national countries …’ He
illustrates his point with a vivid example, the Tanganyika Development
Finance Company – that sounds ‘home grown,’ a national financing
company, but it is in fact ‘partly owned by the Netherlands
Government …’

With his exceptional power of explanation, Rodney provides the
simplest description of what happens to a newly independent African
country as it reaches for economic development. Foreign governments
and companies, Rodney explains, say ‘to African governments and
other third world countries, “we are going to set up a manufacturing
centre in your country. This is in line with your development
strategy, you are becoming industrialised. Now if we are going to help
you to be industrialized then obviously you must include the
conditions under which this industry would succeed. You must provide
tariff protection against other exports from Europe and Asia” …
Never mind that the domestic industry is owned lock, stock and barrel
in many instances by foreign firms, it’s still called domestic, it
is still seen as local industry.’

Returning his focus directly to Tanzania, Rodney explains, that from
the country’s low economic level, colonial era dependence and the
failure to build a genuine autonomous basis for independence, meant
that Nyerere’s socialism, pioneered as ‘_Ujamaa’_ – a
programme for socialist economic development – was doomed to
fail. _Ujamaa_ was celebrated widely around the world by left-wing
radicals but by 1978 Rodney was extraordinarily sober in his analysis,
‘So Ujamaa’ he explained to the class, ‘has not increased
production in Tanzania. It has not transformed technology … It has
not transformed social relations in the countryside as it aimed at …
It has strengthened the bureaucracy. It has failed to cut the
dependency links… And at the ideological level it has created
confusion in so far as it has sought to negate the concept of class
struggle and class responsibilities.’ We should note here that
Rodney came to this realisation in part through being pushed by
Marxist students on campus at Dar es Salaam (most notable of these was
the brilliant young Marxist and for a time, Rodney’s PhD
student, Issa Shivji
[[link removed]],
but also Karim Hirji
[[link removed]]).

A Fork-in-the-Road

Yet it is when Rodney examines the agency and activism of working
people on the course that the excitement becomes tangible. In the
final section of his lectures in Hamburg, Rodney moved on to discuss
class struggle in Tanzania. In this part of the course, Rodney’s
teaching is a giddying, exciting roller-coaster. He tells his class
that, ‘The idea of class struggle does not suit a bureaucratic
bourgeoisie or any sector of the petit-bourgeois because it’s an
idea that speaks about the negation of their own existence over
time’.  At times, Nyerere suggested that there were no real social
classes in Tanzania and that consequently, it did not make any sense
to adopt a theory that emphasises the role of class struggle in
bringing about social transformation.9
[[link removed]]

Rodney argued the ‘petit bourgeoise … were trying to disseminate
the idea that workers exploit the countryside.’ This was a
self-serving point that could be used against wages claims and demands
‘for a larger share of the surplus which they produce.’ These were
not abstract arguments in an academic discussion, but justifications
made directly by the Tanzanian state (and ‘socialist’ and
‘capitalist’ states across the continent). Nyerere, the radical
president of Tanzania, was fond of making such claims himself, Rodney
explained, ‘if the workers ask for more, the bureaucratic bourgeoise
would reply, “You are getting that at the expense of the
peasants.”’

On the role of the state in Tanzania, his attitude had become much
more critical. In the strikes and occupations reported by Issa Shivji
in his 1976 book, _Class Struggles in Tanzania_, and noted by Rodney
in his lectures, there was a new politics in formation.10
[[link removed]] Reporting on the working class
action in the factory occupations in the early 1970s, in Hamburg he
described, ‘We as workers are capable of running this enterprise
more efficiently than the economic bureaucracy.’ In directly
challenging the management of companies, workers were ‘making
arguments that went beyond their own immediate material interests.
They were carrying the class … to even higher levels by in fact
posing the question who should control production …’

Omissions and Inclusions

During these last years of his life, Rodney was at the height of his
powers. He had a capacity for work which was extraordinary.
Increasingly, Rodney’s efforts were focused resolutely on the
struggles from below and on the agency and capacity of working people
to change society. There are invaluable signs of this shift, this new
orientation, in the lecture course he presented in Hamburg and that
was then published in the photocopied, limited-edition book in 1984.

The book, and lectures that comprise it, give a powerful impression of
an activist and thinker engaged with challenging and wide-ranging
issues such as the continent’s history, slavery, independence, and
projects of radical socialist development. Frequently interrupted by
students to clarify a point, or justify a statement, Rodney deals with
complex issues of history, political economy and Marxist theory with
sophistication and clarity, never losing patience, or his narrative
thread. The transcripts and recordings of the lectures held in the
Walter Rodney Papers in Atlanta also give a sense of Rodney’s own
political development, reflecting on his activism, and his work with
the working class in Guyana.

One of the most impressive aspects of the course is Rodney’s
criticism of Tanzania’s socialist efforts. He is uncompromising,
there was, he said to the ‘large group of students’, simply
nothing socialist about the reforms. He points to the strikes and
working-class activity in a wave of action from 1973 as the centre of
a genuine movement for socialist change – which saw a shift in the
consciousness of those involved in struggle, Rodney explains. This is
where we need to look for change, he asserts. This critical
reappraisal, made in front of his class in 1978, was still, to me –
reading the transcripts of the lectures in the windowless reading room
of to the Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center
– in 2018, a tremendously exciting experience.

Understanding this wave of working-class action required that Rodney
undertake a detailed reading of what had taken place. Nyerere was not
a socialist in the way Rodney now understood the term, and he had
crushed the strikes and occupations of workers, when these workers had
dared to take matters into their own hands.11
[[link removed]] Yet as I scanned the 1984 book of
these lectures, I realised that this significant part of the course,
Rodney’s account of the strikes and the ‘wild-cat’ action in
Tanzania had been excluded – this vital story had simply disappeared
from this 1984 publication of the lectures.

What could be the reason for leaving out this still scintillating
account of Nyerere and Tanzania and the role of the post-colonial
working class? I can only imagine that even in 1984 – when Nyerere
had resigned as president – it was still considered too critical.
Whatever the reasons, the book – only a few copies now available
anywhere in the world, including in the library in Hamburg – remains
an astonishing tour de force of modern African history up to 1978, and
evidence of Rodney’s mastery and application of Marxism and radical
political economy.

_Leo Zeilig is an editor on the Review of African Political Economy
and is the coordinator of roape.net. He has written widely on African
history and politics, and his study on Walter Rodney, A Revolutionary
for Our Times
[[link removed]],
is being published by Haymarket Books in 2022._

_The author would like to thank Louis Allday and Zeyad el Nabolsy for
their comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this review._

_Liberated Texts is an independent book review website which features
works of ongoing relevance that have been forgotten, underappreciated,
suppressed or misinterpreted in the cultural mainstream since their
release._

_Although not exclusively, we are interested in texts with
anti-colonial, anti-imperialist themes and those related to the
history of Marxism, communism and revolution globally._

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]
Screenshot of the email generated on import

Message Analysis

  • Sender: Portside
  • Political Party: n/a
  • Country: United States
  • State/Locality: n/a
  • Office: n/a
  • Email Providers:
    • L-Soft LISTSERV