Migration 5

Most important of all (…) it is necessary to make some estimate of the number of people killed and injured so as to extract the millions who were taken alive and sound. The resultant figure would be many times the millions landed alive outside of Africa, and it is that figure which represents the number of Africans directly removed from the population and labour force of Africa because of the establishment of slave production by Europeans.

Walter Rodney (1973: 96)    

Walter Rodney (1942-1980) was a Marxist historian and politician from Guyana. Rodney was born into a working class family, studied in Guyana and Jamaica and taught in Hamburg and Tanzania, amongst other places. In 1980 he was killed in a bomb attack while campaigning for the Working People's Alliance. In all likelihood, the then Forbes Burnham administration was responsible for the murder.

Rodney claims that a) the transatlantic abduction and forced enslavement of millions of Africans to Europe and America, b) economic exploitation and c) political colonial power resulted in the systematic underdevelopment of Africa. His book was enormously influential in efforts to develop a new anti-colonial perspective within historiography. Rodney's book concludes with the statement that the only humanistic way to liberate and develop Africa would be to end the neo-colonial regime.

*Walter Rodney (1973): How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London & Dar-Es-Salaam: Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications.

1973