5 Ways Europe Underdeveloped Africa

                                                Africa’s Population Underdeveloped

According to the World Bank, Sub-Saharan Africa currently has about 910 million people. That number would  be much higher if it weren’t for the Europeans and the Trans Atlantic slave trade.

During slavery, the African continent had an abnormal stagnation in population in respect to the rest of the world and there is no causative factor other than the fact that millions of people who were of age to bear children were being shipped to the Americas.

One European scholar gave the following estimates of world population (in millions) according to continents:

Years: 1650 1750 1850 1900
Africa: 100 100 100 120
Europe: 103 144 274 423
Asia: 257 437 656 857

Africa’s population didn’t move at all during slavery. In other parts of the world such as Japan and parts of Europe the population growth allowed large socioeconomic development to occur while the lack of growth stagnated Africa.

The European Slave Trade Had Major Effects On The African Labor Force

 

According to some estimates, between 1445 and 1870 as many as 100 million enslaved African men, women and children left Africa during the Trans Atlantic slave trade. This loss of workers put a major dent in the African labor force.

According to Walter Rodney, author of “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,” the massive hit to the African labor force was made more critical because it was composed of able-bodied young men and young women. Slave buyers preferred their victims ages 15 to 35, and preferably in their early 20s; the gender ratio being about two men to one woman. Europeans often accepted African children, but rarely any older people. For four centuries, the lack of workers slowed further development of the African continent.

The Distortion of The African Cloth Economy And Other Industries

It has already been indicated that in 15th-century Europe technology wasn’t superior to that of other parts of the world. There were certain specific features that were highly advantageous to Europe–such as shipping and (to a lesser extent) guns. Europeans trading to Africa had to make use of Asian and African consumer goods, showing that their system of production was not absolutely superior, Rodney said.

He also said that by the time that Africa entered the colonial era, it was concentrating almost entirely on the export of raw cotton and the import of manufactured cotton cloth. This remarkable reversal is tied to technological advances in Europe and to stagnation of technology in Africa owing to the very trade with Europe.

In the late 1800s, after accumulating a tremendous amount of wealth from the slave trade, Europeans made technological advances and vital inventions to produce clothes faster and cheaper. Through the initiative,  European countries were able to put the African cloth manufacturing industries out of business.  

The European cloth industry copied fashionable Africans and eventually replaced them as sellers, establishing a stranglehold on the distribution of cloth around the shores of Africa. This practice repeated itself in other African industries.

Social, Political And Economic Consequences of Colonialism

 

Colonialism is the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.

The colonization of Africa lasted for just over 70 years in most parts of the continent. The negative consequences of colonialism for Africa sprang mainly from the fact that Africa lost power socially, politically and economically.

The power shift from the African allowed direct appropriation by Europeans of the social institutions within Africa. Africans ceased to set indigenous cultural goals and standards, and lost full command of training young members of the society. Thus, the Europeans were able to set up institutions throughout African nations for their own interest.

The negative impact of colonialism in political terms was quite dramatic. Overnight, African political states lost their power, independence and meaning — irrespective of whether they were big empires or small polities. Political power had passed into the hands of foreign overlords, Rodney said.

With the new political and social power, the Europeans were able to extract the resources from the continent for their own benefit and not a single African state could flourish under colonialism.

African Underdevelopment of Education

 

Pre-colonial African education matched the realities of pre-colonial African society and produced well-rounded personalities to fit into that society. Specialized functions such as hunting, organizing religious ritual, and the practice of medicine definitely involved formal education within the family or clan. Such educational practices all dated to communal times in Africa, but they persisted in the more developed African feudal and pre-feudal societies, and they were to be found on the eve of colonialism.

According to Rodney, as the mode of production moved toward feudalism in Africa, new features also emerged within the educational pattern. There was, for instance, more formal specialization, because the proportion of formal to informal education increases with technological advances. Apart from hunting and religion, the division of labor made it necessary to create guilds for passing down the techniques of iron working, leather making, cloth manufacturing, pottery molding, professional trading, and so on.

When the European colonizers came to Africa they introduced a new set of formal educational institutions which partly supplemented and replaced those that were there before. The main purpose of the colonial school system was to train Africans to help man the local administration at the lowest ranks and to staff the private capitalist firms owned by Europeans. In effect, that meant selecting a few Africans to participate in the domination and exploitation of the continent as a whole. It was not an educational system that grew out of the African environment or one that was designed to promote the most rational use of material and social resources. It was not an educational system designed to give young people confidence and pride as members of African societies, but one which sought to instill a sense of deference toward all that was European and capitalist, said Rodney.

Sources:

Walter Rodney’s “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” 

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