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How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

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“In the final analysis, perhaps the most important principle of colonial education was that of capitalist individualism… . In Africa, both the formal school system and the informal value system of colonialism destroyed social solidarity and promoted the worst form of alienated individualism without social responsibility” — location: 237 ^ref-63443

The Third World faces Europe/America like a colossal mass whose aim should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe/America has not been able to find the answers. — location: 320 ^ref-7108

is it not clear by now that the process of exploitation leads to an underdeveloped humanity both at the “center” and at the “periphery”? — location: 338 ^ref-28892

So who among us does not need to break the coils of the past, to transcend and recreate our history? — location: 341 ^ref-31053

even without any guarantees of success, we must move in the flow of humankind’s best, most creative imagination, in the direction of our most profoundly renewing dreams. — location: 381 ^ref-56751

The relations which develop within any given social group are crucial to an understanding of the society as a whole. Freedom, responsibility, skill, have real meaning only in terms of the relations of men in society. — location: 409 ^ref-57515

development cannot be seen purely as an economic affair, but rather as an overall social process which is dependent upon the outcome of man’s efforts to deal with his natural environment. — location: 457 ^ref-31000

Never before in any human society had a group of people seen themselves consciously functioning in order to make the maximum profit out of production. — location: 536 ^ref-1099

social (class) relations of capitalism are now outmoded, just as slave and feudal relations became outmoded in their time. — location: 545 ^ref-51180

There was a period when the capitalist system increased the well-being of significant numbers of people as a byproduct of seeking out profits for a few, but today the quest for profits comes into sharp conflict with people’s demands that their material and social needs should be fulfilled. The capitalist or bourgeois class is no longer capable of guiding the uninhibited development of science and technology—again because these objectives now clash with the profit motive. Capitalism has proved incapable of transcending fundamental weaknesses such as underutilization of productive capacity, the persistence of a permanent sector of unemployed, and periodic economic crises related to the concept of “market”—which is concerned with people’s ability to pay rather than their need for commodities. — location: 546 ^ref-36907

Imperialism is itself a phase of capitalist development in which Western European capitalist countries, the USA, and Japan established political, economic, military, and cultural hegemony over other parts of the world which were initially at a lower level and therefore could not resist domination. — location: 578 ^ref-19339

is useful to recognize how inadequate are the explanations of that phenomenon which are provided by bourgeois scholars. They very seldom try to grapple with the issue in its totality, but rather concentrate attention narrowly on “economic development.” — location: 596 ^ref-56972

At one stage in history, advance was made at the cost of entrenching privileged groups. In our times, development has to mean advance which liquidates present privileged groups with their corresponding unprivileged groups. — location: 643 ^ref-23918

Taxes do not produce national wealth and development. Wealth has to be produced out of nature—from tilling the land or mining metals or felling trees or turning raw materials into finished products for human consumption. These things are done by the vast majority of the population who are peasants and workers. — location: 725 ^ref-32209

There would be no incomes to tax if the laboring population did not work. — location: 728 ^ref-39643

The situation is that Africa has not yet come anywhere close to making the most of its natural wealth, and most of the wealth now being produced is not being retained within Africa for the benefit of Africans. — location: 744 ^ref-8077

When the terms of trade are set by one country in a manner entirely advantageous to itself, then the trade is usually detrimental to the trading partner. — location: 783 ^ref-19368

However, it is very essential at this stage to draw a clear distinction between the capitalist countries and the socialist ones, because socialist countries have never at any time owned any part of the African continent nor do they invest in African economies in such a way as to expatriate profits from Africa. — location: 805 ^ref-56383

it is absolutely necessary to determine whether the standard of living in a given industrialized country is a product of its own internal resources or whether it stems from exploiting other countries. — location: 814 ^ref-20927

in the second place, restrictions were placed upon African capacity to make the maximum use of its economic potential—which is what development is all about. — location: 837 ^ref-56851

The capitalists of Western Europe were the ones who actively extended their exploitation from inside Europe to cover the whole of Africa. — location: 890 ^ref-11154

the so-called international law which governed the conduct of nations on the high seas was nothing else but European law. — location: 1679 ^ref-17117

European technical superiority did not apply to all aspects of production, but the advantage which they possessed in a few key areas proved decisive. — location: 1706 ^ref-29349

Literacy, organizational experience, and the capacity to produce on an ever expanding scale also counted in the European favor. — location: 1710 ^ref-48973

some African rulers found European goods sufficiently desirable to hand over captives which they had taken in warfare. Soon, war began to be fought between one community and another for the sole purpose of getting prisoners for sale to Europeans, and even inside a given community, a ruler might be tempted to exploit his own subjects and capture them for sale. — location: 1718 ^ref-33932

The king of the Kongo had conceived of possibilities of mutually beneficial interchange between his people and the European state, but the latter forced him to specialize in the export of human cargo. It is also interesting to note that while the Oba (king) of Benin was willing to sell a few female captives, it took a great deal of persuasion and pressure from Europeans to get him to sell male African prisoners of war, who would otherwise have been brought into the ranks of Benin society. — location: 1739 ^ref-62366

the manner in which Europeans got together to wage the “Opium War” against China in the nineteenth century to insure that Western capitalists would make profit while the Chinese were turned into dope addicts. — location: 1753 ^ref-30764

the Atlantic trade was the stimulator of consistent advances in naval technology. — location: 1831 ^ref-34998

The Muslim religion was also a stimulator of educational advance during the colonial period. In North Africa, Muslims often found it necessary to channel their efforts into schools other than those built by the colonialists. — location: 5219 ^ref-21987

In Morocco, the Muslim schools that were established by popular effort possessed the unusual feature of aiming at women’s emancipation by having a high percentage of girls—far higher than government schools. — location: 5224 ^ref-63507

Europeans knew well enough that if they did not control the minds of Africans, they would soon cease to control the people physically and politically. — location: 5335 ^ref-49137

foreign investment does not only help to undermine our economics by extracting enormous profits, but it does more serious damage to the economies by distorting them into lopsidedness. — location: 5541 ^ref-3932

the cardinal development demand, namely, that, to be really effective, the development process must begin by transforming the economy from its colonial, externally responsive structure to one which is internally responsive. — location: 5551 ^ref-39461