Africa in Chaos (review)

Abstract

Issues of continental African development/underdevelopment have been hotly debated within the last forty-five years. Immediately after World War II, a number of Pan-African students, intellectuals, ex-service men, labor union leaders, and others began to actively agitate for the liberation of European colonized territories in Africa. In 1947 Kwame Nkrumah was invited to be publicity secretary of the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) Party in present-day Ghana, under [End Page 244] the leadership of Pan-Africanist, Kwame Nkrumah. In 1963 and 1965, President Nkrumah published his Africa Must Unite and his Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, respectively. By the 1970s the debate over African development/underdevelopment was wide open, and two major schools of thought had emerged. Walter Rodney (1972) argued, in his How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, that European colonialism, Western Education, the Atlantic Slave Trade, and the unequal trade relations between Europe and Africa held Africans down; in his Neo-Colonialism, Nkrumah saw political freedom but not economic liberation from Western Multinational Corporations. American and European scholars saw that Africa's economic problems derived from Africa's internal conditions. If only African countries could adopt Western paradigms of development, they would be well on their way to industrial development. As such, Africans needed an educated manpower, industrial plants, hydroelectric power stations, massive road construction projects, financial aid, and technological transfer from Europe and the United States.