# Quote — Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

> For most European capitalist states, the enslavement of Africans had served its purpose by the middle of the nineteenth century; but for those Africans who dealt in captives the abrupt termination of the trade at any given point was a crisis of the greatest magnitude. In many areas, major social changes had taken place to bring the particular regions effectively into the service of the European slave trade—one of the most significant being the rise of “domestic slavery” and various forms of class and caste subjugation. African rulers and traders who found their social existence threatened by the earliest legal edicts such as the 1807 British act against the trade in slaves found ways of making contact with Europeans who still wanted slaves.

- Author: [Walter Rodney](https://www.leafyquotes.com/walter-rodney.md)
- Book: [How Europe Underdeveloped Africa](https://www.leafyquotes.com/walter-rodney/how-europe-underdeveloped-africa.md)
- Page: 141
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Walter_Rodney#How_Europe_Underdeveloped_Africa_(1972)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/walter-rodney/how-europe-underdeveloped-africa/for-most-european

## More from this book

> The removal from history follows logically from the loss of power which colonialism represented. The power to act independently is the guarantee to participate actively and consciously in history. To be colonized is to be removed from history, except in the most passive sense. A striking illustration of the fact that colonial Africa was a passive object is seen in its attraction for white anthropologists, who came to study "primitive society." Colonialism determined that Africans were no more makers of history than were beetles—objects to be looked at under a microscope and examined for unusual features.

p. 225 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/walter-rodney/how-europe-underdeveloped-africa/the-removal-from.md)

> African independence was greeted with pomp, ceremony, and a resurgence of traditional African music and dance. “A new day has dawned,” “we are on the threshold of a new era,” “we have now entered into the political kingdom”—those were the phrases of the day, and they were repeated until they became clichés.

p. 446 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/walter-rodney/how-europe-underdeveloped-africa/african-independence-was.md)

> Some of the contradictions between the content of colonial education and the reality of Africa were really incongruous. On a hot afternoon in some tropical African school, a class of black shining faces would listen to their geography lesson on the seasons of the year—spring, summer, autumn, and winter. They would learn about the and the river Rhine but nothing about the of or the river . If those students were in a British colony, they would dutifully write that "we defeated the in 1588"—at a time when Hawkins was stealing Africans and being knighted by Queen Elizabeth I for so doing. If they were in a French colony, they would learn that "the , our ancestors, had blue eyes," and they would be convinced that "Napoleon was our greatest general"—the same Napoleon who reinstituted slavery in the Caribbean island of , and was only prevented from doing the same in Haiti because his forces were defeated by an even greater strategist and tactician, the African Toussaint L'Ouverture.

p. 246 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/walter-rodney/how-europe-underdeveloped-africa/some-of-the.md)