# Quote — Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

> It can be argued that the Arabs of and the n coast were also transformed into agents of European colonialism. At first, they resisted because European colonialism affected their own expansionist ambitions on the East African mainland, but they soon came to an arrangement which gave Europeans the ultimate powers. The Europeans reduced the small Arab clique into political and economic instruments of imperialism. European superiority over the Arabs in East and North Africa and in the Middle East demonstrates conclusively that modern imperialism is inseparable from capitalism, and underlines the role of slavery in the context of capitalism. The Arabs had acquired Africans as slaves for centuries, but they were exploited in a feudal context. African slaves in Arab hands became domestics, soldiers, and agricultural serfs. Whatever surplus they produced was not for reinvestment and multiplication of capital, as in the West Indian or North American slave systems but for consumption by the feudal elite. Indeed, slaves were often maintained more for social prestige than for economic benefit.

- 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: 143
- 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/it-can-be-argued

## 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)