POLS 3000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Walter Rodney, Coltan, European Colonialism
5 Oct 2016
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They did not any more history than beetles did and were merely objects to be examined. 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. So long as it lasted, not a single african state could flourish. Banks did very little lending to black africans. The money they did lend was to europeans who were white and this money was actually generated by africans. In this sense, colonies were the generators of capital rather than the countries into which foreign capital was ploughed. What was foreign about the capital in colonial africa was its ownership and not its original source (p. 589) Modern sanitation, electricity, piped water, paved roads, medical services, and schools were as foreign at the end of the colonial period as they were in the beginning.
