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Walter Rodney citations
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Walter Rodney, né le 23 mars 1942 et mort assassiné le 13 juin 1980 à Georgetown, est un militant de la cause noire, un historien et un homme politique guyanien. Wikipedia  

✵ 23. mars 1942 – 13. juin 1980
Walter Rodney: 50   citations 0   J'aime

Walter Rodney: Citations en anglais

“That is a profound revelation of the difference between capitalist and pre-capitalist societies; and when capitalism came into contact with the still largely communal African societies, it introduced money relations at the expense of kinship ties.”

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Walter Rodney livre How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 338.

“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. A chain reaction was started by European demand for slaves (and only slaves) and by their offer of consumer goods—this process being connected with divisions within African society.”

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Walter Rodney livre How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 119.

“The capitalists misinformed and miseducated workers in the metropoles to the point where they became allies in colonial exploitation. In accepting to be led like sheep, European workers were perpetuating their own enslavement to the capitalists. They ceased to seek political power and contented themselves with bargaining for small wage increases, which were usually counter-balanced by increased costs of living. They ceased to be creative and allowed bourgeois cultural decadence to overtake them all. They failed to exercise any independent judgment on the great issues of war and peace, and therefore ended up by slaughtering not only colonial peoples but also themselves.”

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Walter Rodney livre How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 316.

“Fascism was a monster born of capitalist parents. Fascism came as the end-product of centuries of capitalist bestiality, exploitation, domination, and racism—mainly exercised outside Europe. It is highly significant that many settlers and colonial officials displayed a leaning towards fascism. Apartheid in South Africa is nothing but fascism.”

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Walter Rodney livre How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 316.

“Imperialism is essentially an economic phenomenon, and it does not necessarily lead to direct political control or colonization.”

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Walter Rodney livre How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 214.

“In a way, underdevelopment is a paradox. Many parts of the world that are naturally rich are actually poor and parts that are not so well off in wealth of soil and sub-soil are enjoying the highest standards of living. When the capitalists from the developed parts of the world try to explain this paradox, they often make it sound as though there is something “God given” about the situation.”

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Walter Rodney livre How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 35.

“Development means a capacity for self-sustaining growth. It means that an economy must register advances which in turn will promote further progress. The loss of industry and skill in Africa was extremely small, if we measure it from the viewpoint of modern scientific achievements or even by standards of England in the late eighteenth century. However, it must be borne in mind that to be held back at one stage means that it is impossible to go on to a further stage. When a person was forced to leave school after only two years of primary school education, it is no reflection on him that he is academically and intellectually less developed than someone who had the opportunity to be schooled right through to university level. What Africa experienced in the early centuries of trade was precisely a loss of development opportunity, and this is of the greatest importance.”

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Walter Rodney livre How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 159-160.

“In some quarters it has often been thought wise to substitute the term "developing" for "underdeveloped". One of the reasons for so doing is to avoid any unpleasantness which may be attached to the second term, which might be interpreted as meaning underdeveloped mentally, physically, morally, or in any other respect. Actually, if “underdevelopment” were related to anything other than comparing economies, then the most underdeveloped country in the world would be the U. S. A., which practices external oppression on a massive scale, while internally there is a blend of exploitation, brutality, and psychiatric disorder.”

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Walter Rodney livre How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 25.

“Gold is required in large quantities only in a society which produces a very large economic surplus and can afford to transform part of that surplus into gold for prestige purposes (as in India) or into coinage and money to promote capitalism”

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Walter Rodney livre How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

as in Western Europe
Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 106.

“One South African saying put forward that “the white man has no kin, his kin is money.””

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Walter Rodney livre How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 338.

“The efficient accounting and business methods which are supposed to characterize capitalist firms did not drop from the sky. They are the result of historical evolution, and in that evolution the exploitation of Africa played a key role”

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Walter Rodney livre How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 292.

“Even the widespread resort to shifting cultivation with burning and light hoeing was not as childish as the first European colonialists supposed. That simple form of agriculture was based on a correct evaluation of the soil potential, which was not as great as initially appears from the heavy vegetation; and when the colonialists started upsetting the thin topsoil the result was disastrous. The above remarks show that when an outsider comes into a new ecological system, even if he is more skilled he does not necessarily function as effectively as those who have familiarized themselves with the environment over centuries; and the newcomer is likely to look more ridiculous if he is too arrogant to realize that he has something to learn from the “natives.””

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Walter Rodney livre How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 63.

“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.”

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Walter Rodney livre How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 221.

“The mulatto sons of white traders and the sons of African rulers were the ones who made the greatest effort to learn the white man’s ways. This helped them to conduct business more efficiently. One Sierra Leone ruler in the eighteenth century explained that he wished “to learn book to be rogue as good as white man”; and there were many others who saw the practical advantages of literacy. However, the educational process also meant imbibing values which led to further African subjugation. One West African educated in this early period wrote a Ph. D. thesis in Latin justifying slavery. That was not surprising. The Reverend Thomas Thompson was the first European educator on the Gold Coast, and he wrote in 1778 a pamphlet entitled, The African Trade for Negro Slaves Shown to be Consistent with the Principles of Humanity and the Laws of Revealed Religion.”

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Walter Rodney livre How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 223.

“Instead of speeding up growth, colonial activities such as mining and cash-crop farming speeded up the decay of “traditional” African life. In many parts of the continent, vital aspects of culture were adversely affected, nothing better was substituted, and only a lifeless shell was left.”

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Walter Rodney livre How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 366.

“During the colonial epoch, the British forced Africans to sing”

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Walter Rodney livre How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972)

“After all, if there is no class stratification in a society, it follows that there is no state, because the state arose as an instrument to be used by a particular class to control the rest of society in its own interests.”

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Walter Rodney livre How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 76.

“The resourcefulness of West African market women is well known, but it was put to petty purposes. The problem posed to capitalists and workers in Europe while making insecticide from African pyrethrum was one requiring that resourcefulness be expressed in a technical direction. But the problem posed to an African market woman by the necessity to make a penny more profit on every tin of imported sardines was resolved sometimes by a little more vigor, sometimes by a touch of dishonesty, and sometimes by resort to “juju."”

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Walter Rodney livre How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 365.

“The above praise-song appeared on the back cover of the biography in question; and, since capitalist publishers treat books just like boxes of soap powder, one has admittedly to be suspicious of any advertisement designed to sell the book.”

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Walter Rodney livre How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 200.

“The writer of the above lines (E. W. Bovill), a supposed European authority on the Western Sudan, then goes on to say that silent trade or dumb barter was a feature of the Western Sudan’s gold trade throughout all the centuries until modern times. Actually, the only thing dumb about the trade is what he writes about it. The story of dumb barter for gold in West Africa is repeated in several accounts, starting with ancient Greek scripts. It is clearly a rough approximation of the first attempts at exchange of a people coming into contact with strangers, and it was not a permanent procedure.”

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Walter Rodney livre How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 92.

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