Privatizing Prisons: Rhetoric and Reality Book

The first three chapters, on development in general, and development in Africa before the arrival of Europeans, and development in Europe, were quite dull, though the second has many fascinating snippets of information, it was too brief a tour to give the subject the kind of attention that would make it enjoyable rather than necessary, and I wasn't convinced that measuring social conditions in the various African societies against a very Eurocentric model of so-called development was actually needed or even appropriate. Nonetheless, the book became much better, in my opinion, when it arrived at the main subject, the exploitation of Africa and Africans by Europeans.

The last three chapters cover the period of slavery, the period of colonialism, independence, and "the supposed benefits of colonialism for Africa". These chapters are full of excellent material that remains highly relevant given that Europeans continue to assert that colonialism was beneficial and to exploit African countries and other regions. Like many texts, this one makes clear how Europeans gained our wealth through plunder and exploitation.

Among the many things pointed out by Rodney that I hadn't known or realised the importance of before, or just found especially salient, were:

- The effect of depopulation by the European slave trade, which removed able-bodied adults from Africa. It seems obvious that this would cause economic problems for the preyed-on region, but I had never thought of this, because I had not grasped the sheer scale of that slave trade.

- The effect of European monopolies and trade rules on technology and innovation in Africa, and, relatedly, the huge benefits of trading internally and locally. Globalization of capitalism == neo-colonial exploitation, and to fight it, ditch oppressive trade treaties, support local industries, trade with your neighbours.

- "Throughout the colonial period the [difference between the prices of exported raw materials and imported manufactured goods] got worse [in Europe's favour]. In 1939, with the same quantity of primary goods colonies could buy only 60% of manufactured goods which they bough in the decade 1870-80 before colonial rule. By 1960, the amount of European manufactured goods purchasable by the same quantity of African raw materials had fallen still further. There was no objective economic law which determined that primary produce should be worth so little. Indeed, the developed countries sold certain raw materials like timber and wheat at much higher prices than a colony could command. The explanation is that the unequal exchange was forced upon Africa by the political and military supremacy of the colonizers, just as in the sphere of international relations unequal treaties were forced on small states in the dependencies, like those in Latin America"

- Colonies were taxed. Africans paid for "the upkeep of the governors and police who oppressed them and served as watchdogs for private capitalists... taxes and customs duties were levied in the nineteeth century with the aim of allowing the colonial powers to recover the costs of the armed forces which they dispatched to conquer Africa. In effect, therefore, the colonial governments never put a penny into the colonies."

- "Finally, when all else failed, colonial powers resorted widely to the physical coercion of labor - backed up of course by legal sanctions, since anything which the colonial government chose to do was 'legal.' [...] the simplest form of forced labour was that which colonial governments exacted to carry out "public works." Labor for a given number of days per year had to be given free for these "public works" - building castles for governors, prisons for Africans, barracks for troops, and bungalows for colonial officials. A great deal of this forced labor went into the construction of roads, railways and ports to provide the infrastructure for private capitalist investment and to facilitate the export of cash crops. Taking only one example from the British colony of Sierra Leone, one finds that the railway which started at the end of the nineteenth century required forced labour from thousands of peasants driven from the villages. The hard work and appalling conditions led to the death of a large number of those engaged in work on the railway. In British territories, this kind of forced labor (including juvenile labor) was widespread enough to call forth in 1923 a "Native Authority Ordinance" restricting the use of compulsory labor for porterage, railway and road building. More often than not, means were found of circumventing this legislation. An international Forced Labor Convention was signed by all colonial powers in 1930, but again it was flouted in practice."

In the last chapter, Rodney dismisses the still popular argument that colonialism somehow benefited the colonies. "The argument suggests that, on one hand, there was exploitation and oppression, but on the other hand, colonial governments did much for the benefit of Africans and they developed Africa. It is our contention that this is completely false. Colonialism had only one hand - it was a one-armed bandit. What did colonial governments do in the interest of Africans? Supposedly, they built railroads, schools, hospitals and the like. The sum total of these services was amazingly small."

First, he points out the paltriness of the total expenditure on social services in the colonies, then he shows how the vast majority of these services were provided for white settlers and expatriates:

"it is well known that whites created an infrastructure to afford themselves leisured and enjoyable lives"

"Ibadan, one of the most heavily populated cities in Africa, had only about 50 Europeans before the last war. For those chosen few, the British colonial government maintained a segregated hospital service of 11 beds in well-furnished surroundings. There were 34 beds for the half-million blacks [...] altogether the 4,000 Europeans in the country in the 1930s had 12 modern hospitals, while the African population of at least 40 million had 52 hospitals."

Rodney goes on to discuss how exploited workers in unhealthy industries, such as miners, had no access to health care, and rural areas which produced cash crops had no social services at all. Social services to which Africans did have access were provided solely to facilitate exploitation.

"[Roads and railways] had a clear geographical distribution according to which particular regions needed to be opened up to import-export activities. Where exports were not available, roads and railways had no place. The only slight exception is that certain roads and railways were built to move troops and make conquest and oppression easier"

"Apologists for colonialism are quick to say that the money for schools, hospitals, and such services in Africa was provided by the British, French or Belgian taxpayer [...] It defies logic to admit that the profits from a given colony in a given year totalled several million dollars and to affirm nevertheless that the few thousand dollars allocated to social services in that colony was the money of European taxpayers!"

I will leave out huge swathes of material on areas like banking, agriculture (the disastrous creation of monocultures, for example) and industry, and discussion of the negative economic, political and social effects of colonialism in this chapter, including on the status of women. Colonialism created the conditions for neo-colonial exploitation and dependence. But the one thing I found most interesting and impressive about Rodney's work is his discussion of education.

Pre-colonial education in Africa was outstandingly relevant, he explains, in contrast to colonial education, the main purpose of which "was to train Africans to help man the local administration at the lowest ranks and staff the private capitalist firms staffed by Europeans. In effect, that meant selecting a few Africans to participate in the domination and exploitation of the continent as a whole [...] it sought to instill a sense of deference towards all that was European and capitalist. Education in Europe was dominated by the capitalist class. The same class bias was automatically transferred to Africa; and to make matters worse the racism and cultural boastfulness harboured by capitalism were also included in the package of colonial education. Colonial schooling was education for subordination, exploitation, the creation of mental confusion, and the development of underdevelopment."

Rodney quotes statistics showing the small number of school places. The levels of secondary education were low, and higher education almost non-existent. What education there was included generous doses of propaganda. The more education a person received, the more alienated and separated from their culture they became. Abdou Moumini is quoted: "colonial education corrupted the thinking and sensibilities of the African and filled him with abnormal complexes". The church played its part: "[its] role was primarily to preserve the social relations of colonialism [...] therefore, [it] stressed humility, docility, and acceptance."

Despite this (and this is the exciting part), Africans struggled hard to gain education, and the fruit of that struggle, ultimately, in combination with other aspects of liberation struggle, was independence.

"The educated played a role in African independence struggles far out of proportion to their numbers, because they took it upon themselves and were called upon to articulate the interests of all Africans."

"If there is anything glorious about the history of African colonial education, it lies not in the crumbs which were dropped by European exploiters, but in the tremendous vigor displayed by Africans in mastering the principles of the system that had mastered them. In most colonies, there was an initial period of indifference towards school education, but once it was understood that schooling represented one of the few avenues of advance within colonial society, it became a question of African clamoring and pushing the colonialists much further than they intended to go."

Africans everywhere put their money (often savings were hard won through self-denial) into building schools, and put pressure on colonial institutions to provide schooling. Administrations were unwilling to comply. The Beecher report on education in Kenya:Illiterates with the right attitude to manual employment are preferable to products of the schools who are not readily disposed to enter manual employmentKenya had two independent school associations (as mentioned by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, although I forget in which book), which were immediately closed when the Mau Mau war for liberation broke out.

"it was not really necessary to get the idea of freedom from a European book. What the educated African extracted from European schooling was a particular formation of the concept of political freedom. But, it did not take much to elicit a response from their own instinctive tendency for freedom [...] that universal tendency to seek freedom manifested itself among Africans even when the most careful steps were taken to extinguish it [...] Teachers were supposed to have been steeped in the culture of domination [...] but in the end, many of them stood in the vanguard of national liberation movements."

The chapter ends by emphasising that the mass of the people were involved in winning independence, but a detail account of the process would require a long text for each state, so it is not given. The post-independence (or postcolonial) situation and neo-colonial exploitation is left for other books to address.