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by Joseph R. Gibson (Author)
The fact that 50% of the world's currently impoverished is African is a calculated result of European and American neocolonialism in Africa, a concept Dr. Walter Rodney could only began to analyze. What he did thoroughly recognize is that "in order to understand present economic conditions in Africa, one needs to know why it is that Africa has realized so little of its natural potential, and one also needs to know why so much of its present wealth goes to non-Africans who reside for the most part outside of the continent." I wrote this book for two reasons. One, Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is arguably the most brilliant and influential book I've personally ever read. As a social studies teacher, I can't teach a world history, economics, or global issues lesson without somehow referring to it. Same thing goes for many of the books I've written. However, with all due respect to Dr. Rodney who himself even realized that "ideally an analysis of underdevelopment should come even closer to the present than the end of the colonial period in the 1960s. The phenomenon of neo-colonialism cries out for extensive investigation in order to formulate the strategy and tactics of African emancipation and development. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa] does not go that far," but How Europe and America Are Still Underdeveloping Africa does. Moreover, several current issues related to neocolonial underdevelopment in Africa, which are again beyond the scope of Rodney's original volume, need special emphasis, such as the tyrannical role of the International Monetary Fund and its Structural Adjustment Policies, the assassinations of several socialist African leaders like Muammar Gaddafi, water privatization, the external debt crisis, global warming, environmental racism, the scramble for African oil, genetically modified food with "Terminator" technology, land grabbing for agrofuel production and export, AFRICOM, endemic African-on-African violence, joblessness, food insecurity and imported food dependency, father hunger, endemic HIV/AIDS, toxic waste colonialism, and hazardous drug trials led by and for the principal benefit of Western pharmaceutical companies. Two, is the impact of the image of Africa accepted by African-Americans on our collective self-concept. The image of Africa internalized by African-Americans largely determines our self-concept and self-confidence, and if that image is egregiously negative, then we, especially African-Americans, should have access to the true reasons why this image exists. The situations that this negativity is based on are often blamed on corrupt, rapacious, immoral African leaders and the haplessly apathetic African masses, with little if any mention of the fact that European and American governments and multinational corporations are still intentionally underdeveloping Africa.
