Development, Part 7b
The Rise and Fall of
Neo-Colonialism
Today’s main item is Chapter 8 of Colin Leys’ 1975 book
“Underdevelopment in Kenya” (attached, and downloadable from the link below).
This book was researched in Kenya and published 2-3 years after Rodney’s
Dar-es-Salaam-written “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”.
“Underdevelopment in Kenya” is remarkable (like Engels’ “Condition of
the Working Class In England”, for example) for being written in the right
place at the right time, by a man who was able to see what he was looking at,
know that it was something new and important, and describe it properly.
What Leys saw was not only post-colonial class formation, but also the
beginnings, in 1975, of the “neo-liberal” and “Washington Consensus” policies
that have cursed us ever since, but which now, at last, appear to be on their
way out.
The fourth linked item of the week
is a more deliberately scholarly essay by David Moore, as compared to
the short newspaper article of his that we used two days ago, and written in
the same year, 2004.
Moore’s essay rehearses parts of the factual background of capitalist
colonialism and reviews some of the works of the then-fashionable theorists,
who now, eleven years later, seem out-of-date (which Walter Rodney, for
example, or Lenin, will never be).
No doubt David Moore contributed to the demise of the theories that he
described and criticised, thereby doing a good service to us all.
The two documents introduced above are together bigger than a normal
post in this series. But both are valuable and both contribute substantially to
this collection of material on development. Therefore they go out together,
today, for the sake of maintaining a well-rounded archive, and for those who
may wish to read them.
Images:
Top: Photo of the then President of the Republic of Kenya
Jomo Kenyatta posing in pseudo-traditional regalia prepared by former
colonialists (Disclosure: I, your VC, was working for a different department in
the company that made this regalia at the time);
Middle: photo of a bronze public statue of Kenyatta wearing
the same phony theatrical robes, providing a long-term image of the
neo-colonial mummeries for posterity.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Contradictions of
Neo-Colonialism, Leys, 1875; The Second Age of the Third
World, Moore, 2004.
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