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 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, nine
years later, seem out-of-date (which Walter Rodney, for example, or Lenin, will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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