Africa Is Not Poor Because It Has Nothing: It Is Poor Because the World Has Learned How to Take From It

One of the most damaging consequences of colonialism is not simply the wealth that was taken from Africa. It is the intellectual architecture that continues to shape how Africans understand their own continent and how the rest of the world understands it. Africa is routinely presented as a place of poverty, instability, conflict and dependence, while the historical relationships that helped produce those conditions are treated as peripheral to the story. In a widely circulated post, Nigerian journalist David Hundeyin argued that keeping Africans ignorant of the continent's central role in the global economy is a defining feature of Europeanised education. His argument deserves serious attention because it challenges a familiar narrative: that Africa is marginal to the modern world rather than deeply embedded in the systems that created it.

Hundeyin points to the extraordinary natural wealth of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the extraction of African labour and resources during the transatlantic slave trade, the role of African territories in the two world wars, and the use of Congolese uranium in the American atomic bombs dropped on Japan. He also recalls the contribution of African soldiers to the liberation of Europe from Nazi Germany, followed by the massacre of African veterans at Thiaroye in Senegal in 1944. These are not disconnected historical footnotes. They are part of a larger story about how African labour, land and resources have repeatedly been incorporated into global power structures without Africans receiving an equivalent share of the resulting wealth or political influence.

The history of the Congo is particularly revealing. The country's mineral endowment is enormous, and its deposits of cobalt, copper, coltan, diamonds and other strategic materials have made it central to industries far beyond its borders. Yet resource wealth has not translated into broad prosperity for its population. The country's history includes the violence of King Leopold II's personal rule, Belgian colonial exploitation, the overthrow and assassination of Patrice Lumumba, decades of authoritarian government, foreign interference and recurring conflict in its mineral-rich east. The question is not whether the Congo has resources. It is why a country so important to the global economy has struggled to exercise effective control over the value generated by those resources.

Hundeyin's post also draws attention to the relationship between African history and the development of the Americas. The forced transportation of millions of enslaved Africans supplied labour that helped build plantation economies across the Caribbean and the Americas. The wealth generated through slavery, colonial trade and the extraction of raw materials contributed to the accumulation of capital that helped shape the modern Atlantic economy. This history should not be reduced to a simplistic claim that every aspect of Western development came from Africa. But neither should the role of African people and resources be minimised or pushed to the margins of economic history. The modern world cannot be understood honestly without confronting the central place of slavery and colonial extraction in its development.

The Second World War provides another example of how African contributions have been obscured. African soldiers fought in campaigns across Europe, North Africa and other theatres of the war. West African troops served in the Free French forces and helped fight Nazi Germany. In December 1944, Senegalese soldiers who had served France were massacred by French forces at Thiaroye after protesting over unpaid wages and demobilisation conditions. The episode remains a powerful reminder of the contradiction between the language of freedom used by European powers and the treatment of the colonial subjects who fought for them. The men who had helped defend France were not treated as equals when they returned to African soil.

The global economy still reflects many of these unequal relationships, although the mechanisms have changed. African countries frequently export unprocessed minerals and agricultural commodities while importing higher-value manufactured goods. The most profitable stages of production, financing, refining, branding, logistics and distribution are often controlled elsewhere. A country can possess the minerals required for electric vehicles, the agricultural capacity to supply global food markets or the labour needed for industrial production and still capture only a limited share of the final value. This is not explained by geography alone. It is also a question of infrastructure, bargaining power, ownership, capital, technology, governance and the ability to negotiate the terms of international trade.

There are, however, claims in Hundeyin's post that deserve further scrutiny rather than automatic acceptance. Estimates of the Congo's underground wealth, including the widely repeated figure of $24 trillion, depend on assumptions about mineral quantities, prices, recoverability and the cost of extraction. They should not be treated as a verified cash value sitting beneath the ground. The claim that the wars in Ukraine and the Sahel are effectively the same conflict, fought by the same two sides, is also an interpretation of geopolitical developments, not a fact. France's interests in uranium and its former African territories are important subjects for investigation, but they do not mean every event in the Sahel can be reduced to a single French strategy. The strength of an argument about historical exploitation is not diminished by demanding evidence for its most dramatic claims.

What Africans should take from this debate is not merely anger at Europe. It should be a demand for a different understanding of political economy. The continent needs to know what it produces, who owns the companies that extract it, where its commodities are processed, who finances the supply chains, who captures the profits and how much value remains within African economies. It needs universities and schools that teach African history as part of world history, not as an optional regional subject. It needs industrial policy, regional infrastructure, stronger public institutions and the ability to negotiate collectively where individual states are too weak to bargain effectively.

This is why Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains relevant. Rodney did not argue that Africa's history was one of uninterrupted prosperity before European contact. He examined how European expansion and colonial economic structures transformed African societies in ways that served external interests and obstructed independent development. His work remains a foundation for understanding the relationship between imperialism and underdevelopment, even as contemporary researchers must also examine the decisions and responsibilities of African political and business elites.

The most important question raised by Hundeyin's post is one that Africans should ask of the global system: are we regarded as equal participants in the world economy, or are we regarded primarily as the people occupying territory that others want to extract from? A continent cannot secure its future through historical grievance alone. But neither can it build a just future by forgetting how its present was shaped. Africa must understand its history, audit its economic relationships and insist that the wealth generated from its land and labour contributes substantially to the lives of its people.

The world has never treated Africa as irrelevant. It has often treated Africa as indispensable while treating Africans as expendable. That contradiction is one of the central political and economic questions of our time.