I AM in the final throes of writing a new book. It will be called The Rebirth of the African Phoenix: A View from Babylon.

The new book, which will be published in May by Manifesto Press, widens the scope of my last one, African Uhuru, which was primarily focused on the importance of black communities of resistance in Britain.

This one looks forward to the rebirth of Africa as one of the defining aspects of the remaining three-quarters of the 21st century following centuries of humiliation and exploitation.

One of the joys of writing this book has been rereading some of the classic texts on African liberation.

One of these texts was written by someone who has always been inspirational in helping to shape my political outlook — the great Guyanese scholar and activist Walter Rodney.

His classic 1972 book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is, in my view, one of the seminal texts that must be read by anyone who is serious about understanding why Africa is in the shape that it is.

It also provides a Marxist and Pan-Africanist framework for helping to build an understanding of how the continent can break away from the endemic humiliation and exploitation it has faced for 500 years.

The book helps to provide clarity as to why there can be economic progress in some African nations while millions of Africans live in the most abject poverty with lower life expectancy, sky-high levels of unemployment with the informal sector far outstripping the security of formal employment and the benefits of trade unionism.

Rodney was an academic as well as a working-class revolutionary who was heavily influenced by Marxism. But he was never afraid to use the tool that Marxism provides to develop new thinking that took account of the material circumstances facing the working class and peasant populations of the global South.

Rodney was able to bring together several traditions that engaged with the global South experience.

As well as having a deep understanding of Marxism, Rodney was able to engage confidently with the thoughts of Martinique’s Frantz Fanon, the Pan-Africanist tradition of the likes of George Padmore and CLR James as well as the ideas of African socialism put forward by Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere and Guinea’s Ahmed Sekou Toure.

Being open to this range of ideas meant that Rodney was not boxed into trying to explain the material circumstances that faced the global South by simply trying to equate them with Europe and applying what might work there to working-class and peasant communities on the African continent.

Rodney, along with CLR James, was one of the first people who was ever able to explain to me the legacies of enslavement, colonialism and underdevelopment in a way that you didn’t have to swallow a Marxist dictionary to be able to understand.

I realise that this might be heretical to some reading this where the mastery of theory is turned into a weapon to be used against people that don’t quite meet the standards.

I’m not against theory in the slightest — it is vital to have a firm grasp of Marxist theory, as I have said in these pages before.

But unless we are able to understand how this theory can be turned into revolutionary action then it is not much more than arrogant self-indulgence.

Rodney believed that Africa — far from being an afterthought — has in fact been absolutely central to the growth of Western capitalism.

According to Rodney, this growth was only achieved by the underdevelopment of the African continent through centuries of enslavement, exploitation and imperialism.

Rodney shows that Europe did not merely enrich its own empires but deliberately blocked the economic and social development of Africa.

By utilising his immense skills as a historian Rodney was able to demonstrate how the West was built on the backs of Africans and through the ruthless extraction of the continent’s natural resources.

He talks about how the underdevelopment of Africa is historically produced through capitalist expansion and imperialism. It creates value and wealth for the Western ruling class while making the exploited poorer.

The so-called trading relationship between Europe and Africa was in fact no trade at all. It was pure exploitation.

This exploitation was integral to the unequal relationship that was closely tied up with the growth of European port cities such as Liverpool, with the exchange of enslaved Africans for cheap industrial goods.

The bottom line was that the trade in African human beings provided the British with the capital that was necessary for the success of the Industrial Revolution.

The vastly unequal trade relations meant that technological development across the continent stagnated and blocked the means by which innovation could take place. In my previous column, I pointed out how the “scramble for Africa” led to the exploitation of the vast wealth of raw materials of the continent. Something that we are still witnessing today.

I also pointed out how racism was used to justify European imperialism and how this has always been met by resistance by Africans — whether on the African continent or across the diaspora.

But, as Rodney makes clear in his writings, it is an inescapable fact that the colonisation of Africa was an “indispensable link in a chain of events which made possible the technological transformation of the base of European capitalism.”

Uranium, copper and cobalt from the Congo, iron from West Africa, and chrome from Rhodesia and South Africa were vital for the development of Western capitalism.

Rodney was able to point all of this out in the early 1970s as well as organise in Guyana to develop a Marxist and Pan-Africanist movement for change.

This was scary to the establishment and led to him being killed by the social democrat forces in the country.

My new book will lean on the thoughts of Rodney and many other leading Marxist writers of African descent to help set out some of the often competing challenges that face Africans on the continent and across the diaspora in organising for and building a new multilateral world.

My contention is that Africa will play one of the leading roles in that new multilateral world. Africa and Africans wherever we are will do so by standing on the shoulders of giants such as Rodney and understanding that we don’t need to wait for a hero to emerge to guide us.

We can rebirth Africa through a belief in our own collective strength as Africans and with an understanding that many others, such as Rodney, have already provided us with much of the theoretical foundations we need.

Our job is to add to those foundations where we need to and build on them solid structures based on the principles of Marxism and Pan-Africanism.