With his magnus opus, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, published in 1972, Rodney told the development story of Africa in a way that bears resonance to the African condition today.
Rodney and other radical scholars had begun to approach the problems of development in Africa with a scientific method before the African intellectual landscape became suffused with neo-liberal ideas.
To be sure, Rodney never indulged in wringing hands and blaming only the past for Africa's underdevelopment because as he emphasises in the classic: "None of these remarks are intended to remove the ultimate responsibility for development from the shoulders of Africans."
This is a country that many optimists had proposed to be the fulcrum of African development in a triangular alliance with South Africa and Egypt.
Underdevelopment remains a feature of Africa in 2020 because African governments and their experts fail to learn one thing from Rodney: there should be a political economy approach to development as a process deeply rooted in history.
