A Weaponized Intellects review of A History of Africa that excavates Hosea Jaffe’s uncompromising analysis of colonialism, class formation, and imperial domination—situating his intervention within the liberation struggles of his time and assessing its enduring relevance for understanding Africa, the world system, and the unfinished project of revolutionary transformation today.
By Prince Kapone | Weaponized Information | Weaponized Intellects Book Review | April, 2026
History Is Not Innocent
Hosea Jaffe did not write this book from a quiet corner of the academy, detached from the world he was describing. He wrote it as a South African intellectual forged inside one of the most violent expressions of modern capitalism: apartheid. Born in 1921, shaped within the Non-European Unity Movement, and driven into exile after the repression that followed Sharpeville in 1960, Jaffe belonged to a generation that had already learned—through blood and betrayal—that liberalism would not dismantle empire. By the time A History of Africa appeared in 1985, the illusions had been stripped away. Colonialism had not ended. It had adapted.
1985 is not just the year this book was published. It is also the year I entered this world—born not in South Africa, but in another settler formation: the United States. That matters. Because what Jaffe is dissecting here is not a regional anomaly. It is a global system. The same structure that produced apartheid South Africa produced the United States as a settler empire built on stolen land, enslaved labor, and the ongoing management of colonized populations. I did not come to this book as an outsider looking in. I came to it from inside that system, shaped by its contradictions long before I had the language to name them.
It would take decades before I encountered Jaffe directly. Around 2015–2016, while organizing within the Uhuru Solidarity Movement under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party, this book entered my political life. By that point, I was not new to the question of colonialism. My time studying and organizing—especially while locked up—had already forced me into confrontation with the reality of settler colonialism in the United States. The work of J. Sakai, particularly Settlers, had been decisive in breaking through the mythologies of class neutrality and exposing how the so-called “working class” in the U.S. was historically constituted through the spoils of empire.
But Sakai, for all his sharpness, is focused on the internal anatomy of the settler formation. Jaffe widened the frame. What this book made possible was not just an understanding of settler colonialism as a national structure, but as a moment within a global system. It connected the dots between the plantation, the reserve, the mine, the colony, and the metropolis. It showed that what we were dealing with was not an American exception, but a world-historical process: capitalism as a system built through colonial domination, racial hierarchy, and the restructuring of entire continents.
It was within the political education shaped by Chairman Omali Yeshitela and the theory of African Internationalism that Jaffe’s work found its sharpest use. African Internationalism insists that Africa and African people are not marginal to world history, but central to the development of capitalism itself. Jaffe’s analysis—of colonialism as the foundation of Europe, of Africa as structurally positioned at the base of the global system, of independence as incomplete—provided material grounding that could be seized, tested, and extended within that framework. Not as doctrine, but as ammunition.
This is the context in which this review is written. Not as a neutral reading of a historical text, but as a continuation of ideological struggle. Jaffe is not being approached as an authority to be accepted or rejected wholesale. He is being engaged as a combatant—one who has opened a line of attack against imperialist historiography, but whose work must be sharpened, corrected, and extended in light of both past and present contradictions.
The moment in which Jaffe wrote was defined by a central contradiction: formal colonialism had retreated, but the structure of imperial domination remained intact. The moment in which we read him is defined by the deepening of that same contradiction. Today, the language has changed—globalization, development, partnership—but the underlying relations persist. Africa remains positioned within a world system that depends on its subordination. The mechanisms have evolved—finance capital, debt regimes, multinational corporations, NGO governance—but the direction of value has not.
What Jaffe understood, and what this review will insist upon, is that history is not a passive record of events. It is an active terrain of struggle. The story told about Africa—whether as primitive, developing, or emerging—is never innocent. It serves a function. It justifies a system. To rewrite that history is not an academic exercise. It is to intervene in the ideological foundations of imperialism itself.
The review that follows will not summarize Jaffe’s work. It will engage it—tracking its arguments, extracting its strengths, exposing its limits, and situating it within the ongoing global struggle against capitalism, colonialism, and imperial domination. If this book is a weapon, then our task is not to admire it. It is to use it properly.
Before Europe Called Africa “Backward,” It Had to Forget What Africa Was
Hosea Jaffe opens this part of A History of Africa by going straight for one of the dirtiest operations in the whole colonial arsenal: the theft of memory. Empire did not only seize land, labor, gold, and bodies. It also seized time. It taught the world to imagine Africa as a continent without history, without development, without political intelligence, without civilization worth mentioning except when Europeans happened to stumble over its ruins and pretend they had discovered what African peoples had already built, inhabited, defended, and remembered for centuries. Jaffe refuses that lie from the first pages. He reminds us that long before the smug parade of European explorers, Arab-African historians and travelers had already written of the civilizations of the Sudan, the Niger regions, Nubia, Meroe, Axum, Zanj, and other centers of social life and political organization. That point matters. It is not a decorative correction to the record. It is a strike against the colonial conceit that Europe became the custodian of universal history because it had the loudest ships and the bloodiest bayonets.
What gives this opening section its force is that Jaffe does not stop at saying Africa had a past. Plenty of liberals are willing to admit that now, so long as the admission changes nothing. He pushes further. He argues that the “lost past” of Africa was not simply buried by accident or obscured by scholarly neglect. It was actively mediated by colonialism and then reintroduced to the present in a distorted form. That is one of the strongest theoretical moves in this section. The present relation to Africa’s past, he argues, must be understood through the chain of precolonial society, colonial conquest, and liberation struggle. In other words, what survives into the present is not the old world untouched, but the old world broken, recoded, rearranged, and made to serve new masters. The kings and chiefs who appear in colonial and postcolonial Africa are not straightforward survivals from a timeless tradition. They are often the colonial mutation of older institutions, repurposed through conquest, indirect rule, and the ideological machinery of empire. That is an essential insight, because it saves us from two equally useless habits: the liberal habit of treating African tradition as backward debris, and the romantic nationalist habit of treating every precolonial institution as sacred revolutionary inheritance. Jaffe will not let us rest in either illusion.
There is a real strength here. He understands that history is not a museum shelf. It is a battlefield. The African past became politically important again not because professors grew a conscience, but because liberation movements needed to break the colonial narrative that Africa began with conquest and could only be redeemed by Europe. The invocation of Mali, Ghana, Benin, Zimbabwe, and Zanj by figures like Nkrumah, Cabral, Nyerere, Keita, Sekou Toure, and Samora Machel was not nostalgia. It was ideological combat. A colonized people taught to believe they come from darkness must first learn that their conquerors did not find darkness at all, but cities, states, trade routes, metallurgical skill, agricultural systems, schools of learning, armies, political hierarchies, and collective forms of life that had their own logic and their own contradictions. Jaffe is right to insist that this recovery of memory mattered materially. It gave dignity to the colonized. It helped shatter the inferiority complex beaten into them by missionaries, administrators, textbooks, and rifles.
But Jaffe is too serious a thinker to leave the matter there. He takes a knife to the sentimental version of “African socialism” that presents the precolonial past as one long village picnic occasionally interrupted by a drum circle. He insists that the old societies of Africa were not only communal. They were also hierarchical, conflict-ridden, and in many cases exploitative. This is the central contradiction of the section and the hinge on which the whole argument turns. Against the old colonial historians who stressed only tyranny, and against the flattering nationalist myths that stress only harmony, Jaffe proposes that many precolonial African societies were best understood through a communal-despotic dialectic. That phrase is not elegant, but it is useful. He is trying to describe societies in which land was often held communally, where cooperative labor and kinship organization formed the basis of production and social reproduction, yet where tribute, slavery, caste, chiefly domination, priestly authority, and inter-tribal hierarchy could and did exist. In plain language: the absence of capitalism did not mean the absence of oppression. That should not scandalize anyone except those who still think history is improved by lying about it.
One of Jaffe’s most important contributions in this section is his refusal of the European stage-play version of world history, that tired old script where every society is expected to march in formation through slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and only then perhaps, if it behaves itself, something beyond. Jaffe uses Marx’s correspondence with Vera Zasulich and the wider debate around non-European development to insist that the Western European sequence is not a universal law. This is a decisive point. Africa did not fail to become Europe. Africa developed according to different historical conditions, different property relations, different ecological settings, and different forms of political organization. That is why his discussion of land matters so much. Again and again he returns to the absence of generalized private property in land across much of precolonial Africa. That alone places a stick in the spokes of a great deal of lazy Marxism. European categories, when applied mechanically, do not clarify Africa. They flatten it. Jaffe is strongest when he resists that flattening.
His treatment of the African Iron Ages helps drive the point home. He will not allow technology to be turned into a cheap measuring rod of civilization, still less into proof that Europe was somehow history’s appointed manager. African societies worked iron, traded over long distances, developed complex forms of agriculture and pastoralism, built social systems around kinship, tribute, and collective labor, and did so without reproducing the same property relations that emerged in Europe. This is an important correction, because the old Eurocentric tale made iron, cities, written culture, and state formation seem to belong naturally to Europe and only accidentally to everyone else. Jaffe shows instead that technological development and social development do not move according to one civilizational timetable. Iron in Africa did not mechanically produce the same class structure as iron in Europe, just as stone in the Americas did not prevent the formation of powerful and stratified societies. In other words, tools matter, but social relations decide what tools mean. That is a point Marx himself would have appreciated, though perhaps with fewer archaeological references and more insults aimed at the professors.
Jaffe’s discussion of Egypt, Nubia, Meroe, Axum, Zanj, the Niger-Sudan complex, Benin, the Congo kingdoms, and Zimbabwe is part historical reconstruction and part argument against the bourgeois belief that Africa only entered the world when Europe entered Africa. He shows large-scale political formations, trade systems, towns, forms of literacy, military organization, and monumental labor. He also shows their contradictions. In places like Axum and Meroe, communal landholding could coexist with caste hierarchy and slavery. In Zanj, communal rural property could coexist with urban classes based in commerce, craft production, and domestic slavery. In the Niger-Sudan complex, communal village life and lack of private landed property coexisted with dynastic rule, tribute, social differentiation, and long-distance trade in gold, salt, and slaves. This is the section at its best: it refuses both the missionary sneer and the patriotic fairy tale. Africa’s past appears neither as barbaric void nor as innocent Eden, but as a living and changing field of contradiction.
Still, this is also where the limits of Jaffe’s framework begin to show. His effort to escape Eurocentrism remains entangled in categories inherited from European Marxist debates, especially the language of “despotism,” “barbarism,” and the “Asiatic mode.” He uses these terms critically and comparatively, yes, but the residue remains. The problem is not only vocabulary. It is the deeper risk that African history gets translated into concepts forged elsewhere, under other struggles, in response to other archives. At his best, Jaffe uses those categories as tools. At his weaker moments, the tools start using him. There are places where the texture of African social life threatens to disappear behind typologies. One can feel him trying to save specificity while still remaining loyal to a large classificatory system. Sometimes he succeeds brilliantly. Sometimes the system stands over the material like a customs officer, stamping everything before it is allowed to pass.
That tension appears sharply in his treatment of “tribal despotism.” Jaffe is right to reject the modern liberal habit of treating tribe as either a purely cultural identity or an eternal African curse. He shows that tribal formations were historical social structures with internal organization, surplus extraction, political authority, and conflict. He is also right to insist that inter-tribal domination and slavery were real, and that women’s oppression persisted even within communal formations. This helps strip away the sentimental varnish that some currents of postcolonial thought apply to the past. But there is also a danger here. The category of tribe, even when used critically, is never innocent. It has been one of the master-keys of colonial anthropology, one of the favored labels through which Europe reduced nations, peoples, polities, and civilizations into administratively manageable fragments. Jaffe often pushes against that colonial reduction, especially when he emphasizes wide regional formations like Zanj and the Niger-Sudan complex. Yet he sometimes slips back into language that carries too much of the old colonial dust on it. The reader has to keep brushing it off.
What deserves particular attention is Jaffe’s argument about surplus. This is where the prose grows heavy, but the thought turns sharp. He argues that in many precolonial African societies, surplus could be extracted and centralized without generalized private property in land. Kings, courts, priesthoods, and urban strata could command labor, tribute, and goods while formally operating “in the name” of the communal order. This matters because it helps explain how oppression and hierarchy could arise without the exact class forms familiar from Europe. It also helps explain why merchant activity, slavery, and state power could grow inside societies whose basic rural foundation remained communal. Here Jaffe is grappling with a real historical problem: how to think exploitation where the dominant class does not yet look like the neat textbook landlord or capitalist. He is right to resist the notion that class only exists when it comes dressed in European tailoring. At the same time, he is careful to note that many of these formations remained mixed, transitional, and contradictory. Some were proto-class, some had caste elements, some combined communal foundations with urban commercial stratification, and some, like Ethiopia, developed more durable forms of private landed power and serfdom. This is hard terrain, and Jaffe deserves credit for refusing to simplify it into slogans.
The section on Ethiopia is especially important because it disrupts any attempt to smooth all of Africa into one historical pattern. Ethiopia, in Jaffe’s account, stands as an exception in which a distinct kind of feudalized order developed, combining private landed exploitation, church power, serfdom, and persistent communal residues. That exception matters for two reasons. First, it proves that Africa was historically diverse, not a single undifferentiated social block waiting to be named by Europeans. Second, it helps sharpen Jaffe’s broader claim that the dominant African pattern was not European-style feudalism. Ethiopia becomes important precisely because it is not the rule. Here again his historical instinct is stronger than many of his categories. He knows that a theory worthy of the continent must bend to the material, not force the material into pre-cut shapes.
There is another crucial political insight running through this whole part of the book: colonialism did not invent all contradiction in Africa, but it reworked every contradiction it touched. Precolonial slavery was transformed by European expansion into something more extensive, more commercialized, and eventually more integrated into the machinery of primitive accumulation. Existing hierarchies could be intensified, bent, and weaponized. Communal institutions could be hollowed out and then displayed as quaint “traditions.” Merchant networks could be rerouted into imperial extraction. Rulers could become brokers. Conquest did not descend on a blank page. It entered a living social formation and rearranged its contradictions in the interests of Europe. That is why Jaffe’s insistence on studying precolonial society, colonialism, and liberation movements as one connected system remains so valuable. He understands that the past becomes politically intelligible only when we grasp the violence that mediated it into the present.
What, then, are we to take from this first part of Jaffe’s book? We should take a great deal. We should take his demolition of the lie that Africa lacked civilization, development, or historical movement. We should take his insistence that land relations matter, that the absence of generalized private property marks a real historical divide with Europe, and that capitalism was not the natural ripening of all human society but a particular and violent path. We should take his understanding that communal forms and oppressive hierarchies could coexist, and that revolutionary analysis must tell the truth about both. We should take his warning that colonialism does not simply destroy the past; it mutates it and sends the mutation forward under the mask of tradition. All of that is immensely useful.
But we should not take everything. We should reject any lingering temptation to make “despotism” do more explanatory work than the evidence can bear. We should be wary whenever African history is made legible only by passing through European conceptual customs. We should note, too, that Jaffe sees women’s oppression clearly enough to mention it, but not deeply enough to theorize how gendered labor and patriarchal power were woven into these formations. And while he is right to insist on internal contradiction, we must refuse any reading that lets those contradictions blur the decisive fact that Europe’s intervention did not merely join the story; it broke the scale of the violence, rewired the social order, and subordinated the continent to the accumulation of capital abroad.
Even so, Jaffe has done something important here. He has torn a hole in the colonial curtain. Behind it we do not find paradise. We find history: uneven, inventive, communal, stratified, dynamic, wounded, and unfinished. That is better than paradise anyway. Paradise is for preachers and tourism brochures. History is for people trying to understand how a continent that built cities, forged iron, sustained trade, organized communal production, and generated its own political forms was then chained, looted, partitioned, and told it had never amounted to anything. Jaffe helps restore that history to motion. Our task is to push further: to take what is living in his reconstruction, strip away what remains trapped in Euro-Marxist framing, and bring the African past into revolutionary clarity not as nostalgia, not as folklore, but as part of the long and unfinished struggle against imperialism.
Europe Was Not Born at Home
If the first part of Jaffe’s book cleared the colonial rubble away from Africa’s buried past, this second part does something even more dangerous: it drags Europe itself into the dock. Not Europe as the schoolbook fantasy of cathedrals, reason, and little powdered philosophers murmuring about liberty while other men did the dirty work. Not Europe as the glowing center of civilization, benevolently radiating progress to the unfortunate. Jaffe’s argument is far more devastating than that. He insists that Europe did not first become “great” and then go abroad. It went abroad because it was not enough unto itself. It had to break out through conquest, slaving, plunder, and colonial seizure. In his telling, Europe is not the author of world history but one of its most violent products, hammered into coherence through the looting of Africa, the Americas, and Asia. That is the first great strength of this section. Jaffe does not treat colonialism as an extension of Europe’s maturity. He treats it as part of Europe’s birth process. The continent that later strutted around calling itself civilized had to first feed on the labor, gold, land, and bodies of the rest of the world. The gentleman arrived after the pirate, and in truth he never fully replaced him. He merely learned better table manners.
Jaffe begins with a sharp contrast. In much of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, production had long been oriented toward use, toward reproduction of communal life, even where hierarchy and despotism existed. In Europe, however, exchange-value increasingly became the ruling principle. This was not because Europeans were somehow blessed with a superior civilizational instinct for markets, but because the social and ecological limits of Europe pushed its ruling strata outward. Here Jaffe is pushing against one of the deepest lies in bourgeois historiography: that capitalism emerged as an almost natural flowering of European ingenuity. He says instead that it was driven forward by need, competition, scarcity, and above all by the violent search for external sources of wealth. The early chronology he lays out is not there just to impress the reader with names and dates. It is there to show method. Before the Berlin Conference, before the full imperial partition, before the polished rhetoric of empire, there was already a long rehearsal of raiding, mapping, encirclement, missionary penetration, slaving forts, and maritime predation. The conquest of Africa did not fall from the sky in the nineteenth century. It was prepared over centuries by merchant capital, papal blessing, armed Christianity, and the patient construction of primitive accumulation.
This is why Jaffe’s formulation that colonialism is the genesis of Europe carries such force. He is not making a rhetorical point. He is making a historical-materialist one. Europe, as a unified consciousness and interest, did not simply preexist colonial expansion. It was produced through it. The Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, English, Germans, Danes, and others did not first become Europeans in some neutral cultural chamber and then sail outward carrying a ready-made identity in their pockets. They became a world-historical bloc through common antagonism to Africa, Asia, and the Americas, even while they fought one another over the spoils. Colonialism gave them both a shared interest and a shared self-image. Their unity was born in plunder; their disunity was over how to divide it. That is a magnificent reversal of the usual civilizational fable. Europe is not the source from which colonialism flows. Colonialism is one of the furnaces in which Europe is forged.
And yet Jaffe goes further still. He argues that with colonialism came not only Europe as a political-historical formation, but “the European” as a human type and race itself as a ruling mythology. This is one of the most important arguments in the whole book. Jaffe’s point is not that prejudice suddenly appeared out of nowhere in the fifteenth century. Human beings have always found foolish ways to distinguish themselves from one another. His point is more precise and more dangerous: race, in the modern sense, was consolidated as an instrument of conquest, labor control, enslavement, and expropriation under colonialism. The African did not become “Black” in the modern racial sense before Europe needed Blackness as a category of domination, just as the European did not become properly “white” before colonialism made whiteness materially useful. Race was not simply an idea draped over conquest after the fact like a bad sermon over a robbery. It was one of the tools of conquest itself, one of the organizing principles through which land was seized, labor was disciplined, cities were segregated, reserves were established, and whole peoples were taught that they were less than human. Jaffe is exactly right here. Race is not a side effect of capitalism. It is one of the active forms through which capitalist-colonial rule was built and stabilized.
That line of thought makes his treatment of racialism especially sharp. He refuses the liberal habit of treating racism as ignorance, hatred, or moral failure floating in the air above history. For Jaffe, racialism is practical. It is administrative. It is territorial. It is ideological, yes, but only because it is also material. It helps unify the conquerors and disarm the conquered. It breaks solidarity, normalizes expropriation, converts human beings into labor reservoirs, and rationalizes the transformation of the colonized into an exploitable and disposable mass. Here Jaffe is very close to the best currents of anti-colonial and Black radical thought, even if he does not always use their language. He sees racialism as an active social force. He is unsparing in showing that it permeated the whole structure of European society, not just the bourgeoisie or colonial administrators. Churchmen, traders, settlers, soldiers, liberals, abolitionists, and even large sectors of the European working class moved through the colonial world carrying racial assumptions like packed rations. That is a hard truth, but a necessary one. Too much European socialism has tried to hide its colonial luggage under the bed and then act surprised when the whole room stinks of empire.
Jaffe’s account of resistance is equally important because it demolishes another old fairy tale: that Africa simply crumbled before European invasion. No. Jaffe gives us centuries of resistance, uprisings, military defeats inflicted on European powers, destroyed forts, armed rebellions, religious insurrections, peasant struggles, slave revolts, urban uprisings, anti-missionary campaigns, and prolonged wars of defense. From the Khoi-Khoin and Xhosa to the Ashanti, from Mombasa to Mozambique, from Samory to Lobengula, from El Hadj Omar to Bambatta, Jaffe reconstructs a continent that fought back again and again. This matters politically because imperial historiography has always needed the colonized to appear passive, disorganized, or doomed by internal backwardness. Jaffe refuses that. He insists that resistance was not incidental. It was structural. The very scale of the forts, prisons, missions, and military apparatus tells the story. These were not built because Africans were docile. They were built because Africans resisted so fiercely that slaving and conquest had to be fortified at every step.
Still, Jaffe is too serious to turn resistance into a romance. He does not flatten the question into heroes on one side and villains on the other. Instead, he introduces what may be the most fruitful contradiction in the section: the contradiction of resistance and collaboration. Colonial invasion, he argues, produced both, and both emerged from the contradictory structure of precolonial society itself. The communal side of those societies, rooted in collective land, mutual obligation, and the material basis of autonomous social reproduction, generated resistance. The despotic side, rooted in hierarchy, tribute, chiefly privilege, and domination, could incline toward collaboration. That is an important insight, because it keeps us from writing anti-colonial history as a church pageant. Yet Jaffe is also careful to note that many rulers who were unquestionably despotic in their own internal order became historically progressive in relation to colonial invasion. Why? Because what they defended, however imperfectly and however inconsistently, was a social world whose communal foundations were being destroyed by a far more expansive and destructive enemy.
This is where Jaffe’s discussion of what we might call the “despotic resister” becomes especially useful. Colonial powers habitually accused African rulers of defending slavery, barbarism, and tyranny. Jaffe refuses to take that accusation at face value. He points out that while many of these societies indeed contained hierarchy and even slavery, colonialism transformed slavery on an altogether different scale, tied it to global accumulation, privatized land, racialized labor, and remade whole populations into reservoirs of cheap and unfree work. In that context, a ruler who resisted colonialism could be defending something historically more progressive than the system trying to replace him, even if his own rule was marked by oppression. This is exactly the kind of dialectical clarity liberal historiography cannot tolerate. It wants every anti-colonial resister to be either a flawless democrat or a reactionary tyrant. Jaffe says no. History is not so neat. Menelik, Moshoeshoe, Cetswayo, Behanzin, Samory, and others do not need to be polished into saints in order for us to see that their resistance to capitalist colonial invasion had a just and progressive content. That is not moral confusion. It is historical seriousness.
There is, however, a limit here that our review must not evade. Jaffe is right to defend the legitimacy of anti-colonial resistance led by contradictory rulers, but we must take care not to slide from that into any kind of restorationist nostalgia. The communal land system being defended may be historically progressive against colonial privatization; the internal hierarchies resting on it are not thereby absolved. One can defend the anti-colonial content of such struggles without pretending that the future lay in restoring every chiefly order to full health. That distinction matters. Revolution does not mean choosing Europe or the chief. It means identifying the social basis worth defending against imperial destruction while also refusing to sanctify older forms of domination. Jaffe gestures toward that balance, though he does not always hold it as tightly as he should.
The most fertile concept in this section, and perhaps the one with the longest afterlife, is Jaffe’s idea of capitalist retribalization. Here he shows real theoretical imagination. Colonialism, he argues, does not simply destroy tribe and replace it with modernity. That is the story settlers, missionaries, and social scientists liked to tell themselves while carving up the continent. What colonialism actually does is more vicious and more cunning. First, it destroys the material basis of precolonial social life: common land, communal labor, autonomous reproduction, chiefs as real custodians of a social order not yet subordinated to capital. Then, after ripping out that living core, it preserves and repackages the shell. It keeps the names, the rituals, the titles, the costumes, the language of custom, and the forms of indirect authority, but empties them of their old substance. The chief becomes a recruiter of labor, a tax collector, a policeman, a local broker of colonial rule. The reserve becomes a “traditional homeland” only in the same way a prison yard is a garden because someone once planted a flower there. In reality it is a labor reservoir, a cheap-labor dump, a device for controlling mobility and reproducing the workforce at minimal cost to capital.
This is one of Jaffe’s most devastating insights because it helps explain the long afterlife of colonial power in postcolonial forms. Colonialism did not preserve tribe; it manufactured a new tribalism under capitalist conditions. It detribalized Africa through conquest and then retribalized it through administration, labor control, racial hierarchy, and indirect rule. That point cuts far beyond the nineteenth century. It helps explain Bantustans, reserves, native authorities, colonial ethnography, and the state management of “customary” identities. It also helps explain why postcolonial regimes so often inherit, manipulate, or speak through these hollowed-out structures. The colonizer cut out the kernel and left the shell. Then later generations are told to treat the shell as ancient authenticity. That is one of the cruelest tricks in the whole history of empire. Jaffe names it well.
His treatment of the slave trade reinforces that argument by showing how colonialism turned older contradictions into mechanisms of generalized ruin. Precolonial slavery and hierarchy existed in many parts of Africa, yes, but colonialism transformed them qualitatively. It expanded the scale, commercialized the process, intensified inter-polity violence, redirected trade, and converted whole sections of society into hunters, porters, sellers, and regulators of human flesh for an international market. Goods flowed in, bodies flowed out, and the social fabric was torn accordingly. The old systems were not simply overwhelmed from outside. They were twisted into service of the new order. Chiefs became brokers, rivalries became markets, collective labor became body-hunting, and communities were pulled into the monstrous arithmetic of accumulation. Here Jaffe’s argument is strong because it is not content with moral outrage. He shows mechanism. He shows conversion. He shows how the old society was not merely crushed but reorganized through the demands of slave trading and land seizure.
At the same time, this is where one of Jaffe’s lingering weaknesses returns. He often frames the social world being transformed in the language of tribe, despotism, and communal residue, and while he uses those terms critically, they remain burdened with colonial dust. The irony is that the man who gives us such a useful account of capitalist retribalization still sometimes writes as though the colonial category of “tribe” were not itself part of the problem. To be fair, he is trying to historicize it, not naturalize it. But the language still carries risks. Our review should preserve the substance of his argument while refusing to let that vocabulary pass unchallenged. Too much blood has been spilled under those labels to use them casually, even in critique.
Another place where we should push beyond Jaffe is in his treatment of colonial forms. His discussion of different kinds of racial colonies is useful, especially insofar as it shows that colonial rule took distinct shapes depending on settlement patterns, slavery, and pre-existing class structures. But the framework does not fully reach the clarity of a more developed theory of settler colonialism. It points in that direction without quite arriving. The distinction matters because in colonies like the United States, South Africa, Algeria, Rhodesia, Kenya, and elsewhere, the settler project is not merely one version of racial domination among others. It is a distinct structure aimed at land seizure, native elimination or confinement, and the building of a new political community over the ruins of the old. Jaffe’s analysis prepares the ground for that insight, but our review should carry it further. He has handed us the spade. We should use it.
Even with those limits, this section of Jaffe’s book is one of the strongest indictments of Europe and one of the strongest defenses of African historical agency that a Marxist historian of his generation could produce. He shows that Europe was not born at home. He shows that race was not an inherited superstition but a colonial instrument. He shows that Africa did not collapse passively but fought, rebelled, regrouped, and fought again. He shows that collaboration was not a mystery but the other side of a contradiction intensified by colonial violence. And he shows, above all, that colonialism does not simply destroy. It destroys and reorganizes. It tears apart and then restitches the wound into a new form that serves accumulation. That is why this section matters so much. It does not just describe colonialism as an external assault. It shows colonialism as a historical process that remade both Europe and Africa, but in opposite directions: one toward accumulation, racial self-invention, and imperial power; the other toward expropriation, fragmentation, and coerced incorporation into the world market.
If Part II of our review dealt with the buried world before the knife, then this part deals with the knife itself and the social order it carved into being. Jaffe has given us much to work with here. What we must now do is sharpen it further. We must take his argument that Europe emerges through colonialism and push it harder against liberal and Western Marxist complacency. We must take his argument that race is produced materially and connect it more explicitly to settler-colonial rule, labor segmentation, and the making of white social blocs. We must take his argument about retribalization and apply it not only to colonial administration but to the later management of ethnic identities, Bantustanization, NGO multiculturalism, and the postcolonial state’s habit of preserving broken shells of social life while serving capital. Jaffe has done the hard work of opening the wound. Our task is not to bandage it with civility. Our task is to make the structure of the injury unmistakable. Only then can the next stage of the review show how the old anti-colonial resistances give way to newer forms of struggle: class struggle, labor rebellion, mass politics, and the difficult emergence of modern African emancipation.
Africa at the Base of the World Pyramid
By the time Jaffe reaches this stage of his argument, the polite fiction of “European development” has already been buried. Now he does something more decisive. He redraws the map of the world—not as a collection of nations politely exchanging goods and ideas, but as a single system built through violence, hierarchy, and forced integration. What emerges is not a story of parallel civilizations moving at different speeds, but a single, unified world capitalist system forged in the collision of radically different social orders. Europe did not climb a ladder and then pull itself upward by its own cleverness. It smashed into other societies, tore them open, and reorganized them. Capitalism, in this telling, is not an internal European miracle. It is the historical product of that global rupture. The so-called “European sequence” of slavery, feudalism, and capitalism only makes sense when placed alongside the destruction of communal and non-capitalist systems across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Europe did not rise beside these worlds. It rose on top of them.
From this vantage point, Africa appears not as the laggard at the edge of history, but as one of its decisive foundations. Jaffe is blunt: the modern world system is a hierarchy, and Africa was forced to the base of its pyramid. This was not geography. It was not destiny. It was organized. A “handful of rich nations” did not simply become rich by working harder or thinking better. They became rich by constructing a system in which the labor, land, and life of entire continents were subordinated to their accumulation. The unity of the world system, Jaffe reminds us, is a unity of opposites. The prosperity of the metropole and the impoverishment of the colony are not separate phenomena. They are two sides of the same process. Europe’s abundance is Africa’s expropriation in another form. Once that is understood, the sentimental language of “development” begins to sound less like progress and more like a polite synonym for organized theft.
What imperialism does to Africa, then, is not merely conquest. It is total reorganization. Jaffe shows how colonial rule dismantled existing social structures and rebuilt them to serve the needs of capital. Land that had been held communally was seized, enclosed, or placed under colonial authority. Labor that had once been organized around social reproduction was redirected toward wage work, forced labor, taxation, and migrant systems. Communities were fractured, not accidentally, but systematically. The so-called “tribe” was first undermined materially—its economic base shattered—and then resurrected in hollowed form as an administrative tool. Chiefs became intermediaries, reserves became labor reservoirs, and entire populations were reorganized into what can only be described as managed scarcity. The result was not modernization in any meaningful sense. It was the production of dependency, unemployment, and a permanent reserve army of labor whose misery was not a failure of the system but one of its conditions of operation.
Here the violence becomes structural. Jaffe insists that what emerges in Africa is not simply capitalism as experienced in Europe, but a harsher, more naked form of it. Wage labor appears, but not as a free exchange between equal parties. It appears alongside dispossession, coercion, taxation, pass laws, and racial hierarchy. The worker is “free” only in the sense that he is free from land, from resources, and from any means of survival except the sale of his labor power. Even that sale is constrained by colonial control. The reserve, the mine, the plantation, and the city are tied together in a system that produces labor cheaply and expends it ruthlessly. Jaffe’s point is unmistakable: capitalism in Africa is not a repetition of Europe’s past. It is a distinct formation, more compressed, more violent, and more openly dependent on coercion. If Europe experienced the industrial revolution as a period of misery, Africa experienced imperialism as a condition of permanent social emergency.
Out of this reorganization emerges a new form of struggle. Jaffe shows that resistance in Africa does not end with the defeat of precolonial states. It transforms. The old wars of defense give way to new struggles rooted in the changing social structure. Workers strike. Peasants revolt. Urban populations mobilize. But these struggles do not look like their European counterparts. In Europe, it was at least possible, for a time, to separate economic struggle from political struggle—to fight for wages here, hours there, reforms somewhere else, while leaving the state intact. In Africa, Jaffe argues, that separation collapses. Every strike becomes political because the employer is tied directly to the colonial state, and the colonial state is tied directly to imperial power. To demand a higher wage is to challenge the entire structure that makes that wage possible. To organize is to confront not just a boss but a system. The worker does not have the luxury of economism. He is pushed, by the very structure of imperialism, into anti-colonial politics.
This is where Jaffe introduces one of his most powerful insights: under imperialism, class struggle takes on an international form. It is not simply worker against capitalist within a single nation. It is oppressed nations against oppressor nations, with classes arranged inside that larger conflict. African workers and peasants find themselves confronting not just local elites, but an entire global system of extraction backed by foreign capital and foreign states. The class struggle is not diluted by this expansion; it is intensified. It becomes clearer. The lines are sharper. The enemy is not hidden behind layers of national compromise. It stands visibly as a bloc of external power fused with internal domination. In that sense, Africa becomes one of the clearest sites in which to observe the real nature of imperialism—not as policy, not as diplomacy, but as a material structure of exploitation on a world scale.
Jaffe pushes the argument further by making a comparison that should unsettle anyone still clinging to European moral superiority. He describes colonial rule in Africa as a form of total domination that anticipates what Europe would later call fascism. Long before fascist regimes took power in Europe, the essential elements were already present in the colonies: the fusion of monopoly capital with state power, the suppression of political freedom, the militarization of society, the use of racial ideology to justify domination, and the systematic organization of labor for the benefit of a ruling bloc. In this sense, fascism does not appear as a sudden European deviation from liberal norms. It appears as a return of colonial methods to the metropole. The violence that Europe practiced abroad eventually came home. That is a difficult truth, but Jaffe does not flinch from it. He reminds us that the colony was not an exception to European values. It was one of their most honest expressions.
At the center of all this stands the African working class, though not in the form familiar to European theory. Jaffe describes a proletariat stripped not only of property but of the minimal securities that even European workers sometimes possessed. This is a proletariat produced through dispossession on a massive scale, pushed into labor markets under coercive conditions, and subjected to levels of exploitation that generate what Jaffe calls “super-surplus value.” The term may sound technical, but the reality is simple enough: African labor is exploited more intensely, more cheaply, and with fewer protections than its European counterpart. The result is not only economic extraction but political radicalization. This proletariat has little to lose and much to gain. It is not cushioned by imperial privilege. It is sharpened by imperial violence.
This brings Jaffe to one of his most controversial but necessary arguments: the European working class cannot be understood in isolation from imperialism. He notes, with a bluntness that will irritate many, that European workers often shared, materially and ideologically, in the benefits of empire. This did not make them uniformly reactionary, nor did it eliminate class struggle within Europe. But it did create a layer of workers whose conditions were stabilized, in part, by the extraction of wealth from the colonies. The result is what Jaffe describes, provocatively, as a “bourgeois proletariat”—a working class that can fight for improvements at home while tolerating, or even supporting, domination abroad. This is not a moral accusation. It is a structural observation. It forces us to rethink any theory of revolution that assumes the European proletariat as the automatic vanguard of global transformation. Jaffe is not dismissing that class. He is situating it. And in doing so, he shifts the center of gravity toward the colonized world.
In Africa itself, the class structure develops under severe constraint. Jaffe emphasizes the relative absence of a fully formed national bourgeoisie. Colonial rule, with its systems of indirect governance, retribalization, and economic control, blocks the emergence of an independent capitalist class capable of leading development on its own terms. Instead, what appears is a fragmented social formation: a large proletarian and semi-proletarian mass, a peasantry under pressure, and a thin layer of intermediaries who hover between roles without consolidating into a stable class. This has important political consequences. Liberation movements cannot rely on a strong national bourgeoisie to carry the struggle forward. They must draw their strength from workers, peasants, and the broader oppressed population. That gives these movements a different character from classical bourgeois revolutions. It also introduces contradictions that will become sharper after independence, when the question of development, state power, and class formation returns with new urgency.
Jaffe does not present this history as a closed chapter. He insists on continuity. The struggles of workers, peasants, and communities under colonialism are not isolated eruptions. They are part of a longer tradition of resistance stretching back into the precolonial period. What changes are the forms, the targets, and the language of struggle. What remains is the refusal to accept domination as natural. This is important because it disrupts the idea that Africa becomes political only when it encounters Europe. On the contrary, Africa carries its own history of struggle into the colonial encounter and reshapes it under new conditions. The result is not silence but a different kind of voice—one that speaks through strikes, revolts, movements, and eventually organized political formations aimed at liberation.
By the end of this section, the contours of the argument are clear. The modern world is not a neutral space of nations interacting. It is a structured system of exploitation in which Africa has been forcibly positioned at the base. Imperialism is not a policy choice but a mode of organizing that system, binding together capital, state power, racial ideology, and social control. Class struggle in Africa cannot be confined within national boundaries because the structure it confronts is global. And the subjects of that struggle—workers, peasants, and the dispossessed—emerge under conditions that make their fight both more difficult and, in some respects, more direct than that of their counterparts in the imperial centers.
Jaffe gives us here a map of the system. It is not a comfortable map. It does not flatter Europe, and it does not romanticize Africa. It shows a world built through violence and maintained through inequality. But it also shows where the pressure points lie. If Africa was made the base of the pyramid, then the stability of the entire structure depends on keeping it there. And if that base begins to shift—through struggle, organization, and the refusal of imposed limits—then the consequences will not remain confined to the continent. They will reverberate through the entire system that was built upon it. That is the implication Jaffe leaves us with, whether he states it directly or not. The question is not only how Africa was placed at the bottom. The question is what happens when those at the bottom decide they are no longer willing to stay there.
Independence Without Power
By the time the colonial flag is lowered and the anthem changes, Jaffe forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: very little of substance has actually moved. The theater is impressive—the ceremonies, the speeches, the careful choreography of sovereignty—but beneath it, the machinery remains largely intact. What disappears is not the system, but its most visible managers. The governor leaves; the structure stays. And if we are not careful, we mistake the changing of uniforms for the changing of power. Jaffe refuses that mistake. He insists that independence, as it unfolded across Africa, was not the end of colonialism but its reorganization. The form shifted. The essence endured.
This is where the concept of neocolonialism emerges not as a slogan but as a diagnosis. Jaffe strips it of its rhetorical fog and presents it plainly: control no longer requires direct administration when economic dependence can achieve the same result more efficiently. The old colonial state, with its overt coercion and visible hierarchy, gives way to a subtler arrangement—trade agreements, financial dependency, investment flows, diplomatic pressure, and strategic influence. Power becomes less theatrical and more embedded. It no longer needs to declare itself openly because it is woven into the very conditions of economic survival. The new African state inherits a flag and a seat at the international table, but it does not inherit control over the terms on which it participates. Sovereignty, in this context, begins to look less like freedom and more like managed autonomy.
Jaffe is at his sharpest when he shows that this is not a failure of leadership or a series of unfortunate decisions. It is structural. The colonial economy was not designed to be self-sustaining. It was designed to extract. Its infrastructure—railways, ports, trade routes, labor systems—was oriented outward, toward the needs of foreign capital. Independence does not automatically reverse that orientation. On the contrary, it often reinforces it. The newly independent state finds itself responsible for maintaining an economy it did not design and cannot easily transform. It must export what it has always exported, import what it has always imported, and operate within a global market whose rules it did not write. In this sense, independence arrives with a built-in constraint. The state is free to govern, but not free to restructure the conditions under which governance occurs.
This constraint is most visible in the question of class formation. Jaffe argues that one of the defining features of postcolonial Africa is the relative absence of a fully developed national bourgeoisie. Colonial rule prevented its emergence, and independence does not magically produce it. What exists instead is a thin layer of intermediaries—administrators, businessmen, political figures—who occupy positions of influence but lack the economic base to function as an autonomous class. They do not control production in any decisive way. They do not command independent capital. Their position depends on their ability to mediate between external forces and internal populations. In other words, they govern, but they do not own the system they govern within.
This creates a peculiar situation. The state appears strong—it has authority, institutions, and international recognition—but its material foundation is weak. It cannot easily industrialize because it lacks capital. It cannot easily diversify because it is tied to existing export patterns. It cannot easily break dependency because doing so would require confronting the very global structures on which it relies for survival. The result is a form of power that is real but limited, visible but constrained. The postcolonial state becomes, in effect, a manager of inherited conditions rather than an architect of new ones.
Jaffe does not stop there. He follows the consequences of this arrangement into the realm of development, where the promises of independence begin to unravel. Development, in the postcolonial context, is presented as a project of catch-up—a way to close the gap between Africa and the industrialized world. But Jaffe shows that the gap is not simply a matter of time or effort. It is built into the structure of the system itself. The same mechanisms that produced underdevelopment under colonial rule continue to operate, albeit in modified form. Trade remains unequal. Capital flows remain asymmetrical. Profits are repatriated. Debt accumulates. Aid arrives, but with conditions attached, shaping policy and limiting autonomy. What is called “development” often functions less as transformation and more as maintenance—a way of stabilizing the system rather than overturning it.
Here Jaffe’s critique cuts through the optimism of modernization theory and the polite language of international institutions. He shows that underdevelopment is not a stage on the way to development. It is a condition that is reproduced by the very processes that claim to overcome it. The economy remains externally oriented. Accumulation occurs elsewhere. The local population bears the costs—unemployment, precarious labor, uneven growth—while the benefits flow outward. If colonialism was direct extraction, neocolonialism is extraction through integration. The mechanism changes, but the direction of value does not.
Within this framework, nationalism reveals both its strength and its limits. It was nationalism that mobilized populations, that articulated the demand for independence, that gave political form to anti-colonial struggle. Jaffe does not dismiss that achievement. But he insists that nationalism reaches a ceiling. It can win the state, but it cannot, on its own, transform the global system in which that state operates. Once independence is achieved, the nationalist project confronts a new reality. The enemy is no longer only external and visible. It is embedded in economic relations, institutional frameworks, and international pressures. The slogans that once united the struggle begin to lose their clarity. The movement becomes a government. And in that transition, contradictions sharpen.
This is where a new ruling layer begins to take shape. It is not a classical bourgeoisie in the European sense, nor is it simply a continuation of colonial authority. It is something in between—a stratum that derives its power from its position within the state and its connections to external capital. It manages resources, negotiates agreements, oversees development projects, and controls access to opportunities. Its interests are not identical to those of foreign capital, but they are often aligned with it. The result is a form of rule that is both national and dependent, autonomous in appearance but constrained in practice. Jaffe does not fully theorize this layer, but he identifies its emergence and its importance. It becomes one of the key actors in the postcolonial landscape, shaping policy, mediating conflict, and, at times, limiting the possibilities of more radical transformation.
What follows from all this is not a simple story of betrayal, though betrayal certainly occurs. It is a story of structural limitation. The horizon of liberation, which once seemed clear and immediate, becomes more complex. The struggle does not end with independence. It changes form. It moves from the terrain of direct confrontation with colonial power to the more intricate terrain of economic restructuring, class formation, and global negotiation. The enemy is no longer only the colonial administrator. It is the system itself, reproduced through new arrangements and new actors.
Jaffe leaves us, then, with a difficult but necessary conclusion. Independence is not nothing. It matters. It creates space, possibilities, and contradictions that did not exist before. But it is not enough. Without control over the material foundations of society—land, labor, production, exchange—political sovereignty remains incomplete. The flag can fly, the anthem can play, the seat at the United Nations can be occupied, and yet the underlying relations of dependence can persist. This is not a failure of will. It is a reflection of the scale of the problem.
The task that emerges from this analysis is therefore not to romanticize the past or to dismiss the achievements of independence, but to recognize their limits and to push beyond them. If colonialism reorganized Africa to serve the needs of external accumulation, and if neocolonialism maintains that orientation through more subtle means, then the question of liberation cannot be confined to political sovereignty alone. It must extend to the restructuring of the economy, the transformation of class relations, and the redefinition of Africa’s place in the world system. Jaffe does not provide a full blueprint for that transformation. But he clears away the illusions that would make it impossible to even begin. And in a world still eager to celebrate independence as the end of the story, that clarity is itself a weapon.
No Liberation Without Rupture
By the time we reach the end of Jaffe’s argument, the illusion has nowhere left to hide. Not in the myth of a primitive Africa waiting for Europe. Not in the fantasy of a benevolent colonialism that brought development. Not even in the comforting story that independence resolved the question. What remains, stripped of decoration, is a system—coherent, global, and violent—built through the conquest and restructuring of Africa and sustained through its continued subordination.
Jaffe’s greatest contribution is not that he tells a different story about Africa. It is that he forces us to confront the fact that Africa is not a side chapter in world history. It is one of its foundations. Capitalism did not expand into Africa. It was constructed through processes that tore Africa apart, reorganized its societies, and integrated them into a world system designed for extraction. Europe did not rise first and then dominate. It rose through domination. Race was not an incidental prejudice. It was forged as a tool to stabilize that domination. These are not academic corrections. They are blows against the ideological scaffolding that continues to justify the present.
At the same time, Jaffe’s work carries its own contradictions. He breaks decisively with Eurocentric history, but not entirely with Eurocentric language. He identifies the limits of nationalism, but does not fully map the path beyond it. He exposes the structure of neocolonialism, but only begins to theorize the class forces that reproduce it in the postcolonial state. These are not small gaps. They are the points where the struggle must continue. To treat Jaffe as complete would be to betray the very method he is trying to apply.
What this review has attempted to do is not resolve those contradictions, but to work through them—to take what is sharp and make it sharper, to take what is incomplete and push it further. Through the lens of African Internationalism and the broader anti-colonial revolutionary tradition, the outlines become clearer. The colonial contradiction is not secondary. It is central. The division between oppressor and oppressed nations is not an abstraction. It is a material structure that organizes the global system. And the question of liberation cannot be confined to political sovereignty. It must confront the economic, social, and ideological foundations of imperial power.
That is where Jaffe’s analysis finds its fullest use—not as a finished map, but as a set of coordinates. It tells us where the system was built, how it was built, and why it persists. It shows us that resistance did not begin yesterday and has never been absent. It exposes the limits of solutions that leave the underlying structure intact. And it points, however incompletely, toward the necessity of rupture.
Because that is the conclusion we are left with, whether Jaffe states it directly or not. There is no path to liberation that runs through the maintenance of the existing system. There is no reform that can reverse a structure built on extraction without confronting that extraction itself. There is no independence that can become real without control over land, labor, production, and exchange. Anything less is management. Anything less is adaptation. Anything less leaves the foundation untouched.
The present only sharpens this reality. The mechanisms have evolved—finance capital, debt regimes, digital infrastructure, global supply chains—but the structure remains recognizable. Africa continues to be positioned as a site of extraction. The global South continues to bear the weight of a system that depends on its subordination. The language has changed, but the direction of power has not. If anything, the system has become more sophisticated in disguising its operations, more diffuse in its mechanisms, and more entrenched in its reach.
And yet, the same is true of resistance. It has not disappeared. It has adapted. From strikes to uprisings, from land struggles to anti-imperialist movements, from organized political formations to spontaneous revolts, the refusal of domination continues. It carries with it the memory of past struggles and the possibility of future ones. That continuity is not accidental. It is the other side of the system’s persistence.
So the task is clear. Not to romanticize the past. Not to settle for the present. But to understand the structure we are confronting well enough to break it. Jaffe gives us part of that understanding. He shows us where to look and what to question. He dismantles the stories that would keep us disarmed. What he does not give us—and what no single book can give—is the finished strategy.
That must be built in struggle.
What this book offers, then, is not closure, but clarity. And clarity, in a world organized by illusion, is already a form of weaponry.
Weaponized Information 
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