There are no statutes of limitation on imperialism. Just because US multinationals are ignoring most of Subsaharan Africa today, we can not forgive or forget that the damage was already done. Walter Rodney's "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa" leaves no doubt that imperialism left the continent in a shattered state. The absence of foreign investment today is not so much a sign of "benign neglect", but rather that the bones have been already been picked clean. Colin Leys, on the Socialist Register editorial board, has written an analysis of underdevelopment in Africa that elaborates on these points. Titled "Rise and Fall of Development Theory", it attempts to skirt the dialectical poles of the sort of stagist Marxism represented by James Heartfield and the late Bill Zimmer, both of whom argue that more foreign investment was needed in Africa if anything, and "dependency theorists" on the other who blame everything on capitalist penetration. Leys's basic argument is that Africa is suspended between 2 modes of production. It has not fully uprooted precapitalist social and economic formations, but at the same time it has not been attractive enough to outside capitalist investors to warrant the full-scale transformation that has taken place in much of East Asia, for example. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
