The roots of African hunger lie deep in the structure of the most persistent of colonial institutions in the continent — the export out of sub-Saharan Africa of plantation agricultural cash crops to the markets of Europe and North America. Long after Europe had abandoned the slave trade, slavery and the colonies themselves, it remained, together with its successor states in North America, determined to maintain hegemony over those former imperial territories, and particularly to retain uninterrupted access to African resources. So it educated Africa to maintain its colonial institutions for achieving ‘progress’ and ‘development’. This gave birth, among other things, to an entire stream of economic development literature legitimizing the perpetuation of colonialism in Africa under the guise of development.
