The conventional belief in capitalist theory that economic dependence is a transitional phase is overruled by dependency theory as the peripheral country never gets the chance to become an equal competitor on the free market. Proponents of “ dependency theory”, a framework originating from UN economics in the early 1950s, claim that the extraction of human and resource capital from peripheral countries to an economic centre in the west is what keeps these countries poor and dependent indefinitely. An example of neocolonialism can be found in the various organisations set up by the Belgian government as discussed in the previous article on Katanga, where its copper mines fell into the hands of Belgian and other western investors.įor this article, the primary factor of interest is economic neo-colonialism. This is what we now call neo-colonialism the practice of using economics, globalisation, cultural imperialism and conditional aid to influence a country instead of the previous colonial methods of direct military control (imperialism) or indirect political control (hegemony). In broad terms African countries went from a long period of European rule to a brief period of self-rule only to fall back into the economic and political grasp of Europe through subversion by multilateral (financial) institutions. The famous Kikuyu anti-colonial writer and academic Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o outlines in his article The Writer in a Neo-colonial State three “ages” that Africa experienced the age of colonialism, the age of independence and the age of neo-colonialism.
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