Rodney's is
Yes there was exploitation, but they left Africa with a lot of resources, and they established a system on how the resources can be used more efficiently to improve the life in this continent
Africa had resources before the Europeans came and they still have a lot of resources after Europeans left
the source of African problems today is greediness, selfishness, attitude and laziness of their people and that has nothing to do with European colonialism
Walter Rodney's whinge was, still is, sad. By criticizing Europe on the score of development he played right into the hands of the racists he purported to attack. First off, to get the mental faculties i.e., logic, language, delivery etc to write his thesis he used the "European" thinking by the way of schools he went to through to the London School of Oriental Studies. In other words, to become a Walter Rodney of keen intellect he didn't go to some jungle school of African "values". That would have passage of rite (jando) and there he would not have learned to dissect European profit motive for exploitation of other races.
Second, the Africa Rodney claims was under-developed had been around before all the other continents, in other terms: Africans were the original people, (Gondwanaland) yet until the coming of Arabs, Asians and Europeans, there was not a single stone structure between Aswan and the Cape. (Great Zimbabwe? 14th century, yesterday in historical perspective. The Chinese had their stone structures i.e., canals, cities, 5000 years before Zima za Mabwe).
Lastly, the very medium we are using now, algorithm of the Internet, is a "European" development. The very ways we reason, believe and see the world, has been Europeanised. This is not only peculiar for Africa, the development of Dubai, say, is European from the financial systems, property rights, jet engines of their airlines to the architecture of their skyline. So, how did Europe under-develop Africa? By the time Europeans set foot on the continent, people were in loincloths, if at all, almost all believed in sacrifices of babies with albinism or twin-borns, power of spirits and mumbojumbo (which is, by the way, the devil sitting at the gates of Iffe or a Yoruba village), there were no discernible bureaucracies with governments, armies, alphabets, which on other continents organized religions to set the framework for a civilization. Africa's was disorganized if existent at all. Timbuktu? No. Timbuktu was Arab civilization following surges in the 7th century. (Subject for another discussion).
Europe exploited Africa, that there is no question. Europe still does exploit Africa this minute. Why? Because Africa is under-developed. Why is Africa under-developed?