Walter Rodney

Walter Rodney (March 23, 1942 – June 13, 1980) was a prominent Guyanese historian, political activist and preeminent scholar, who was assassinated in Guyana in 1980.

Career

Born into a working-class family, Rodney was a very bright student, attending Queen's College in Guyana, where he became a champion debater and athlete, and then attending university on a scholarship at the University College of the West Indies (UCWI) in Jamaica, graduating in 1963 with a first in history, thereby winning the Faculty of Arts prize.

Rodney earned a PhD in African History in 1966 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England at the age of 24. His dissertation, which focussed on the slave trade on the Upper Guinea Coast, was published by the Oxford University Press in 1970 under the title A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800 and was widely acclaimed for its originality in challenging the conventional wisdom on the topic.

Rodney traveled widely and became very well known around the world as an activist, scholar and formidable orator. He taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania during the period, 1966-1967 and later in Jamaica at his alma mater - UWI Mona. Rodney was sharply critical of the middle class for its role in the post-independence Caribbean. He was also a strong critic of capitalism and argued for a socialist development template.

On 15 October 1968 the government of Jamaica, led by prime minister Hugh Shearer, declared Rodney persona non grata. The decision to ban him from ever returning to the country because of his advocacy for the working poor in that country caused riots to break out, eventually claiming the lives of several people and causing millions of dollars in damages. These riots, which started on October 16, 1968, are now known as the Rodney Riots, and they triggered an increase in political awareness across the Caribbean, especially among the Afrocentric Rastafarian sector of Jamaica, documented in his book, The Groundings With My Brothers. Rodney returned to the University of Dar es Salaam in 1969 where he served as a professor of history until 1974.

Rodney became a prominent Pan-Africanist, and was important in the Black Power movement in the Caribbean and North America. While living in Dar es Salaam he was influential in developing a new centre of African learning and discussion.

Academic legacy

Rodney's most influential book was his magnum opus, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, published in 1972. In it he described an Africa that had been consciously exploited by European imperialists, leading directly to the modern underdevelopment of most of the continent. The book became enormously influential as well as controversial.

Later years and assassination

In 1974 Rodney returned to Guyana from Tanzania. He was due to take a position as a professor at the University of Guyana but the government prevented his appointment. He became increasingly active in politics, founding the Working People's Alliance, a party which provided the most effective and credible opposition to the PNC government. In 1979 he was arrested and charged with arson after two government offices were burned.

In June 1980, Rodney was killed by a bomb in his car, a month after returning from the independence celebrations in Zimbabwe and during a period of intense political activism. Rodney was survived by his wife, Pat, and three children. Walter's brother, Donald, who was injured in the explosion, said that a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force named Gregory Smith had given Rodney the bomb that killed him. Smith fled to French Guiana after the killing, where he died in 2002.

It was, and is still widely believed, that the assassination was a set-up by then President Linden Forbes Burnham, while technically hard to prove because of his stature. Rodney's ideas of the various ethnic groups who were all historically disenfranchised by the ruling colonial class, working together, was in conflict with Burnham's maniacal need for control.

Rodney's death was commemorated in a poem by Martin Carter entitled "For Walter Rodney" and by the dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson in "Reggae fi Radni".

In 1984, the Centre for Caribbean Studies of the University of Warwick established the Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture in recognition of the life and work of one of the most outstanding scholar-activists of the Black Diaspora in the post World War II era.

In 1993, the Guyanese government posthumously awarded Walter Rodney Guyana's highest honour, the Order of Excellence of Guyana. The Guyanese government also established the Walter Rodney Chair in History at the University of Guyana.

In 2004, Walter Rodney`s widow, Patricia, and his children donated his papers to the Robert L. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center. Since 2004, an annual Walter Rodney Symposium has been held each 23 March (Rodney's birthday) at the Center under the sponsorship of the Library and the Political Science Department of Clark Atlanta University, and under the patronage of the Rodney family.

In 2005, the London Borough of Southwark erected a plaque in the Peckham Library Square in commemoration of Dr.Walter Rodney, the political activist, historian and global freedom fighter.

Walter Rodney bibliography

Works by Rodney

• Walter Rodney Speaks: the Making of an African Intellectual (1990)
• A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 (1981)
• Marx in the Liberation of Africa (1981)
• Guyanese Sugar Plantations in the Late Nineteenth Century: a Contemporary Description from the "Argosy" (1979)
• World War II and the Tanzanian Economy (1976)
• How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972)
• A History of the Upper Guinea Coast (1970)
• The Groundings with my Brothers (1969)
• Kofi Baadu Out of Africa. (children’s book) Georgetown, [Guyana]: [s.n.]

Lakshmi Out of India. (children’s book) Georgetown, Guyana: The Guyana Book Foundation, 2000.

Works about Rodney

• "And finally they killed him": speeches and poems at a memorial rally for Walter Rodney, 1942-80, Oduduwa Hall, University of Ife, Nigeria, Friday, June 27, 1980

• Walter Rodney: Revolutionary and Scholar: A Tribute. Los Angeles: Center for African-American Studies and African Studies Center, University of California, 1982.

Alpers, Edward A. and P.M. Fontaine (eds) Walter Rodney, Poetic Tributes. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture, 1985.

• Campbell, Horace. Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1985.

• Gabriehu. Dangerous Times: The Assassination of Dr. Walter Rodney. Brooklyn, NY: Gibbi Books, 2003.

• Lewis, Rupert: Walter Rodney`s Intellectual and Political Thought, Wayne State University Press, 1998

• Lewis, Rupert: Walter Rodney: 1968 Revisited

External links

• Walter Rodney 25 Anniversary Commemoration Committee
• Walter Rodney's Heresy by Neil Roberts.
• Rodney biography
• The "Walter Rodney Effect"
• African History in the Service of the Black Liberation
• George Jackson: Black Revolutionary
• Street Speech
• Walter Rodney and Pan Africanism Today by Horace Campbell
• Walter Rodney and the Question of Power by CLR James