Walter Rodney: Revolutionary historian and activist

[BlackMic Radio]

Published Feb 17, 2005 9:58 PM

"We must understand that we are still locked in struggle. And
we are reaffirming our commitment to struggle, and we are
saying we are ready to proceed. We are moving forward, we are
not intimidated, we recognize the pressures, but we are far
from bending under those pressures." -- Walter Rodney, June
6, 1980, Georgetown, Guyana

This June will mark the 25th anniversary of the assassination
of Walter Rodney--an African-Caribbean Marxist revolutionary
activist, theoretician and internationalist.

Born in multiracial Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana)
to working-class parents in 1942, Rodney was involved early
on in political activity as a result of his father's
participation in the anti-colonial movement with the People's
Progressive Party (PPP), led by the Indo-Guyanese leader
Cheddi Jagan. Rodney's mother was a domestic worker and a
seamstress. His grandparents were farmers.

As a result of this upbringing Rodney was introduced to class
relations in Guyana and to an intimate understanding of
Britain's (and later the United States') artificially created
divisions between different nationalities, including South
Asians, Africans, Portuguese, Indigenous people and Chinese.

Under the British colonial system, working-class and peasant
students had to win scholarships to attend school beyond a
few initial grades, if they attended school at all.

Rodney attended the University of the West Indies at Mona,
Jamaica, majoring in history. He received his undergraduate
degree in 1963. He then received a scholarship to study
African history at the University of London. He earned his
Ph.D. in 1966 at age 24.

To research his dissertation, "A History of the Upper Guinea
Coast, 1545 to 1800," Rodney learned to read Spanish,
Portuguese and some Italian to decipher the slavery records
of these former colonial powers.

Globalizing the struggle

During his short life, Walter Rodney lived and worked on four
continents and in several areas of the Caribbean.

He became a Marxist in London, learning the science of
dialectical and historical materialism in study groups with
leading West Indian Marxists, often led by C.L.R. James.

The London group's work was grounded in works by Amilcar
Cabral, Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Marcus Garvey, V.I.
Lenin, Marx and Engels, George Padmore and W.E.B. DuBois.
Rodney also traveled to the USSR and China.

Rodney first taught history at the University of Dar-es-
Salaam, Tanzania, from 1966-1967. He returned to Tanzania in
1969 after a year in Mona, Jamaica, teaching courses in
African history.

He applied his Marxist teachings and activities on-and-off
campus in Jamaica. He worked with Rastafarians and the super-
exploited in the shantytowns and elsewhere. This resulted in
the government banning him from the country upon his
attempted return from a Congress of Black Writers in
Montreal, Canada, in October 1968, which sparked massive
demonstrations and a parliamentary crisis for the ruling
Jamaica Labor Party.

Living in Tanzania from 1969-1974, Rodney taught courses on
the African Diaspora and was a key figure in the socialist
movement in Tanzania, where he collaborated with President
Julius Nyerere.

In 1972 Rodney's best-known book, "How Europe Underdeveloped
Africa," was published. This work was an earth-shaking
analysis of the economic and social underdevelopment of
Africa by European powers, mainly through the slave trade.

Rodney's work refuted the racist bourgeois argument that
slavery existed on a large scale in Africa before the
Europeans invaded. This fallacy was an attempt to deflect
responsibility for the development of the African slave trade
from the Europeans to Africans.

Expounding on Eric William's "Capitalism and Slavery", Rodney
introduced a Marxist analysis "and the concept of the
penetration of Africa by, and its subordination to, the world
capitalist system of production," wrote Edward A. Alpers
in "Weapon of History in African Liberation."

Rodney left Tanzania in 1974 to assume the chair of the
History Department at the University of Georgetown, Guyana.
[However, he was never allowed to assume his faculty
position.] He formed the Working People's Alliance with the
goal of developing a new independent revolutionary party to
help build a true Guyanese socialist republic.

Throughout the 1970s Rodney traveled periodically to the
U.S., lecturing at many colleges and universities.

He connected the Black liberation movement and other
oppressed people's struggles to the struggle against
imperialism. He also worked closely with progressive and
revolutionary leaders in the Caribbean, such as the
assassinated president of Grenada, Maurice Bishop.

And in his homeland, Guyana, Rodney always worked shoulder-to-
shoulder with the working class, be it in the sugar cane
fields or bauxite mines or other work and cultural spaces.

Rodney was assassinated on June 13, 1980, in Georgetown by a
bomb explosion. Some say the political forces involved in the
bombing were linked to the CIA. There was never an inquest
into Rodney's death and to this day no one has been held
accountable.

Rodney's funeral cortège was attended by thousands of
mourners from inside Guyana and internationally who felt the
deep loss of one of the most potent Marxist revolutionaries
to have lived.

Marxism--a weapon for the oppressed

Rodney was an internationalist. He understood working-class
and oppressed people's need for their own party for self-
emancipation, one that has flexibility in tactics and
strategy and that is attempting to build socialism.

And as his "Marxism and Liberation" talk at Queens College in
1975 attests, Rodney rejected racist and bourgeois assertions
that Marxism couldn't be applied outside of a European
context, which was one of his greatest contributions.

"They seem not to take into account that already that
methodology and that ideology have been utilized,
internalized, and domesticated in large parts of the world
that are not European.

"That it is already the ideology of 800 million Chinese
people; that it is already the ideology which guided the
Vietnamese people to successful struggle and to the defeat of
imperialism. That it is already the ideology which allows
North Korea to transform itself from a backward, quasi-
feudal, quasi-colonial terrain into an independent industrial
power. That it is already the ideology which has been adopted
on the Latin American continent and that serves as the basis
for development in the Republic of Cuba.

"That it is already the ideology which was used by Cabral,
which was used by Samora Machel, which is in use on the
African continent itself to underline and underscore struggle
and the construction of a new society.

"It cannot therefore be termed a European phenomenon; and the
onus will certainly be on those who argue that this
phenomenon, which was already universalized itself, is
somehow not applicable to some Black people..." ("Yes to
Marxism" pamphlet, February 1986, People's Progressive Party
of Guyana)

As Alpers wrote, "...What stands out is that to the very end
of his life Walter Rodney recognized and used history as a
weapon in the revolutionary struggle for liberation."

Sources for this article include: Rupert Charles
Lewis, "Walter Rodney's Intellectual and Political Thought";
Walter Rodney, "Groundings with my Brothers; History of the
Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905," "History of the Upper
Guinea Coast, 1545-1800," "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,"
and "Walter Rodney Speaks: The Making of an African
Intellectual"; Edward A. Alper and Pierre-Michel
Fontaine, "Walter Rodney, Revolutionary and Scholar: A
Tribute" (includes appendix of Rodney's writings and
lectures); Kwayana, Eusi, "Walter Rodney."

[Kweku_Omowale]

thanks man for that i havent seen anything on walter rodney or marice bishop some just posted about bishop wants to thank youa million for that posting man!!!

[BlkSpartacus]

Good looking on this post Blackmic.Guyana willl never get a great leader like him again. From what Ive heard from my Uncles, he was a great person an eloquent speaker. He should still be with us,doesnt make sense that you would send your leader to check out a guy that makes bombs for a living without anyone with him.

[Akyeame Kwame]

Remembering Walter Rodney

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/colum...TER_RODNEY.asp

Remembering Walter Rodney
Analysis
Rickey Singh
Sunday, May 22, 2005



NEXT month, a very significant political/cultural
event will take place in Guyana to mark the 25th
anniversary of the most sensational act of
assassination of a Caribbean icon to have shocked
governments in this region and Africa and peoples in
many countries of the world.

It was the murder of that outstanding Caribbean
thinker and political activist, Walter Rodney on the
night of June 13, 1980 by a bomb that was concealed in
a walkie-talkie and delivered to him by an officer of
the Guyana Defence Force, Sergeant Gregory Smith,
acting as an agent of the then governing People's
National Congress.

Smith was spirited out of the country into
neighbouring Suriname and later moved to Cayenne where
he died. He never returned to Guyana since that
tragedy that occurred at the height of a campaign
Rodney was leading against what was profiled as the
"Forbes Burnham dictatorship".

Rodney was just 38 years old at the time of his
assassination, leaving behind three children - Shaka,
Kanini and Asha - wife Patricia, and an entire
generation of young people in Guyana, Africa, across
the Caribbean and the West Indian Diaspora for whom he
was their idol; their hope for a new political
culture, the symbol of a Herculean struggle against
racism, colonialist oppression and the evils of
imperialism.

Comrades and associates of various nationalities and
professions have planned a week of activities,
starting on June 8, to commemorate the anniversary.
Chairman of the US-based planning committee is the
Jamaican academic and author of Reclaiming Zimbabwe,
Horace Campbell.

Organised around a series of "groundings" - the
concept of inter-personal relations popularised by the
murdered historian in his The Groundings with my
Brothers, first published in 1969 - the central theme
for the commemoration is "Another World is Necessary".
The events will take place from June 8-13.

Last week, the Guyana Government Information Agency
(GINA) announced that it would be hosting an
exhibition on the life and times of Dr Rodney at the
National Library in Georgetown, featuring a number of
his speeches, books and articles. The exhibition is to
be opened by minister of culture, youth and sports,
Gail Teixeira.

The Rodney commemoration committee explained at a
media briefing in Georgetown that the "series of
groundings" will include public lectures/discussions
on the politics of oppression, race and violence, food
security, the trade union and social justice
movements; issues of regional and international
importance, as well as an exhibition, film shows, a
cultural unity concert and a closing vigil.

Twelve years before his assassination in the heart of
Georgetown, a stone's throw away from a mobile police
unit, Rodney was banned from re-entering Jamaica where
he was then residing and working as history lecturer
at the University of the West Indies Mona campus.
Then 27 years of age, the former lecturer in history
at the University College of Tanzania was returning to
Jamaica from participating in a Congress of Black
Writers in Montreal, Canada.

This dramatic political development on October 15,
1968, under the administration of then Prime Minister
Hugh Shearer, was to erupt into what came to be known
throughout the region and beyond as "the Rodney riots"
in Kingston.

Some of the pro-Rodney militants who participated in
the protests and political disturbances later became
parliamentarians, cabinet ministers and one a prime
minister - Ralph Gonsalves of St Vincent and the
Grenadines.

Gonsalves, as well as the novelist George Lamming, who
had delivered the eulogy at Rodney's funeral service
at the Roman Catholic Cathedral, will be among
Caribbean, African and American personalities
attending next month's "groundings" in Guyana.

In his introduction to Rodney's The Groundings with my
Brothers that begins with the statement that Walter
had presented to the Black Writers Conference in
Montreal on "The Jamaica Situation", the Jamaican
lawyer and close family friend of the Rodneys, Richard
Small, reflected on how quickly the young
Guyanese-born scholar had endeared himself to ordinary
Jamaicans as "the man who knew about Africa..."

Small reminds us that within a short period after his
arrival from Tanzania to lecture at the UWI, "the news
of a man who knew about Africa, who would talk to
anybody who wanted to hear him, spread..."
"The response to the history of Africa and the
achievement of the black people throughout the world
was not born from an academic curiosity. It sprang,"
said Small, "from a people who used it for
themselves..."

By 1974, six years after being banned from returning
to Jamaica, Rodney, the militant anti-colonial
nationalist and patriot, respected for his inspiring
public discourses on multi-ethnic and working-class
unity of the Caribbean peoples, returned to his native
Guyana.
It was a time of social and economic horrors, with the
country under the burden of the heinous political
doctrine of "party paramountcy" under the rule of
Burnham's PNC.

Intervention at the highest level of state authority
was to deny him promised employment at the University
of Guyana. Undaunted, he, along with a group of
equally dedicated friends and associates, launched the
then very integrated, militant, high profile Working
People's Alliance (WPA) with a strong multi-ethnic
appeal.

With Rodney at the helm, the WPA was to shake the
traditional ethnic-based turfs of both Burnham's PNC
and Cheddi Jagan's People's Progressive Party in the
face of ominous warnings about the physical survival
of the flamboyant, charismatic people's historian.

Before long, there was the open, boastful threat to
Rodney and his WPA comrades from PNC headquarters,
Congress Place, that "our steel is sharper". That
threat was recorded in sections of the local and
regional media.

The year was 1979, and the Rodney-led "anti-Burnham
dictatorship" campaign was gaining momentum across the
country, particularly in Georgetown, where the crowds
had started to dwarf those at public meetings of the
ruling PNC.

Close colleagues of Rodney, among them two 'comrades'
who had, at different periods, appeared as bodyguards,
were shot to death in separate mysterious
circumstances, with the police claiming self-defence
against "armed" men. Others were regularly beaten,
harassed or forced out of employment, including the
teaching and public services.

Finally, on the night of June 13, 1980, a bag
delivered by GDF officer Gregory Smith contained the
powerful bomb that blew Rodney apart, cutting his body
in virtually two halves and injuring his younger
brother Donald, who was sitting in the driver's seat
of their parked car.
The subsequent inquest into the circumstances of
Rodney's death proved a total farce, as archival
records will show. None of the key players were
invited to testify.

GDF soldier Smith was hurriedly and secretly moved out
of Guyana by agents of the governing party within 24
hours of Rodney's assassination - never to return; and
neither the slain historian's brother, Donald, nor his
widow, Patricia, was allowed to testify.

Eusi Kwayana, a most valuable source on Guyana's
social, political and cultural history, has provided a
very relevant documentation of that so-called
"inquest".

After refusing for at least a dozen years to respond
to increasing demands for an arrest warrant for
Gregory Smith to answer a murder charge, the PNC,
under then President Desmond Hoyte, was to initiate a
highly controversial "inquest" (sic) that determined
that Rodney's death was "by misadventure".

But a subsequent mission by the Geneva-based
International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), mounted
with the help of the then Caribbean Human Rights
Organisation, was to point to "grave defects" in that
very restricted "show inquest", as leading figures of
the WPA were to remind Guyanese.

It is all part of the documented history of the best
known political assassination in the Caribbean of one
of the most outstanding, revered sons of this region,
and respected internationalist. Prior, that is, to the
nightmare of political executions in and military
invasion of Grenada in October 1983.

The Jamaican historian, Rupert Lewis, has offered a
profound examination of Walter Rodney's Intellectual
and Political Thought. Published in 1998, it stands
out among various books, pamphlets and other
publications on Rodney, his ideas and struggles,
including Perry Mars' very thoughtful Ideology and
Change.

As Lewis noted, Walter Rodney "belonged to the
generation of post-colonial historians of Africa and
the Caribbean who embarked on the project of writing
the history of the regions affected by the Atlantic
slave trade from the standpoint of those whose voices
had been muted in the historical record. It was
pioneering work and it was, as well, a pioneering
time..."

Hopefully, the coming series of "groundings" to
commemorate Rodney's assassination can inspire young
and old across the Caribbean to work for a better life
and oppose all forms of oppression and injustices
against which Walter had so valiantly struggled.

[Im The Truth]

Happy B-Day Walter Rodney!!

[Erzulie Danto]

happy earthday, Beloved Warrior, Walter Rodney, Great Afrikan Ancestor, may your legacy continue to guide and inspire us! may your energies propel us toward Liberation from the other side! ase!

[GT4LIFE]

Black Spartacus, you Guyanese? Whappnin deh bannah!
Wuh part of Jersey you deh in? I got family in the Illtown

[Kweku_Omowale]

eric willians,maurice bishop and doctor walter rodney were really good friends! rest in uhuru walter rodney,eric willians and maurice bishop
along with marcus mossiah gavrvey