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.

Rickey Singh

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.

Walter Rodney, respected for his inspiring public discourses on multi-ethnic and working-class unity of the Caribbean peoples, is seen here superimposed on a map of Guyana.

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.

Feeding the multitude

DANGEROUS PETS

Pepper Pot