TWO projects highlighting the life and work of Guyanese historian/intellectual Dr Walter Rodney have been launched at the University of the West Indies’ (UWI) Mona campus.

Songs From Walter Rodney’s Choir is a documentary while the book is Walter Rodney: His Last Days And Campaigns.

Both were launched during the 14th annual Walter Rodney Lecture staged by the Institute of Caribbean Studies. Professor Rupert Lewis, a Rodney scholar, noted the exclusion of Rodney’s years in Jamaica in the film.

“His (Rodney) Jamaican experience needs to be added to the documentary. And that Jamaican experience has its own dynamism, its own history,” Lewis said.

In response, producer of the film Robert Lalljie, argued that Walter Rodney’s Jamaican experience needs a film of its own.

“This (documentary) was necessary as the book dealt with Rodney’s last days and campaigns. But whereas the film dealt with an overview of his life and works, the Jamaican angle would take a film on its own,” Lalljie said. “Songs From Walter Rodney’s Choir is nearly two hours long and still brought over 70 per cent of exclusive information on Rodney to the public domain.”

The Guyana-born Lalljie lives in Birmingham, England.

Rodney was a lecturer in history at the UWI’s Mona campus during the 1960s. He held several educational meetings in the surrounding August Town community which inspired the book, Groundings With My Brothers.

After returning to Kingston from a writers conference in Toronto in October 1968, Rodney was prevented from leaving the airplane by the government of Prime Minister Hugh Shearer, who believed his views were too radical.

The action triggered a day-long protest in Kingston by UWI students. Rodney was assassinated in Guyana in June 1980. He was 38 years old.