Walter Rodney was born on March 23, 1942 and was murdered on June 13, 1980 at age 38, leaving behind Pat, his wife, and three children, Shaka, Kanini and Asha. His funeral in Georgetown, Guyana, was attended by thousands of people. I was in attendance representing the Workers Party of Jamaica.

Forty years later I cannot think of a better set of circumstances in which to memorialise Walter Rodney than the nationwide movement in the US protesting white supremacist violence against black people and the corresponding global response. A distinctive feature of 2020 is that a mass movement is taking shape in the world’s most powerful country during the COVID-19 pandemic, with severe consequences for health and economics. This pandemic has exposed the inequalities that make black people more vulnerable. Youth activists across the world today can draw on the legacies of Rodney’s educational and organisational work in the 1960s and 1970s.

Edward Percival Rodney and Pauline Rodney were his parents. His mother worked at home and his father earned his living as a tailor and was an activist in the then People’s Progressive Party that had Indian and African supporters. In 1953, when Cheddi Jagan’s socialist party won the election, the British sent in the military consisting of 500 soldiers, who departed from Jamaica aboard the HMS Superb headed to British Guiana to quell the nationalist movement.

Walter was only 11 years old at the time, but he was aware of the actions of British imperial power and the indignities of colonial subjugation. He was educated at Queens College in Georgetown and from there won a scholarship to the then University College of the West Indies (now The University of the West Indies [The UWI])in 1960 and graduated in 1963 gaining a first class honours bachelor’s of arts degree in history. Walter went on to complete his doctoral dissertation on ‘A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800’ at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in 1966, aged 24.

During his undergraduate years he travelled to Cuba intrigued by the Caribbean’s most recent revolution led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. He also visited the Soviet Union. This brought him to the attention of the police special branch in Jamaica.

The decades of the 1960s and 1970s in which Walter Rodney was intellectually and politically engaged saw the maturation of counter-cultural movements such as Rastafari, rude boys, and the cultural rebellion inaugurated in ska, rocksteady and reggae music. Fifty years ago the Trinidad Black Power Revolution of 1970 compelled Prime Minister Eric Williams into developing the State sector in oil and finance. Young people in the Caribbean were reshaping their nations and nowhere was this more evident than during the People’s Revolutionary Government led by Prime Minister Maurice Bishop from 1979-1983. This reshaping was being informed by research in history, social sciences, and epidemiology, as evidenced in Professor Ken Standard’s community health medicine at The UWI, Jamaica campus.

Radical intellectual thinking in the New World Group influenced groups throughout the region which championed the dismantling of plantation agriculture; campaigned for land reform; lobbied the development of manufacturing, black entrepreneurship, and the end to endemic racism in the region. Associated with these youthful movements were women activists such as Andaiye, a close colleague of Walter in the Working Peoples Alliance (WPA), whose writings under the title ‘The Point is to Change the World’ have recently been published.

Rodney signed a contract with the University of Dar es Salaam in 1966 during the period of radical political and agrarian reform in Tanzania under the leadership of President Julius Nyerere. Tanzania, at the time, was the headquarters of the Organization of African Unity’s Liberation Committee and Dar es Salaam became the base for many of the exiled liberation movements of Southern Africa. Among these organisations were the African National Congress of South Africa, Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) of Mozambique, and Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola (MPLA). In this atmosphere, Rodney developed his pan-African perspectives deepening his research into the history of African resistance to colonialism.

1968

He returned to Jamaica to teach at The UWI in January 1968. His radical views and association with Rastafarians and the Black Power movement in Jamaica led to his being banned by the Government from re-entering the country after he attended a black writers conference in Montreal, Canada, in October 1968. The demonstration by university students together with Kingston’s urban youth against this ban marked a watershed in Jamaica’s political development as the scale of mass action in Rodney’s support surprised the regime.

Richard Small, a close Jamaican friend and attorney, described Rodney as being “of average height, articulate, gentle, quiet at times, but with strongly held views, and an unassuming presence”. I would add that Walter had a compelling rationality and wealth of knowledge to call on in support of his views, and a willingness to listen. He was not a populist nor did he believe that he was a messiah.

The Jamaican Government had brought back Marcus Garvey’s body in 1964 and made him a national hero. But four years later the Government banned the writings of Malcolm X, Stokeley Carmichael, the Black Panther Party, and the Nation of Islam. Rodney’s succinct response was, “They brought Garvey’s bones but not his philosophy.” (Walter Rodney, ‘Message to Afro-Jamaica Associations’, Bongo-Man, January 1969, 14-17)

Rodney defined black power as “a call to black peoples to throw off white domination and resume the handling of our own destinies”. He wrote “ ‘Black Power’ as a movement has been most clearly defined in the US. Slavery in the US helped create the capital for the development of the US as the foremost capitalist power, and the blacks have subsequently been the most exploited sector of labour. Many blacks live in that supposedly great society at a level of existence comparable to blacks in the poorest section of the colonial world.” (Walter Rodney, The Groundings With My Brothers, 2019, 13-14)

In addition to the demonstrations of October 16, 1968 in Kingston, Jamaica, there were protests throughout the Caribbean, in Tanzania, Canada, London, and on some university campuses in the US. In the nearly 10 months in 1968 that Walter had spent in Jamaica he not only taught on campus but spoke to groups in the inner-city communities of Kingston, in schools, in churches, and in the rural areas. He had an extraordinary ability to speak with and listen to working people and to unemployed youth to explain the significance of Africa to Caribbean history, and the importance of the struggles against the racial and social legacies of slavery and colonialism.

How Europe underdeveloped Africa

Rodney returned to lecture at the University of Dar es Salaam from 1969 to 1974. In 1972 he published his best-known work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. This work brings together historical scholarship and development theory to argue that the transatlantic slave trade and Western capitalist slavery did serious damage to Africa in depriving it of millions of its young people during the 16th to 19th centuries. It was also critical of the impact of colonialism in retarding the development of the continent.

Rodney’s book is more than protest literature, in that it advances a revolutionary humanist view of development and decolonisation at a time when many countries on the continent were achieving political independence — a process that was also underway in the English-speaking Caribbean whose territories were populated largely by descendants of the African slave trade. For some scholars Rodney relies too heavily on dependency theory of the 1960s and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa has been criticised for not looking sufficiently at the internal factors in Africa that accounted for the slave trade and African underdevelopment. Ironically, however, much of his early work had focused on internal factors that had retarded Africa’s development and his analysis of Africa’s traditional elites was caustic. So, in a sense, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was a departure, and the emphasis on European involvement in the hugely profitable trade completed his treatment of the relationship between European slave traders and plantation owners on the one hand, and, on the other hand, Africa’s elites who facilitated the slave trade.

In the same year that How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was published his doctoral thesis ‘A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800’ was published by Oxford University. In 1975 he had two chapters on ‘The Guinea Coast’ and ‘Africa in Europe and the Americas’ in The Cambridge History of Africa. The latter essay was a pioneering study of the African Diaspora with emphasis on Brazil. He also studied the Russian Revolution from an African perspective and his lectures at the University of Dar es Salaam in the early 1970s were published in 2018 under the title ‘The Russian Revolution – A view from the Third World’.

A history-teller

Walter Rodney returned to his native Guyana in 1974 and was denied a job at the University of Guyana by President Forbes Burnham, who saw in the young scholar-activist a political opponent whom he preferred to have outside the country or inside his political organisation, the People’s National Congress (PNC). Rodney was associated with the Working People’s Alliance, a political organisation that sought to offer a non-racial approach to Guyanese politics in a country where party politics had been divided between Cheddi Jagan’s East Indian-based People’s Progressive Party and Forbes Burnham’s African-based PNC.

Between 1974 and 1980, when he was murdered at age 38 by a booby-trapped walkie-talkie given to him by a member of Guyana’s Defense Force, Rodney lectured in the US and Europe for short periods in order to secure an income. He continued his research and completed working on A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905, which was published posthumously in 1981. This work embodies his philosophy on the creative role of ordinary people in the making of history and introduces the contribution of African slaves “to the humanisation of the Guyanese coastal environment” in creating an elaborate system of canals to provide drainage, irrigation, and transportation in a remarkable transfer of Dutch technology to a coastal landscape that was below sea level.

This was to have been the first volume on the Guyanese working people in the 20th century. In 1982 it won the American Historical Association’s Albert J Beveridge prize, and in 1983 the Association of Caribbean Historians also gave a posthumous award. Rodney’s reputation as a historian of the Caribbean was duly recognised.

Rodney harnessed history in the service of African and Caribbean decolonisation with a view to giving his readers a sense of their creative capacity to build post-colonial societies. Barbadian novelist George Lamming in his foreword to A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905, described Rodney’s approach to history as “a way of ordering knowledge which could become an active part of the consciousness of an uncertified mass of ordinary people, and which could be used by all as an instrument of social change. He taught from that assumption. He wrote out of that conviction.”

He possessed a capacity to communicate complex ideas to small study groups and large audiences with great clarity drawing on his solidly rooted knowledge of African and Caribbean history. Scholarship and activism were inseparably linked in Rodney’s life and he paid the ultimate price in Guyana in 1980 when he was killed by the Forbes Burnham regime because of his political leadership in the Working People’s Alliance against the dictatorship of the PNC.

In 2016 a commission of inquiry in Guyana into Rodney’s murder concluded:

1. Gregory Smith, a soldier in the Guyana Defence Force, murdered Dr Walter Rodney.

2. Dr Walter Rodney was a man of large and significant stature both in Guyana and beyond at the time of his death. He could only have been killed in what we find to be a State-organised assassination.

Rodney’s academic and activist legacies are an important treasure for movements in the 21st century.

Rupert Lewis is professor emeritus in the Department of Government at The UWI. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or rupertlew@gmail.com