Rodney Lives! Abroad

Jun 15, 2012 Editorial

On March 23, Walter Rodney would have been 70 years old – if he had not been assassinated. But both his birth and death anniversaries (June 13) went almost unnoticed in Guyana. Not abroad. In mid-April, the pan-African online newsletter, Pambazuka News, republished his seminal “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” and offered the following tribute.
“From childhood when his politically active parents would take him to the meetings of the then highly radical PPP, the young Walter Rodney had never looked back. An untamable political animal by the 1960s, Walter Rodney began travelling the world as a student of world affairs and an increasingly renowned scholar and activist. Between 1967 and 1968 Baba Rodney lived and taught in Tanzania and Jamaica. This post-colonial period was a time of great political activity for him. He became captivated by the Black Power Movement which was feverishly sweeping the USA and the Caribbean and which eventually consumed him.
This young, exuberant and astute activist grew very critical of the neo-colonial systems which had replaced the old colonial system, but perpetuated the oppression of the majority via a privileged few, working in the interest of their former colonial masters. While in Jamaica, as a lecturer at his alma mater (UWI), in addition to being highly critical of the Jamaican government and ‘middle classes’, he advocated for the working people and agitated for Afrikan history and an Afrikan language to be taught in schools.
But, he did not confine his activism to the academic realms. He took his message of Black Power, Black Liberation and African consciousness to the streets, the shanty towns and the gullies of Jamaica. In fact, he believed passionately, as he oft time said: ‘The intellectual should make his or her skills available for the struggles and emancipation of the people’.
Consequently, on 15 October 1968, the Jamaican government, led by Prime Minister Hugh Shearer, barred Rodney from re-entering the island, on his return from the Black Writers’ Conference in Montreal, Canada. This sparked a massive revolt on 16 October 1968, known as ‘the Rodney Riots,’ which claimed the lives of several people and caused millions of dollars in damages. It also triggered an increase in political awareness and unrest across the Caribbean, especially among the Africentric Rastafarian sector of Jamaica, which is documented in his book “The Groundings with my Brothers”, deemed to be ‘The Bible’ of the Black Power Movement in the Caribbean.
Walter Rodney moved to Tanzania in 1969, where he and his family basked in the cultural life of this great Afrikan nation and from where he travelled to other parts of the Afrikan continent meeting leaders of nations and liberation movements. He lectured at the University of Dar es Salaam and was influential in developing a new centre of African learning and discussion. In 1972, pained by the devastatingly lasting legacy of slavery and colonialism he was witnessing on the Afrikan continent, he wrote his most highly universally acclaimed book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
In 1974, Baba Rodney, his wife Dr. Patricia Rodney and their three children returned to Guyana from Tanzania. The now Swahili speaking proud son of Afrika threw himself into the politics of his country, inevitably, becoming sharply critical of the Burnham Government. He joined the WPA, as a challenge to the incumbent PNC, for political power. And as he grew in popularity he became a rapidly increasing threat to the despotic Burnham and his brutal neo-colonial regime; and therefore a target for vicious propaganda, political assault and eventual murder.
First he was blocked by the Burnham government from taking up an appointment at the University of Guyana; then he was falsely arrested for arson. Alas, on 13 June 1980, a remote control bomb, disguised in a walkie-talkie, handed to Walter Rodney by a military officer, Gregory Smith, was the weapon used to assassinate him. The bomb exploded in Baba Rodney’s lap while he sat in a car with his brother, ending his life – only 38 years young.”
A prophet is not recognised in his own country.

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Rodney Lives! Abroad

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