“29th anniversary” of Rodney’s death

Jun 14, 2009 Editorial

Yesterday was the 29th death anniversary of Dr Walter Rodney, Guyanese scholar and revolutionary extraordinaire. It is a great pity that there is not a greater national recognition of the contributions of this Guyanese hero, and that in itself tells a story. It is a story of a tragedy at several levels.
Walter Rodney exemplified the best tradition of Guyanese excellence at a very early age in the 1950’s when at Queens College, he shone in the class especially in history and on the field high jumping. But he was to transcend that colonial background in spectacular fashion as he delved into the history of Africa at the University of the West Indies (Mona) and then at the London School of African and Oriental Studies.
He completed his PhD at the incredible age of twenty-six as he produced the seminal work, “History of the Upper Guinea Coast” by utilising a Marxist approach.

Returning to Jamaica to teach at UWI, he spent much time outside the campus lecturing among the Rastafarian community and the Jamaican underclass. Regarded as a subversive, the Jamaican government used his attendance at a 1968 conference in Montreal, to ban him from re-entering the country. This sparked the massive “Rodney Protests” in Jamaica, that forever changed the political discourse in that island. His “Groundings with my Brothers”, a collection of his speeches in the gullies of Kingston, continued to inspire the dispossessed of Jamaica and elsewhere where the cry for “Black Power” resounded.
Despairing of the ethnic divisions that had ossified in Guyana by then, Rodney relocated to the University of Tanzania where in addition to building his network in revolutionary circles, he wrote the astoundingly popular “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” in 1972. He became a world-recognised scholar. Applying for a vacancy at the University of Guyana in 1974, his approval was denied upon the intervention of Burnham. Yet Rodney returned.

Unemployed, he fearlessly jumped into the local politics by giving speeches at independent gatherings and those organised by the radical group “Ratoon” and the newly formed Working Peoples Alliance. Present-day opposition figures who tout their fortitude as they insist they have to “earn a living” so they cannot spend time organising a constituency, should take note.
CLR James, who was a mentor to Rodney in his London days, claimed that the latter arrived at a modus Vivendi with Dr Jagan and the PPP. His opposition to the PNC was resolute because of his conclusion that the Burnhamite dictatorship’s manipulation of the race card precluded any reconciliation to Guyana’s fractured politics.

It is interesting that those that have been recently labelling the PPP as “racist” do not mention that when the concept of a National Front Government was floated during the seventies, it was the WPA that opposed the PPP’s contention that the PNC must be part of any such arrangement. Rodney’s and the WPA’s contention was that the PNC “was part of the problem and could not be part of the solution”. Rodney himself raised non-racial politics to new heights when he exposed Burnham’s machinations to railroad the trial of PPP’s activist, Arnold Rampersaud.
Rodney and the WPA intensified the struggle against the PNC under the banner of “People’s Power! No Dictator!” and soon earned the wrath of the increasingly militarised state. In the midst of all his activism, he found the time to research and put together the decisive, “A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1805-1905”.
Several activists were murdered and after the PNC headquarters was burnt down, Burnham in late 1979 declared that he would “meet steel with sharper steel”. Rodney was killed on June 13, 1980. The present administration established a Rodney Chair in the Department of History at UG, and we wonder why no event was organised to commemorate this martyrdom. May his soul rest in peace.

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“29th anniversary” of Rodney’s death

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