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Dr. Rodney’s Life
(Excerpted from the Rodney Commission of Inquiry Report)
Walter Rodney was born in Georgetown, Guyana, on March 23, 1942. He came from a working class family of five sons. Walter was a “bright boy” at school and gained a scholarship to Queen’s College.
There, he excelled academically and earned a reputation as an outstanding debater.
In 1960, Walter graduated first in his class and won an open scholarship to the University College of the West Indies, as it was then known at Mona, Jamaica. He entered the History Department and graduated with First Class Honours in 1963.
Rodney then attended the School of Oriental and African Studies, a constituent college of the University of London, where at age 24, he received his Ph.D. with Honours in African History. Rodney’s thesis, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, was published by Oxford University Press in 1970. Walter was multi-lingual. He learnt Spanish, Portuguese, French and Swahili in order to facilitate his research for his doctoral thesis.
Walter was married to Dr. Patricia Rodney and had three children namely, Shaka, his son, and Kanini and Asha, his daughters. In 1974, Walter Rodney returned to Guyana to take up an appointment as professor of history at the University of Guyana. The academic board had appointed him, but the University Council, rescinded that appointment.
Subsequent to his return to Guyana, Rodney spent much time educating the masses in public meetings, which he saw as a forum for both education as well as agitation. On the morning of June 13, 1980, he took the children to school and returned home where he and his wife discussed a recent invitation for him to work at the university in Zimbabwe. He had in the past ignored many such invitations from other universities. On this occasion, he was particularly keen and actually decided to go to Zimbabwe. Later the evening, he was dead.
Dr. Walter Rodney died while seated in the left front passenger seat of a Mazda Capella motor car bearing registration number PBB 2349, which had been driven by his brother Donald Rodney. At the time, the motor vehicle was in a stationary position at/in the vicinity of John Street and Hadfield Street, in Georgetown. Donald Rodney was in the motor car seated in the driver’s seat. He himself received relatively minor injuries.
Dr. 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 the Commission of Inquiry found to be a State organised assassination with the knowledge of Cde. Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham who was the Prime Minister of Guyana during that period.
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