Angela Davis speaks tomorrow on Walter Rodney

Mar 20, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – The Walter Rodney Foundation, headed by Rodney’s wife, Patricia, has announced that the featured speaker for the 2021 annual Walter Rodney symposium to be held tomorrow is global icon, Angela David. She is certainly one of the most influential women in the second half of the 20th century.
She has to be seen as one of the most dynamic woman activists the United States has produced. She must be seen as one of the great icons in the Black American struggle. The 2021 symposium has come at a time when the rigging of the March 2020 general election has exposed the betrayal of Rodney by some of his closest comrades in the revolutionary struggle.
Those personalities must have been close to his wife too. One wonders what goes through the mind of this Guyanese feminist when she sees how her husband’s trusted lieutenants have become figures of hate in Guyana and the Caribbean.
Now here is the aspect of the symposium that will create immense curiosity in Guyanese minds. The theme that Davis will speak on is: “Democracy Under Stress.” At the beginning of 2020, two democratic countries in the western hemisphere suffered threats to its democratic survival – Guyana and the US.
One does not know the contents of Davis’ delivery, but her countenance should be fascinating to see if she is shown the videos of how Walter Rodney’s comrades attempted to remove Guyana’s democracy in the fateful first five months of 2021.
There is an incident in those five months that threatened Rodney’s legacy in Guyana, not so much by the man who mouthed off the sick vocabulary but by Rodney’s personal revolutionary friends who refused to denounce the man who uttered the insanities.
Manager of Walter Rodney House, the name given to the WPA’s office (now in a complete state of dilapidation), Desmond Trotman, a PNC GECOM commissioner, wrote in the newspapers of June 20, 2020 that as a PNC commissioner his action in the election drama would have found approval by Walter Rodney. And then he went on to name Rodney’s closest comrades who also would have approved his behaviour in GECOM.
His list included Dr. Clive Thomas, Eusi Kwayana, Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine, Dr. Nigel Westmaas, Moses Bhagwan, Dr. Maurice Odle, Jocelyn Dow, among others. For a denunciation of Trotman’s shameless desecration of the heroism of Rodney see the following two columns of mine – Friday July 10, 2020, “Conversation between Walter Rodney and Desmond Trotman,” and Sunday July 12, 2020, “Desmond Trotman and the congenital danger in Homo sapiens.”
There are two panel themes at the symposium in addition to Davis’ keynote address. As with other years’ panels, none of those associated with the remnants of the WPA are invited. The yearly symposium is in commemoration of the birth anniversary of Rodney (March 23). Rewind the tape to prior to 2015 and people like Roopnaraine, Thomas and Kwayana would have gone on stage at Atlanta University and “pampaset” themselves piggybacking on Rodney’s phenomenal name.
Thomas and Roopnaraine did not testify at the Walter Rodney Commission of Inquiry. Roopnaraine as a WPA parliamentarian with the APNU+AFC government voted against the release of the report. Roopnaraine as Minister of Education was not present at any of the annual death anniversary of Rodney for the five years the WPA was part of the APNU+AFC government. In 2018, 2019 and 2020, the event was not held. In those years cited, the WPA was part of the government.
There is no need to mention that the wife of this international icon from Guyana must have been emotionally riveted at what the really intimate friends of her husband have become. I know Rodney’s brother, Donald, has never accepted the merger between the PNC and the WPA.
I was at the vigil of Donald Rodney, protesting the injustice being done to him with the appeal against his trumped up conviction, instigated by President, Forbes Burnham, of participating in Walter’s death. There was an energetic disagreement between Donald and Tacuma Ogunseye over the merger of the WPA and the PNC. After prostituting itself in masochistic ways in the APNU+AFC regime, 2015-2020, the remnants of the WPA has pulled out of the marriage.
The morally right thing to do is to offer the Rodney’s family and the world where Rodney has a large image, an apology. It should not take many words. Just simply say that the marriage was done in the interests of Guyana’s future, it did not work out and the WPA regrets its mistake. Mrs. Patricia Rodney had the last laugh. She is still a Guyanese icon, while the image of Roopnaraine, Kwayana, Thomas, Bhagwan and Odle here and abroad is dead.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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