The Walter Rodney family and Kit Nascimento: Notes on class and colour

Jan 26, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – In yesterday’s newspapers, Kit Nascimento wrote the following in relation to a letter championed by the usual suspects condemning the intended visit of Bolsonaro; “Where were the signatures of these good ladies and gentlemen when our country was threatened by an attempt to install a military dictatorship in place of a democratic election? Not one of them raised their voice nor penned their signature in protest.”
I have done several columns since March 2020 analysing why the Creole middle class (CMS), the few Portuguese that are part of that stratum, and the westernised Christian Indians have not only remained silent on the March 2020 rigging but at a deep Freudian level were shattered after the election showed a PPP victory. The dream of that class was that after 2015, Indian control of government was over. Indians would concentrate on their traditional niches where they got their money from.
For me, as an academic, the events of March-July 2020 are not only about how people belonging to and associated with the CMS endorsed the rigging or remained silent, but about the role of that class in shaping Guyanese politics since the late 19th century. Very interesting to note among those signatures were the names of the wife and son of Walter Rodney – Patricia and Shaka.
Their presence is interesting in that since Walter was assassinated in 1980, the Rodney family has not penned or uttered one word on anything about Guyana only the Rodney story. After 41 years, wife and son have lent their names to a campaign where the issue is race – Bolsonaro is racist against Afro-Brazilians. Wife and son were silent on the election rigging last year and racial attacks on Indians in Region 5 in the aftermath of the election in September last year.
This sudden appearance of the Rodney family may call for Freudian analysis of both Patricia and Shaka. But the appearance of their signatures also brings into focus the role of Walter in the pursuit of the CMS to undermine Forbes Burnham. The time is long overdue for an iconoclastic review of Walter’s role in the WPA and his relationship with the CMS.
I think research is needed on questions like how deeply pro-working class was the politics of Walter in Guyana and how steeped in working class groundings he actually was. The time is long overdue for an iconoclastic review of Walter’s role in the WPA and his relationship with the CMS. Did he intend to establish a socialist working class governance structure (I know about that since I was an advisor in the Maurice Bishop government in Grenada in 1983 in a very sensitive capacity)?
Is there a plausible theory that Walter was a willing agent of the CMS, and would not have birthed a socialist government, and saw himself first and foremost as African? When you look at the racial transformation of all the major WPA players from the 1970s including the westernised Indians, and now the sudden public appearance of the Rodney family on matters in relation to Africans, then, these are valid research areas.
One fact cannot be denied about the politics of Walter Rodney. He was a deep part of an elitist political outfit owned and controlled by the CMS. Rodney was not part of an ongoing mass mobilisation of the urban and rural proletariat and the poor rural peasantry. That role was performed by the PPP and the PNC and at a later stage by the Democratic Labour Movement of Paul Tennassee. Rodney’s mobilisation was done through middle class style activism.
Cheddi Jagan was never comfortable with the way the WPA behaved politically. He predicted Rodney’s behaviour and the WPA’s “wildness” in a brilliant article in the PPP’s journal, “Thunder,” of July – December, 1971 titled – “Guyana: A new stage.” Burnham was livid with the wild, middle class elitism of the WPA.
Burnham thought their politics was not serious and in a private conversation with a visiting Afro-American radical deemed it “bourgeois adventurism.” Jagan lamented Rodney’s lack of painful work among the masses. CLR James asked a legitimate question – why would Rodney go himself to collect the item from his killer. James wrote that leaders do not do those kinds of things.
The answer to Kit Nascimento’s question goes way back to the late 19th century. What we saw in March 2020 was the final attempt of the CMS to compartmentalise Guyanese sociology. I don’t think their efforts are over. In the coming years, the CMS through the usual suspects are going to do what they have always done – seek political power because they feel they are the natural inheritors of the Anglo-phone Caribbean.
(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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