The betrayal of Walter Rodney and Franz Fanon

Jul 23, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

---

Kaieteur News – I have argued on this page since March 2020 that the worst rigged election in the British West Indies in Guyana from March to July 2020 has damaged the legacies of the once famous intellectual survivors of the Walter Rodney era of the WPA.

Young multi-racial academics writing on them in the future are not going to be nice in analysing their credibility. This older academic here have made his little contribution to such a perspective. I would like to think this analysis here is yet another contribution.

When the APNU government was formed in 2015, no political appointee in high office and in the Cabinet had more political experience and scholarly pedigree than Drs. Clive Thomas and Rupert Roopnaraine. None in the APNU leadership came close. In the area of experience in government, only Carl Greenidge had a longer reach than them. Thomas advised the Michael Manley government in Jamaica. Roopnaraine advised the Bouterse regime in Suriname and Bishop revolutionary administration in Grenada.

When I saw an interview with Clive Thomas done by David Hinds sent to me yesterday that was recorded two months ago, my mind went immediately to the words of Black American philosopher, Cornel West. Writing the introduction to the 60^th anniversary of Fanon’s masterpiece, “The Wretched of the Earth, professor West observed that to understand where Fanon ended up (in the violent Algerian war of Independence), it is helpful to understand how he started out.

We have to reverse the meaning of West’s philosophical description of Fanon’s journey and turn it into a negative indictment of the WPA’s post-Rodney leadership. It was where this leadership started that explains how their journey ended up on the opposing spectrum of Rodney and Fanon.

Fanon fought for the liberation of the Third World masses. The WPA’s 1970 leadership started out as middle class activists who hardly had any exposure to the suffering of the masses unlike Fanon. While the French made three attempts to kill Fanon, Forbes Burnham never even contemplated harming the WPA leading personalities. Of course, Burnham eventually harmed Rodney.;;;

It is when you internalise the meaning of West’s learned comment on Fanon and reverse its application to the WPA’s current remnants including all of them without exception, you will understand why many of those remnants including the intellectual doctors became failures when they possessed state power after 2015 and why they shaped their attitude to the five-month election fiasco in 2020.

It will take more than one column to assess the output of Thomas in that interview; therefore, there will be a continuation of this analysis here. We will start with his admission that he is part of the WPA. This obviously is the starting point to evaluate Thomas’s praxis in the context of the struggles of Rodney and Fanon.

I believe an iconoclastic review of Rodney’s praxis is long overdue. I think Black nationalism was at the heart of his politics but Rodney was also influenced by Fanon and though he was nowhere near the stature of Fanon, Rodney understood that African Guyanese liberation can only come through working class liberation.

Rodney’s politics then was driven by the need for a political construct that would not enslave Indians or create an African hegemony. The politics of WPA’s intellectuals after 2015 was the concretisation of Creole middle class dominance accompanied by the structural weakening of the economy of Indians. This explains why every budget between 2015 and 2020 was hostile to the business class and sought to miniaturise the Indian economy.

WPA’s post-Rodney intellectuals betrayed Rodney and Fanon as early as 2002 by the espousal of the WPA’s racial proclamation against the backdrop of what was taking place in Buxton. We have no public statement from many of them after the Buxton mayhem in support of what was taking place in Buxton so no direct comment could be made against them but one of the leading non-intellectual figures of the WPA was involved in conspiratorial activities in Buxton. The WPA as an organisation, never, and I repeat never, condemned the ethnically motivated violence in Buxton, except Eusi Kwayana.

Secondly, in the interview, Thomas’ distance from Rodney and Fanon was on full display when on countless times he referred to something that has a subliminal ethnic flair – the Buxton proposal. No one in Guyana knows what the Buxton proposal is because there is no such thing. See my Thursday, October 7, 2021 column titled, “The Buxton Proposal: Subliminal ethnic instinct.” For those who wish to know what Thomas means by the Buxton proposal, he is referring to cash grants for poorer citizens from oil revenues. It remains inexplicable that he calls it the Buxton proposal rather than cash grants from oil.      

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

 

 

---

---