New book on Walter Rodney generates eerie curiosity about WPA 

Oct 22, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – Books on Walter Rodney are coming out fast. A few months back we had, “A revolutionary for our time: The Walter Rodney story” by Leo Zeilig. Please see my review of  Saturday, August 20, 2022,titled,“Leo Zeilig was contemptuously angry with the WPA.”

Soon to be released is; “Walter Rodney: In search of revolution” by husband and wife team of Jay and Joan Mandle. I am grateful for a draft copy and was given permission to write on the draft.

Professor Jay Mandle is a White American scholar but has devoted his scholarship to the study of Guyana and the Caribbean. His book, “The Plantation Economy: Population and Economic Change in Guyana, 1838-1960” was the reigning text at UG when I was a UG freshman in 1974.

The book was compulsory reading for any student in history, economics and sociology and remains one of the best texts ever published on Guyana. Since then, Professor Mandle’s output has been prodigious.

I would like to think he is among just a handful of top class scholars with interest in Guyana who have remained steadfast to the politics and ideology that they embraced in the 1970s. I know that Dr. Mandle must have a permanent mental pain at what some of the radical Guyanese scholars he was associated with have become.

In fact, what is useful about this imminent and eminent publication is that in quoting what some of Rodney’s intimate comrades have said back then and what they have become in the 21st century compels you to shout out “oh my God!” as you read the quotes.

The manuscript is about Rodney’s life and praxis in Tanzania, Jamaica and Guyana but I will confine this review to the chapters on Guyana. When Rodney’s brother, Donald, was a guest on the Gildarie-Freddie Kissoon Show, he was asked how Rodney would have reacted to the five months of election rigging. Donald said he thinks his brother would have upheld the democratic process.

Many of Rodney’s comrades in the 1970s have defected from the multi-racial, working class agenda that swept Guyana in the 1970s and 1980s. They have abandoned the ideology of working class liberation for an ethnic supremacist/tribalist agenda.

But Mandle’s work is replete with Rodney’s analytical outlays of how the artificial barriers between Indians and Africans can easily be removed. Mandle adequately quotes Rodney to show that Rodney did not see the race problematic more worthy of concentration than the class problematic.

Perhaps the most interesting dimension of the Guyana section of the book is the WPA’s criticism of the PPP for not joining with the WPA to ferment the revolution that would have toppled President Burnham.

It is this part of the book that generates intense anger in the reader who believes the current crop of Rodney’s surviving comrades abandoned the Rodneyite instincts. The list includes Drs. Clive Thomas and Rupert Roopnaraine, Bonita Bone among others.

Dr. Mandle relying on the words of these surviving activists, may have inadvertently gave impressions to readers that the PPP refused to play its part in creating or fostering the dialectical mode that could have led to the toppling of Forbes Burnham. Dr. Mandle quotes from Roopnaraine who blamed Cheddi Jagan for not joining with the WPA to create revolution.

The weakness in this publication when it comes to the disagreement between the WPA and the PPP on the question of overthrowing Burnham is Dr. Mandle’s lack of correspondence with PPP leaders who were an essential part of the moment in the 1970s and who are still active inside the PPP.

I raised this lacuna with Dr. Mandle but he did say something that was extremely relevant. He said Clement Rohee’s autobiography was not helpful in this context. I am in extensive agreement with Professor Mandle here.

It is these kinds of historical nuances Rohee should have expanded on. In this regard, his autobiography is a disservice to Guyana’s historiography. Since none of the books on Rodney’s praxis in Guyana has adequately covered the strategic disharmony between the PPP and WPA and offered the PPP’s version, then the void continues to exist.

Space has run out but this is my take on why the PPP refused to join the planning and organizing of what the WPA called revolution. The PPP did not see it as revolution but adventurism by a radical bourgeois group contemptuous of the time consuming efforts it takes to organize the masses for anti-dictatorship struggle.

Cheddi Jagan’s perception of the wildness and westernized middle class life of those who think the PPP did not want to create revolution can be found in his article: “Guyana: A New Stage,” Mirror, December 1971, Volume 3, Number 3. Time proved the PPP right.

(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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