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Malcolm Rodriques was a tireless worker for social justice

Dec 11, 2022 Letters

Dear Editor,

According to those who were his associates, Fr Malcolm Rodrigues was a complex, dedicated, and humble capitano in the history of colonial/post-colonial teaching of the Holy Gospel and Jesus. In fact, his humility developed on the periphery of South Georgetown ghettos, may well have served as a masque for class and eco political, polarised, ethnic turbulence.

I first encountered his compassion in the early 1970s when Brother Joshua Ramsammy was gunned down near the then Cornhill Street Co-op Bank. Apparently, his perception of Liberation Theology was an asset guided by an awareness of the kind of top-down authority of establishment religions personages the like of Bishop Singh and his predecessor Fr Guilly?

With the formation of the loosely knit IPRA/ASCRIA/USA/WPVP grouping, Malcolm Rodrigues emerged as a more visible foot soldato for the poor and powerless.At that period when the anti-dictatorship struggle was beginning to assume a popular movement, Malcolm Rodrigues was certainly convinced that localized community based groundings were the best option to forge bonds between University radicals and sections of the working people situated in a fragile multi-racial paradigm,

But his activism was not limited, or even determined by academic linkages. He sought to provide spiritual solidarity if not solace to every victim, every casualty of the Burnham dictatorship. It is at this level that his exposure in Oxford to the higher levels of messaging symbolised by Kristos, Euclides and Einstein, qualified categorised him as a capitano for the poor and down pressed.Guyanese can gather a great insight into the Walter Rodney prospectus of materialist history just by recognising Fr Rodrigues and the paths he chose from his preadult years at St. Stanislaus College.In terms of regional (Caricom) integration, it is fair to say that Brother Malcolm had few counterparts of his vision. And this most likely was due to the differentia in socio-political impacts of Eastern Caribbean mass political movements after the collapse of the West Indian Federation that fueled ‘small’ island parochialism at given phases.

Indeed, much of the contributors to the WPA Day clean were quick to perceive the deeper significance of inter Caribbean networking under the challenging circumstances of Georgetown/Chaguaramas complementarity.Fr Rodrigues always respected the popular masses and the working people.Whenever duly summoned for him to perform Walter Rodney memorials and anniversaries there was always that dispassionate tribute articulated to register truth, to highlight Good over Evil and express praise to the examples set by the teachings of the Almighty.

Gone but no Forgotten.

Sincerely,

Eddi Rodney

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