Lesser Spotted Comrades: Walter Rodney
Article originally published in Issue 6 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue:
By Emma Finnamore
Walter Rodney was already an icon of the Black Power Movement in the Caribbean when he was assassinated at the age of 38. A groundbreaking historian and political activist, Rodney dedicated his life to the struggle of oppressed African peoples worldwide. He made major contributions to the field of post-colonialism, exploring the legacies of the Atlantic slave trade and its impact on the development of capitalism and the modern economy.
Part of the global African diaspora, Rodney was born in 1942 to working class parents in what is today Georgetown, Guyana. The South American country was formerly a British colony, and its population is mainly made up of the descendents of enslaved Africans, indentured workers from South Asia, and Indigenous peoples. Walter Rodney spoke from an internationalist Pan-African perspective, with great attachment to the Caribbean and Africa. For most of his life, he worked as a researcher of African history. In his youth, travels to the Soviet Union and Cuba made a large impression on him, and he wrote that the “exploitation of Africans can be terminated only through the construction of a Socialist society … Pan-Africanism must be an internationalist, anti-imperialist and Socialist weapon.”[1]
He completed a PhD in the United Kingdom at the age of 24, and in the years that followed, taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, and the University of West Indies in Jamaica. As his political activity grew more radical, the elite became hostile. He was declared persona non grata by the Jamaican government, as they feared he would incite revolution, which resulted in a student uprising known as “the Rodney Riots”.[2] The violent event is credited with increasing Caribbean awareness of the global Black Power movement, and Rodney was further seen as a symbol of revolutionary thought.
Rodney’s most well-known work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, published in 1972, was as innovative as it was controversial. It discussed the influence of slavery and colonial trade on the growth of the European capitalist economy. The book criticised mainstream notions of “modernisation”, and covered at length the origins of poverty and conflict across the African continent. First world accumulation of wealth comes directly at the expense of periphery nations. Rodney asserted that Africa's subjugation in the modern economy is due to its legacy of political and economic suppression by these core colonial powers. Taking this into account, he specifically used ‘underdeveloped’ to contrast the popular term to refer to poorer nations as “developing”, drawing attention to the intentionality of the exploitation of African nations under imperialism. He saw imperial power similarly to Frantz Fanon and Vladimir Lenin, as a form of capitalist advancement and globalisation. The messages in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa endure and encourage readers to contemplate what constitutes “development” and how societies, particularly the relatively underdeveloped countries today, could grow in sustainable and equitable ways, outside of this process of exploitative development.
While he was revered as an intellectual and prominent academic at universities across the globe, he never lost connection to his roots. Rodney was charismatic and could speak colloquially about complex socio-political topics with anyone, regardless of formal schooling or class. He worked to raise political consciousness among the population through education and activism. In 1974, he founded the Working People’s Alliance, a democratic socialist political party, and continued to infuse Marxist philosophy into everyday organising and teaching in Guyana. His sudden death in 1980 by car bomb, under mysterious circumstances, was an act of aggression against the Guyanese working people’s movement for Pan-African socialist peace and prosperity. His murder is widely attributed to the dictatorship in power at the time, which was motivated to quell rebellion through violent means. He is survived by his family, who today run the Walter Rodney Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to his work and awarding scholarships to young scholars of colour.[3] Recently, his lecture notes have been compiled into full texts, including a history of the Russian Revolution from a Third World perspective. The poet Kamau Braithwaite honoured him with the words,
before you recognized the gorgon head inside the red eye of the walkie talkie
to be blown into fragments: your death
like the islands that you loved
like the seawall that you wished to heal
bringing equal rights and justice to the brothers
that children above all others would be like the sun/rise over the rupununi
over the hazy morne over kilimanjaro.[4]
Angela Davis commemorated his death as well, and wrote about his legacy, “If Walter Rodney’s assassins were under the impression that they could arrest the flow of his ideas by destroying his body, they could have not been more wrong.”[5] His funeral was attended by over 35,000 Guyanese citizens, crying “don’t mourn, organise!”[6] In his brief life, he inspired a generation of Caribbean and African youth to look to Pan-Africanism and a socialist path to liberation and continues to inspire today.
Notes
1. Walter Rodney, ‘Aspects of the International Class Struggle in Africa, the Caribbean and America’, Pan-Africanism: Struggle against Neo-colonialism and Imperialism - Documents of the Sixth Pan-African Congress, Horace Campbell, ed. Toronto: Afro-Carib Publications, (1975), pp. 18-41.
2. Rupert Lewis, “Walter Rodney: 1968 Revisited.” Social and Economic Studies 43, no. 3 (1994): 7–56.
3. "Sharing the Life and Works of Dr. Walter Rodney." The Walter Rodney Foundation. https://www.walterrodneyfoundation.org/.
4. Kamau Braithwaite, ‘A Poem for Walter Rodney’, Index on Censorship, 10.6 (1981), pp. 26–30.
5. Angela Y. Davis, "Walter Rodney's Legacy," Verso Books Blog, April 24, 2019. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4127-walter-rodney-s-legacy-by-angela-davis.
6. ‘In Memoriam: Walter Rodney 1942–1980’, The Black Scholar, 11:6, 1, (1980) DOI: 10.1080/00064246.1980.11414128