Friday Feature
Some Caribbean Islands celebrate
Emancipation day on the 1st August. In the month of July in
celebration of their emancipation from their colonial rulers, every week The
Steve Biko Foundation will cover prominent activists that emerged from some of
the Islands.
Walter Anthony Rodney (23 March 1942 – 13 June 1980) was a
prominent Guyanese historian, political activist and scholar, who was
assassinated in Guyana in 1980.Born into a working-class family,
Walter Rodney was a very bright student, attending Queen's College in
the then British Guiana (now Guyana), where he became a champion
debater and athlete, and then attending university on a scholarship at
the University College of the West Indies (UCWI) in Jamaica,
graduating in 1963 with a first-class degree in History, thereby winning the
Faculty of Arts prize.
Rodney earned a PhD in African History in
1966 at the School of Oriental and African
Studies in London, England, at the
age of 24. His dissertation, which focused on the slave trade on the
Upper Guinea Coast, was published by the Oxford University
Press in 1970 under the title A History of the Upper Guinea Coast
1545-1800 and was widely acclaimed for its originality in challenging
the conventional wisdom on the topic.Rodney traveled widely and became very
well known internationally as an activist, scholar and
formidable orator. He taught at the University of Dar es
Salaam in Tanzania during the period 1966-67 and later in
Jamaica at his alma mater UWI Mona. He was sharply critical of
the middle class for its role in the post-independence
Caribbean. He was also a strong critic of capitalism and argued for a
socialist development template.
On 15 October 1968 the government of Jamaica, led
by Prime Minister Hugh Shearer, declared Rodney persona non grata.
The decision to ban him from ever returning to Jamaica because of his advocacy
for the working poor in that country caused riots to break out,
eventually claiming the lives of several people and causing millions of dollars
in damages. These riots, which started on 16 October 1968, are now known as
the “Rodney Riots”, and they
triggered an increase in political awareness across the Caribbean, especially
among the Afrocentric Rastafarian sector of Jamaica, documented in
his book The Groundings with my Brothers (Bogle-L'Ouverture
Publications, 1969).
In 1969, Rodney returned to the University of Dar
es Salaam, where he served as a Professor of History until 1974.Rodney became a
prominent Pan-Africanist, and was important in the Black
Power movement in the Caribbean and North America. While living
in Dar es Salaam he was influential in developing a new centre of
African learning and discussion.In 1974 Rodney returned to Guyana from
Tanzania. He was due to take up a position as a professor at
the University of Guyana but the government prevented his
appointment. He became increasingly active in politics, founding
the Working People's Alliance, a party that provided the most effective
and credible opposition to the PNC government. In 1979 he was arrested and
charged with arson after two government offices were burned.On 13
June 1980, Walter Rodney was killed, at the age of thirty-eight, by a bomb in
his car, a month after returning from the independence celebrations in
Zimbabwe and during a period of intense political activism. He was survived by
his wife, Pat, and three children. His brother, Donald Rodney, who was injured
in the explosion, said that a sergeant in the Guyana Defence
Force named Gregory Smith had given Walter the bomb that killed him. After
the killing, Smith fled to French Guiana, where he died in 2002.
It was,
and is still, widely believed - although not proved - that the assassination
was set-up by then President Linden Forbes Burnham. Rodney's idea,
that the various ethnic groups who were historically disenfranchised by the
ruling colonial class should work together, was in conflict with Burnham's
presidential opinions.In early 2015 a Commission of Inquiry (COI) was held
during which a new witness, Holland Gregory Yearwood, came forward claiming to
be a longstanding friend of Rodney and a former member of the WPA. He testified
that Rodney might have had a hand in his own demise, having presented
detonators to Yearwood weeks prior to the explosion asking for assistance in
assembling a bomb.
"Rodney's
most influential book was his magnum opus, How Europe Underdeveloped
Africa, published in 1972. In it he described an Africa that
had been consciously exploited by European imperialists,
leading directly to the modern underdevelopment of most of the continent.
The book became enormously influential as well as controversial: it was
groundbreaking in that it was among the first to bring a new perspective to the
question of underdevelopment in Africa. Rodney's analysis went far beyond the
previously accepted approach in the study of Third World
underdevelopment."Instead of being interested primarily in the
inter-relations of African trade and politics, as many of us were at that time,
Walter Rodney focused his attention on the agricultural basis of African
communities, on the productive forces within them and on the processes of
social differentiation. As a result, his research raised a whole set of fresh
questions concerning the nature of African social institutions on the Upper
Guinea coast in the sixteenth century and of the impact of the Atlantic slave
trade. In doing so, he helped to open up a new dimension. Almost immediately he
stimulated much further writing and research on West Africa, and he initiated a
debate, which still continues and now extends across the whole range of African
history.
Though
Rodney lived with constant police harassment and frequent threats against his
life he nonetheless managed to complete four books in the last year of his
life: An academic work: A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905; A
political call to action; People’s Power, No Dictator, and two children’s
books: Kofi Baadu Out of Africa and Lakshmi Out of India
Quotes
by Walter Rodney
"....an
overall view of ancient African civilisation and ancient African cultures is
required to expunge the myths about the African past, which linger in the mind
of Black people everywhere. This is the main revolutionary function of African
History in our hemisphere." -Walter
Rodney
"Every
African has a responsibility to understand the system and work towards its
overthrow." -
Walter Rodney in
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
"If
there is to be any proving of our humanity it must be by revolutionary
means" - Walter
Rodney in
Groundings with my Brothers
http://www.walterrodneyfoundation.org/biography/
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