Walter Anthony Rodney was a prominent Guyanese historian, political activist, and academic. Rodney is recognized as one of the Caribbean’s most brilliant minds. Considered controversial, Rodney fought to change the status quo not just in his country but in the world. “Rodney worked with the poor and committed his life to make poverty a thing of the past for men, women, and children. Rodney was very concerned with exploitation and oppression,” the Caribbean Current reported. He was an outspoken critic of the middle class for its role in the post-independence Caribbean. An anti-capitalist, he pushed for a socialist development template. He was assassinated in 1980 at the age of 38.

The Beginning

Rodney was born into a working-class family in the then British Guiana, what is now Guyana. He attended Queen’s College where he became a champion debater as well as an athlete. He went on to attend the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica on scholarship. He graduated in 1963 with a first-class degree in History, and he won the Faculty of Arts prize.

When he was just 24 years old, he earned a Ph.D. in African History from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in 1966. His dissertation, which focused on the slave trade on the Upper Guinea Coast, was so impressive that the Oxford University Press published it in 1970 under the title “A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800.”

Political Awakening

“Rodney’s own political awakening and the beginning of his lifelong adherence to Marxist theory occurred in the 1950s, when as a youngster he distributed People’s Progressive Party (PPP) manifestos. He learned while doing so that it was imprudent to enter yards with long driveways, because those who lived in the houses there were of a higher social class and lighter pigmentation than he, and therefore unlikely to be sympathetic to the nationalist aspirations of the PPP,” Encyclopedia.com reported.

Teacher, Teacher

Rodney became known internationally as an activist, scholar, and orator. According to Wikipedia, he taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania from 1966 to 1967 and then again from 1969 to 1974. He also taught at his alma mater University of the West Indies in 1968.

Persona Non Grata

“On October, 15,1968, the Government of Jamaica declared Walter Rodney persona non grata. The decision to ban him led to protests among students at the University of the West Indies, Mona, campus and wider, to include large sections of the working-class communities,” the Jamaica Gleaner reported. The incidents became known as Rodney Riots, resulting in six deaths and millions of dollars in damages.

Pan Africanist

Rodney was a prominent Pan-Africanist, and was an important figure in the Black Power movement in the Caribbean and North America. While living in Dar es Salaam, Rodney helped develop a new center of African learning and discussion.

Unwelcoming Homecoming

In 1974 Rodney returned to Guyana where he was to take a position as a professor at the University of Guyana but the Guyanese government blocked his appointment. Instead of teaching, Rodney used his voice in politics and he founded the Working People’s Alliance, which offered a credible opposition to the PNC government. In 1979 he and seven others were arrested and charged with arson after two government offices were burned, according to Black History Studies.

Death

On June 13, 1980, Rodney was killed in Georgetown, Guyana. He was 38. A bomb was rigged in his car, a month after he returned from celebrations during the independence in Zimbabwe.

His brother, Donald Rodney, “accused a sergeant in the Guyana Defense Force, named Gregory Smith, of planting the bomb and it is widely believed, but has not been proven definitely, that the assassination was orchestrated by his arch foe, then President Linden Forbes Burnham. The reason being that, Rodney’s highly visible activism on behalf of Guyana’s various ethnic groups who were all historically disenfranchised by the ruling colonial class, was a destabilizing force and a real threat to Burnham,” the Council on Hemispheric Affairs reported. 

Life In Books

“Rodney’s most influential book was “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,” published in 1972. In it he described how Africa had been 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,” Word Disk reported.

Academic and political activist Angela Davis wrote the forward for the book and wrote: “To mark time,” he [Rodney] insists, “or even to move slowly while others leap ahead is virtually equivalent to going backward.”

Left Behind

Before his death Rodney had revised a manuscript, which he had submitted for publication to the Johns Hopkins University Press. It was later published posthumously as “A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905.” In it, he wrote of the problem of class nature of Guyanese history. He analyzed the “political economy of slavery in general, the capricious labor withdrawal by the Creoles (the former slaves), the role of the planter-controlled legislature in perpetuating the peculiar institution, or Creole opposition to immigration policies that resulted in the introduction of indentured laborers from India to plantation life in the colony,” Encyclopedia.com reported.

In all, he completed four books in the last year of his life: “A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905”; “People’s Power, No Dictator”; and two children’s books — “Kofi Baadu Out of Africa” and “Lakshmi Out of India.”

The Walter Rodney Foundation

The Walter Rodney Foundation offers scholarships and programs, which promote education, health and human development from a social justice perspective. It also promotes the works of Walter Rodney.

It was created by the Rodney Family in 2006 and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2004 it started an Annual Walter Rodney Symposium. The foundation also donated the Walter Rodney Papers to the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library.