Last week marked the 28th anniversary of one of the most tragic events in the modern history of Guyana. I am referring to the death of Walter Rodney, who was assassinated on June 13, 1980 in a car in a street in Georgetown by means of a remote-controlled bomb. At that time Rodney, who was born in Georgetown in March 1942, was in the prime of his life both as a scholar and a political and social activist.
Rodney’s brilliant academic career had begun as a student of Queen’s College between 1953 and 1960. After studying and teaching abroad in Jamaica, the United Kingdom and Tanzania in the following fourteen years, Rodney, who has been described as a radical or revolutionary intellectual, returned to Guyana in 1974 to take up an appointment as Professor of History at the University of Guyana.
On his arrival, however, Rodney discovered that his appointment had been unjustly rescinded by the University’s Board of Governors owing to the interference of the appointees of the ruling People’s National Congress government led by Forbes Burnham. The long but ultimately unsuccessful struggle of the University’s Department of History and others within and without the institution to secure a reversal of this decision remains one of the saddest memories in my long association with the University.
Denied a job in his own country, Rodney refused to migrate, as the fearful P.N.C. political directorate desired and expected him to do. Instead, he lectured abroad periodically to maintain himself and his family, but spent most of his time at home conducting research on Guyanese history and becoming increasingly involved in local politics as a co-leader of the Working People’s Alliance.
By 1980 Rodney had become the most strident and feared critic of the increasingly authoritarian P.N.C. regime under President Forbes Burnham whom he dubbed a dictator. He became well-known for his clarion call, “People’s Power, No Dictator.”
His political activism culminated in his assassination at the comparatively young age of thirty-eight. At the time of his death Rodney was an increasingly popular figure in local politics. As a politician he was known especially for two major initiatives, namely, his struggle for the restoration of democracy to Guyana and his advocacy of non-racist politics in a nation deeply divided by race since the late 1950s.
Rodney’s life and work as a scholar and political activist were celebrated and evaluated in a remarkable way three years ago in a number of commemorative events in the Caribbean, Europe, North America and Africa to mark the 25th anniversary of his tragic demise. One of the contributions to the commemorative activities in Guyana was an article which I wrote in this very column in the Stabroek News edition of June 9, 2005. The rest of this focus on Rodney consists of the following excerpts from that article which was entitled “Walter Rodney The Historian.”
“… Due to his active involvement in local politics in the final years of his life, many Guyanese remember Rodney primarily or exclusively as a politician. However, throughout most of his adult life his principal accomplishments were realized in his capacity as a historian, researching, writing and teaching the history especially of two areas, namely, Africa and the Caribbean…Rodney eventually became not only one of the Caribbean’s most outstanding historians, but also one of the most renowned and internationally acclaimed Guyanese scholars of all time.
This enviable reputation stems largely from the nature, quality and quantity of his historical writing. By Caribbean standards Rodney was a very prolific writer. Thus, in his comparatively short academic career he produced three major books, one edited work on Guyanese sugar plantations in the late nineteenth century, several pamphlets and booklets and over seventy articles in academic and other journals. His acclaim as a historian was due mainly to two somewhat related factors, namely his approach to history and the distinctive traits of his scholarship.
Rodney was essentially a revisionist historian, that is, a historian who sought to correct false or deficient statements and interpretations about historical events. One of his major specific objectives was, in his own words, ‘to uproot the numerous historical myths which have been implanted in the minds of black people’. He considered such myths, born of prejudice, ignorance, loss of memory and other factors, as formidable obstacles to the realization of urgently needed socio-economic change in Africa and the Caribbean. In his view mental liberation as a result of the acquisition of true historical knowledge was an indispensable, though not the only, precondition for the Black man’s total liberation.”
…Rodney’s scholarship was marked by an approach that academics sometimes describe as ‘history from below’, that is, history written from the perspective, and often for the benefit, of the disadvantaged or dispossessed. In some contexts this expression means history written from the viewpoint of the largely poor and non-White developing world, including Africa and the Caribbean, rather than from the standpoint of the wealthy White developed world, especially of Europe and North America. This approach is clearly evident in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
In other circumstances, ‘history from below’ means history from the perspective of the working class, the masses, the ordinary people in the society, the poor and the powerless, rather than from that of the more privileged middle and ruling classes. This approach is particularly evident in Rodney’s final book, The History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905, published posthumously in 1981 and, from the standpoint of the historian’s craft, probably his finest work.
Rodney’s historical writing is well known for its many distinctive traits. It was very diverse in content as well as character. Some of his publications were academic, while others, such as The Groundings with my Brothers which focused on his experiences in Jamaica in 1968, were somewhat polemical. Furthermore, many of them were localized dealing with specific issues in African and Caribbean history, whereas others were global in perspective, addressing more universal themes, such as the history of capitalism, socialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, pan-Africanism and Third World dependency and underdevelopment.
Rodney’s works were generally marked by a great degree of dependence on original independent research. He seldom produced works of synthesis, based largely on the findings of other scholars. Rather his work was often pioneering and creative. It was usually distinguished also by clarity of thought, convincing logic, rigorous analysis of the ideas or events he was examining, and a concise, effective literary style. These traits were partly a result of the perceptive, critical analytic mind he possessed and were pivotal to his achievements.
… Walter Rodney was not an ‘ivory tower’ historian. He believed strongly that teaching, research and writing should be accompanied by serious social involvement-that historical knowledge should be put to practical social use. It is this aspect of his work as a historian which is emphasized in the tribute given in his honour at the time of his death by the International Scientific Committee responsible for organizing the UNESCO General History of Africa. In its memorial the Committee stated: ‘In evaluating Walter Rodney one characteristic stands out. He was a scholar who recognised no distinction between academic concerns and service to society, between science and social commitment. He was concerned about people as well as archives, about the work place as well as the classroom. He found time to be both a historian and a sensitive social reformer.’”
