Walter Rodney has demonstrated through thought and action that it is not inevitable for intellectuals to join the systems of oppression and use their knowledge and skills to perpetuate exploitation. They have the option of committing “class suicide.” Rodney called on the intelligentsia to use their knowledge and skills to challenge and undermine oppression.
“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 workplace as well as the classroom. He found time to be both a historian and a sensitive social reformer.” -International Scientific Committee, UNESCO General History of Africa.
Dr Walter Rodney was a revolutionary intellectual, socialist, Pan-Africanist and organizer who made a significant contribution to the Caribbean Radical Tradition that seeks to create just, liberated and egalitarian societies in the Caribbean region. October 2016 marks the 48th anniversaries of the expulsion of Rodney from Jamaica and the subsequent Rodney Rebellion that took place as a reaction to his banning and the general exploitation of the African-Jamaican masses by the neocolonial regime.
This commemorative moment is as good a time as any to introduce individuals to Walter Rodney and to hopefully inspire people to explore the relevance of his ideas and praxis to revolution-making in the Caribbean and elsewhere.
We are going to highlight some significant periods in Rodney’s life in order to uncover the politics of this revolutionary. Rodney was not an arm-chair revolutionary who sequestered himself on the academic plantation theorizing on what must be done to transform society. He waded into the messy, complicated and threatening world of practice to facilitate resistance to the violent forces of oppression.
Contrary to the robust assertion of one of Rodney’s professors during his undergraduate years that, “There is no such thing (as a revolutionary intellectual). One can be an intellectual or one can be a revolutionary. You can’t combine the two.” Rodney has shown the world through his action that the revolutionary intellectual option is a possibility for academics and students who would like to become active agents of social transformation.
That ideologically misguided academic who sought to misinform Rodney would have likely dismissed Marx’s assertion that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”
The oppressed do not have the luxury of separating radical or revolutionary thought from the requisite transformative practices that are needed to create the just and emancipated society.
There is an evident absence of a critical mass of students and academics who are engaged in radical social movement organizations. Rodney used the platform of the university to engage in the production and dissemination of oppositional ideas and scholarship. He entered the wider society to educate and mobilize the working-class for self-organization.
His legacy of principled commitment and activism is something with which activists or organizers should become fully aware. Neoliberal capitalism has established a seemingly unchallenged ideological and political dominance in the current period. It has left many people believing that there is no viable alternative to capitalism.
Rodney would have rejected this defeatist tendency that has induced many progressives to abandon their radical politics or commitment to socialism and accept liberal capitalist democracy as the only political game in town. Some former radicals have gone over to social democracy, which is essentially capitalism with a human face.
Rodney’s origin and educational experience
Who was Walter Rodney? On 23 March 1942, Rodney was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and he was a product of the Guyanese labouring classes. His mother, Pauline Rodney, was a seamstress and carried out full-time unpaid domestic work in the Rodney household. Rodney’s father, Percival Rodney, was a tailor, an independent operator, but he was forced by economic necessity, on occasions, to engage in wage labour with a big capitalist tailoring firm. Percival Rodney was an active member of the Marxist, multiracial mass-based People’s Progressive Party (PPP).
As a preteen, Walter Rodney distributed PPP’s literature to households in the community. Rodney was therefore exposed to socialism and the working-class mobilizing across the racial divide in a class-based organization.
This political experience was a type of formative, experientially-based political education. He was a firm supporter of Black Power in the Caribbean but it never compromised his commitment to class unity among the racially diverse working-class in the region and close and exacting interrogation of the African petite bourgeoisie and the problematic nature of its relationship with the labouring classes.
Rodney highlights the role of his early exposure to Marxism or socialism and its influence on his later engagement with the doctrine as a young adult:
“As distinct from the many writers, poets and artists, who I think ultimately were the more important figures, there was later a small segment that went into the university and came up in an academic environment, like C.Y. Thomas and myself. We took with us, sometimes unknowingly, a willingness to accept at least the concepts of socialism/communism/Marxism/class struggle without any a priori rejection which many of our university colleagues did have.
Many of the people with whom I was training at the University of the West Indies, Jamaicans in particular, were technically as skilled as any of us, but they had this fundamental reservation about socialist and Marxist thought which I don’t believe Clive Thomas and I ever shared.
That was because the PPP was the only mass party in Guyana and the leadership explicitly said, “we are socialists, we are Marxists”. And they were prepared to talk about creating a new anti-capitalist society based on new and different theory or perception than the one to which we were accustomed.
So long before many Guyanese entered into a serious examination of what was Marxism and communism, at least it seemed to us, from what we heard the leadership of the PPP and the party saying, that whatever Marxism and socialism and these various concepts meant, they were things that could be taken seriously.”
This formative racial and class experience undoubtedly informed the integrated analysis that he took in addressing race and class oppression and avoidance of class or race reductionism. In other words, Rodney did not pander to the use of race or class to explain all social phenomena that occurred in the public and private spheres.
The hostility of certain households and even the church to the message and work of the PPP engendered an awareness of class or social differences and their influence on how members of the public responded to his offer of the PPP’s literature and other products. Walter did not frame this alertness as class consciousness but the experience as his “first real introduction to the class question.”
Rodney was a diligent high school student and he attended Queen’s College. He developed an interest in the study of history at Queen’s College under the mentorship of historian Dr Robert Moore.
Rodney went to the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona campus, on an open scholarship in 1960 and he graduated with a first-class honours degree in history in 1963. While he was a student at UWI, he was active in student politics and extracurricular activities. He ran twice for the presidency of the undergraduate student union, the Student Guild.
According to the late intellectual and economist Norman Girvan, Rodney “was defeated on both tries for the Presidency by persons conservative by temperament and opinion.” Rodney’s second bid for this office was probably not helped by his 1962 visit to Cuba and his enthusiasm in sharing literature acquired during the trip.
This revolutionary intellectual was active in debating competitions for his residential hall and UWI served on the Guild Council and was an elected representative of the Regional Union of West Indies Students. Rodney co-authored the article The Negro Slave with a fellow student C. Augustus and was published in UWI’s flagship journal Caribbean Quarterly in 1964. Jamaica’s secret police or the Special Branch opened a file on Rodney and his activism in June 1961 and claimed that he had a radical leftist outlook.
Rodney started his doctoral studies in African history in 1963 at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and successfully completed and received his Ph.D. in 1966 at the age of twenty-four. He published A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800 through the Oxford University Press. This book was the result of his dissertation work and it launched his career and public profile as a professional historian.
Rodney’s book highlights the class interests of the African rulers that informed their participation in the Atlantic slave trade, the nature of political rule with the governed and the negative impact of the alliance between African rulers and European capitalists-cum-slavers on the region’s development.
Rodney was clear about the European capitalists being the economic actors who gained the most benefits from trading in the region and selling and enslaving Africans:
“Historically, the initiative came from Europe. It was the European commercial system that expanded to embrace the various levels of an African barter economy and to assign to the specific roles in global production. This meant the accumulation of capital from trading in Africa, and above all from the purchase of slaves and their employment in the New World.
It is essential to stress that all changes on the coast occurred without prejudice to this over-all conception. Indeed, the most significant social changes on the Upper Guinea Coast demonstrated how African society became geared to serve the capitalist system.”
Rodney was not into the business of being an apologist for the ruling groups in African societies that aided and abetted the dehumanizing and exploitative sale of the people to the capitalist enslavers. Unfortunately, there are still people who would like to absolve African leaders for their role in the capture and sale of Africans.
During his tenure in England, he deepened his study and understanding of Marxism through a study group that was led by C.L.R James and his partner Selma James.
In Walter Rodney Speaks: The Making of an African Intellectual, Rodney states that the study group consistently met over a two- to three-year period and it was important in assisting him to “acquire knowledge of Marxism, a more precise of the Russian Revolution and of the historical formulation.
One of the most important things which I got out of that experience was a certain sense of historical analysis, in the sense that C.L.R. James was really the master of the analysis of historical situations.”
Teaching, researching and acting in the world as a revolutionary intellectual
Rodney went on to teach at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, from 1967 at the level of a lecturer. He went to work at UWI, Mona, in January 1968 as a lecturer of African history in the Department of History.
His political and public work among Rastas, urban youth and even radicalized members of the petite bourgeoisie earned him the attention of Jamaica’s secret police and the reactionary regime of Prime Minister Hugh Shearer of the Jamaica Labour Party. The urban poor, Rastafari, the progressive intelligentsia could be receptive to what Rodney was offering and the regime knew that it had nothing of substance to serve as an inoculant against the message of empowerment, dignity, and justice.
Rodney identified the African labouring classes and the oppressed peasants who are the overwhelming majority in Jamaica as the only force that “can bear the brunt of revolutionary fighting” for the realization of the socialist society, which was unlike the situation in revolutionary Cuba in which Africans were not the majority.
This attempt at concretizing and politicizing Jamaica’s oppressed in the context of the Cold War, the proverbial “backyard” of American imperialism and the capital of the neocolonial regime could have only led to political repression. Rodney appealed to his petite bourgeois or middle-class colleagues and the UWI students in his speech Black Power – Its Relevance to the West Indies to think about which side they would take in the masses’ struggle against capitalism and racism:
“Trotsky once wrote that Revolution is the carnival of the masses. When we have that carnival in the West Indies, are people like us at the university going to join the bacchanal?”
The Jamaica Labour Party had an uneasy relationship and even hostile relationship with the academics at the University of the West Indies because they were not acting as mouthpieces and sanctifiers of the government’s policies and programmes.
Rodney encouraged and inspired students and faculty members to join the struggle for justice and emancipation. This action was a source of apprehension and fear within the ranks of the government and its imperial patrons. The middle-class elements were not supposed to put their knowledge and skills at the disposal of the working-class’s struggle for justice, dignity, and equity.
Rodney’s work among the Rastafari community was seen as a potential source of subversion. Horace Campbell highlights the thrust of Rodney’s political intervention among the Rastas:
“In Jamaica, Rodney perceived the Rastafari community as a major force in the efforts towards freeing and mobilizing black minds; and he offered his knowledge and experience to the Rastas and all sections of the black population who wanted to break with the myths of white imperialism.
The history lessons on Africa which Rodney took to all sections of the community brought uneasiness and fear to a pretentious leadership which never considered itself black, for Rodney stated simply that “being black was a powerful fact of the society.”
The political directorate had no tolerance for dissent, political dissidents and perceived threats to its rule. It had already used the coercive power of the state to attack and destroy working-class squatter communities in West Kingston, which also had a strong Rastafari presence.
The neocolonial state had no reservation about using the power of the law to discipline and neutralize the impact of Rodney’s political education and mobilization. Rodney had the potential to unify the different political groupings with Jamaica’s Black Power Movement and even Jamaica’s secret police or Special Branch feared this real possibility.
The government finally made its move against Rodney. On Rodney’s return from the Congress of Black Writers in Montreal on 15 October 1968, he was declared persona non grata and prevented from leaving the plane.
On 16 October 1968, the Student Guild organized a protest march against Rodney’s expulsion from Jamaica. However, the ranks of the students were increased by residents from working-class communities in downtown Kingston and they initiated the Rodney Rebellion (aka the Rodney Riots or Rodney Affair).
The masses used the protest to communicate their solidarity with Rodney and their displeasure with the failure of (in)dependent Jamaica to deliver material benefits to them. Although this uprising of the unemployed youth, workers and the working poor was spontaneous in nature, it represented the first time since the labour rebellions of 1938 that the African-Jamaican masses had returned to the stage of history in this massive and militant way.
The neocolonial regime in Jamaica apparently had a fellow-traveler that feared Rodney’s presence on its territory. The repressive and illegitimate Forbes Burnham’s regime got the Academic Board of governors at the University of Guyana to reject Rodney’s application for a job in October 1968.
This prophet of revolution and self-emancipation of the people received no honour from the state in Jamaica. So it was certainly not unexpected that the same carpet of unwelcome or revulsion would have been offered by this regime to an African-Guyanese intellectual who did not pander to its politics of racial division of the Guyanese working-class.
The African-Caribbean petite bourgeois elements who captured state power after independence were mortally afraid of this revolutionary intellectual who unreservedly fraternized with the working-class and brought a materialist analysis to their experience of anti-African racism, social domination, and capitalist exploitation. Racism and capitalism are major targets for Rodney because of the way they impact African lives.
If Rodney’s political activism had taken place in the mid-1980s and beyond, he would have brought an explicit interrogation of patriarchy’s exploitation of women to the centre of his worldview. Based on his belief in situating social analysis and prescription in the objective context of local society, his feminism would have been muscularly Caribbean-accented and relevant to the lives of labouring class women.
The preceding comment ought not to be taken as an indicator of Rodney’s lack of awareness of gender differences and the status of African women in the historical record because it was certainly not the case.
The point being made here is that gender, patriarchy and feminism never had the central role that race, white supremacy and Pan-Africanism, and class, capitalism, and imperialism did in Rodney’s political analysis. Gender politics was an extra in his drama of revolution-making.
Rodney’s political biographer Rupert Lewis offers an explanation for this gendered state of affairs: “In the area of gender the Rastafarians as well as black radicals, including Rodney, in different ways embraced traditional [patriarchal] values.”
Rodney back at the University of Dar es Salaam
Rodney was fortunate in resuming his academic career at the rank of a Senior Lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam in 1969. He was an active participant and significant contributor to the theoretical activism at the university, which took place in the context of the Julius Nyerere regime’s Arusha Declaration. This policy document and the Ujamaa developmental programme were attempts at pursuing a path to socialism that the Tanzanian regime claimed was rooted in the values, history, and sensibilities of Tanzanian society.
Tanzania was the site of Rodney’s researching and writing of his well-known book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa that deals with Europe’s development and domination of the international trading system, Africa’s contribution to the development of Europe, capitalism’s distortion of Africa’s developmental trajectory, the source of development and underdevelopment, the participation and role of the privileged classes in Europe’s exploitation of Africa and education as a cultural instrument of underdevelopment.
Africa and the Caribbean are still entrapped in unfavourable economic and political relations with Western capitalism and imperialism, which facilitate its continued underdevelopment. Rodney did not mince words on the solution to African and Caribbean development, which was grounded in the need to get rid of capitalism and embrace socialism.
Rodney saw the university as a site from which to explore and develop ideas that would advance revolutionary developments in Tanzania. He shares his experience at the university:
“That was the situation in Tanzania. Briefly, it meant that we were able to teach and develop scientific socialist ideas, bearing in mind when I say “we,” I mean comrades like myself, people of like mind, because we were part of a community and that was very important.
It’s extremely difficult to develop any ideas in isolation and the kind of work coming out of Dar es Salaam had a certain collective quality about it. There were perhaps only a few individuals, but nevertheless it was a community that was operating. We had a degree of freedom which was greater than that which is accorded academics in most parts of the Third World. That allowed us to pursue scientific socialist ideas within a political framework that was not necessarily supportive of those ideas, but was not repressive in any overt sense.”
Rodney was an active participant and foundational contributor to the development of the Dar es Salaam School at the University of Dar es Salaam and its critical and interrogative intellectual and political direction offered a radical outlook on capitalist underdevelopment, the oppression and liberation of the labouring classes, delinking from the international economic system, slavery, and Africa, and the process of class development in Africa.
Rodney and the Dar es Salaam School were committed to making scholarship and the preparation of students relevant to the goals of achieving socialism and self-reliance – ends which were, in principle, congruent with the Tanzanian state’s Arusha Declaration and Ujamaa developmental programme.
In spite of Rodney’s integration into the Tanzanian academic community, the influence that he exercised among students and his colleagues, and educational contribution off campus, he felt that he would be able to make his best contribution to the struggle for liberation in the Caribbean in general and Guyana in particular.
His status as a non-citizen was a political limitation on the level of involvement that he could effect in Tanzanian politics and his Jamaican experience likely influenced his sensibilities on this matter.
However, the cultural challenges of not being fully conversant with the language, customs and habits of the masses were the decisive factors.
According to Rodney, ‘‘ it’s virtually a lifetime task to master that language and then to master the higher-level perception which normally goes into a culture.’’
He left Tanzania in 1974 with the expectation to continue his academic career and activism in the land of his birth – Guyana.
Rodney back home in the Caribbean
Political victimization in the area of employment greeted Rodney on his return to Guyana in August 1974. He had applied for the vacant position of Professor of History at the University of Guyana and the academic appointment committee made the decision to offer the job to Rodney.
He said, “It is now well-known that my appointment was approved through the regular academic channels and it was disallowed for supposedly political reasons.”
The university’s Board of Governors under the influence of the Burnham regime rejected the committee’s decision to offer Rodney the vacant professorial position as well as the headship of the Department of History.
The enemies of social transformation do not shy away from imposing economic sanctions such as the denial of jobs as a way to punish social malcontents or revolutionaries. Rodney did not have a stable or reliable source of income from the time of his return in August 1974 and his assassination on 13 June 1980.
The repressive Burnham regime fired a shot across the proverbial bow with this action. For all intents and purposes, the regime communicated to Rodney that he was now a marked man. Burnham’s People’s National Congress (PNC) was repressive of domestic progressive forces at home while masquerading as an anti-capitalist regime at home and anti-imperialist abroad. Rodney dubbed this political posturing as ‘pseudo socialism’.
The anti-imperialist rhetoric, the extensive state ownership of the economy and the constitutional declaration and naming of the country as the “Socialist Cooperative Republic of Guyana” by the Burnham regime fooled a lot of people into believing that they were witnessing a progressive or radical governing party that was pursuing a socialist path.
However, in 1974 four leftist organizations (the Indian Political Revolutionary Association, Working People’s Vanguard Party (Marxist-Leninist), African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa and Ratoon (formation at the University of Guyana) formally created the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) in order to effectively fight for a society that promotes and protects human rights, the economic interests and participation of the working people, the people’s ownership and control of the productive resources, internationalism and solidarity for the oppressed, and “genuine multiracial power of the working people, expressed in organizational forms which guarantee the nature of this power.”
Rodney carried out his due diligence of the organizations that were operating in Guyana and selected the WPA as the political formation to wage the struggle for social transformation.
The WPA carried out a vigorous campaign of opposition and non-cooperation with the authoritarian Burnham regime and engaged in educating and mobilizing the people for political change. The regime used political repression against WPA activists and leaders, including assassinations, economic victimization and trumped up arson charges.
In spite of the WPA’s action in establishing a collective leadership principle and practice, Rodney was seen by the people as the leader “in the struggle against the dictatorship.”
The Burnham government viewed the WPA and Rodney as a threat to its stability. Their agitational and mobilizing work for justice and call for unity of the Indian and African working people put the state on the defensive. Rodney did not shy away from doing this oppositional work notwithstanding the danger to himself.
Rodney was assassinated on 13 June 1980 and the Burnham regime removed this revolutionary from the stage of history.
Concluding thoughts
Walter Rodney has demonstrated through thought and action that it is not inevitable for intellectuals to join the systems of oppression and use their knowledge and skills to perpetuate exploitation. They have the option of committing “class suicide.”
Rodney called on the intelligentsia to use their knowledge and skills to challenge and undermine the lies and prejudices of imperialism and racism that are peddled about the people, extend themselves beyond the disciplinary boundaries and liquidate the ‘social myths’ that officialdom offers on society, and become immersed in the struggle of the people for liberation.
The progressive or radical intellectuals should not confine their contribution to the academic realm. They must become members of social movement organizations and work with the people in building their capacity for self-organization or self-emancipation.
It is the oppressed who are responsible for liberating themselves. If liberation is conceived, directed and executed by the usurpers-cum-vanguards of the people and their struggle, the people will end up with new masters in the morning after the “successful” revolution.
Rodney has affirmed the possibility of engaging in intellectual work that is directed at the struggle for emancipation while taking part in the said process of bringing into being the classless, stateless and self-organized society.
The labouring classes across the world are staring at the seemingly impregnable and unchallengeable neoliberal capitalist turn and the tale that there is no alternative to capitalism and imperialism.
However, Rodney would have probably advised political activists to have “confidence that our people (the labouring classes) have the capacity to deal with their own situation.”
Therefore, the work of organizing with the people and arming them with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes for self-emancipation must be prioritized and executed. The oppressed have only one option – create the counterhegemonic programmes, projects, and institutions today that represent the embryonic expressions of the liberated society that we intend to create tomorrow.
Ajamu Nangwaya, Ph.D., is an organizer, writer, and lecturer at the University of the West Indies.
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