Opinion: Walter Anthony Rodney, Activism, and African Historiography: Forty Years After, By Ibrahim Abdullah
Rodney’s account of his stay in Jamaica, as a student, and later as a faculty member, lends itself to an essentialist reading of the Jamaican people. Emphasising what he called the dynamism of the Jamaican situation, Rodney concluded that the Jamaican people… “are a breed apart,…of any people.
By the time he won a scholarship to do graduate work in England — he had graduated summa cum laudae in Jamaica — his ideas where decidedly of a leftist persuasion. Yet, it was in England that he was able to unravel the maze of theoretical positions, which then dominated political discussions about the so-called Third World situation and the struggle for political and economic emancipation.
As the first individual of African descent in the new world to conduct a scientific study of slavery and the slave trade in Africa, Rodney struggled to emphasise the complex linkages between Africa and the Americas.
By the time he returned to his native Guyana in 1974, Walter Rodney was an accomplished scholar and a leading theoretician of the African experience. Denied a professorial chair by the Burnham regime, after the university authorities had already made him an offer, Walter settled down to an active life of teaching, research, and politics, from 1974 to 1980, when he was brutally assassinated. Rodney was a full time organiser and founding member of the Working Peoples Alliance .
When he was murdered by agents of the Burnham regime in Georgetown, Guyana, on June 13, 1980, he was involved not only in the writing of history but more so in the making of history. For a couple of days before Gregory Smith’s bomb took his life, he had sent the final version of his a manuscript on the Guyanese working class that was published posthumously as. His notes and unfinished manuscript on the impact of Bolshevism in Africa,, was published two years ago.
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