{"id":7242,"date":"2022-07-22T08:00:42","date_gmt":"2022-07-22T12:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=7242"},"modified":"2022-07-27T23:42:52","modified_gmt":"2022-07-28T03:42:52","slug":"a-rebels-guide-to-walter-rodney-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2022\/07\/a-rebels-guide-to-walter-rodney-2\/","title":{"rendered":"A Rebel\u2019s Guide to Walter Rodney"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span> wrote A Rebel’s Guide to Walter Rodney<\/a><\/em> because I think the Afro Guyanese guy on the cover\u2014-historian Walter Rodney\u2014is one of the most brilliant revolutionaries of the last century. But he\u2019s also one of the most underrated and understudied, especially if you compare him to the likes of Malcolm X, Angela Davis, or Franz Fanon.<\/p>\n

In terms of Rodney\u2019s political identity, many labels have been given to him at various times. Some people have called him a Pan-Africanist. Some people called him an anti-imperialist intellectual. Some of his closest friends and supporters called themselves Rodneyites.<\/p>\n

And of course there\u2019s some truth in all of these definitions. But what I wanted to emphasize in my book is that Walter Rodney was, above all else, a Marxist, somebody who fought for the self-emancipation of ordinary working people and for the liberation of the oppressed, somebody who saw Marxism not just as a tool, but as a revolutionary theory and a guide to action. So my book is, in many crucial ways, the story about how Rodney engaged with Marxism through his various journeys in Africa, Europe, and the Americas.<\/p>\n

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Walter Rodney. Photo<\/a> credit Review of African Political Economy.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in Rodney\u2019s ideas and his story. I think this is partly due to the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement and countless movements to decolonize education in recent years. Because what we\u2019ve seen here is hundreds of thousands of young Black and white people challenging state racism, challenging police brutality. But in that process, they\u2019re also questioning its history, pulling down the statues of racist slave owners, like those in Bristol.<\/p>\n

And during these times, especially in 2020, there was a real desire to uncover the voices of marginalized people who spoke against imperialism and the legacy of empire. Rodney is increasingly becoming one of those go-to people again, especially through his book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The other aim of my book was to get young, especially Black people, acquainted with Rodney\u2019s life and work, to put these in context, because they might seem quite distant to us here in 2022.<\/p>\n

Early years<\/h4>\n

The first thing to say about Rodney\u2019s early years is that there was an actuality of the anti-colonial struggle and a real march to independence going on across the globe.<\/p>\n

Rodney was born in 1942 and grew up in British Guyana in the 1950s. Guyana was a British colony in Latin America, but culturally it was closer to the Caribbean. Rodney\u2019s parents were supporters of an anti-colonial party, which was really the only game in town, called the People\u2019s Progressive Party. It called itself Marxist, but it was in between reformism and Stalinism. Nevertheless, the party had a long lasting influence on how he approached Marxism. Rodney would say that he never had any animosity towards Marxism, because that party called itself Marxist and was leading the struggle against the British.<\/p>\n

During Rodney\u2019s childhood, the year 1953 was a rare moment in Guyanese politics, because you have the two major groups, the Africans, who come from slavery, and the Indo-Guyanese, who come from indentureship, uniting in the anti-colonial struggle. And this was a rare moment, because usually the two groups were kept apart by the planters and the colonial authorities.<\/p>\n

Student years<\/h4>\n

Rodney had brilliant grades. He was a scholar and earned a scholarship to go to university in Jamaica, where he studied at the University of the West Indies.<\/p>\n

This was in the runup to Jamaican independence. So here Rodney was rediscovering African history, a part of history that has been wiped out due to colonialism. Rodney was also becoming fascinated with the Cuban revolution and traveling to Cuba.<\/p>\n

Rodney eventually went to London, where he got his PhD in African history. He also joined a Marxist study group taught by CLR James and his wife Selma, where he read the classics of Marxist literature, including passages of Capital<\/em> and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Rodney was also fascinated by the various guerrilla wars that are going on in the Portuguese colonies in Africa. He was very much a fan of Che Guevara, and he read Franz Fanon as well.<\/p>\n

So you have, in a nutshell, the formation of an African historian, who is very much interested in Marxism. But it\u2019s from 1968 to 1980 that Rodney\u2019s life got really interesting, that he emerged as a key theoretician and activist, becoming an increasingly more convinced, determined Marxist.<\/p>\n

Radical intellectuals<\/h4>\n

I want to mention some of the major themes in Rodney\u2019s life. The first is that Rodney\u2019s life says a lot about the role of radical intellectuals, especially radical intellectuals operating in the global south.<\/p>\n

It raises the question of what does it mean to be a radical intellectual? Is it simply to write a spicy article against capitalism in a language that nobody understands, and to go home, eat dinner and forget about the class struggle? Or is there more to it than that?<\/p>\n

In Rodney\u2019s life, there was always a real attempt to link his radical ideas against imperialism, to the practical activity of the masses, to the ordinary men and women who are making history.<\/p>\n

One powerful example of that was Rodney\u2019s activism in Jamaica during 1968. The year 1968 was a year of global revolt. Rodney was 26, and he was teaching at the university of Kingston. He showed very quickly that he was very different from most middle-class academics. He decided not to stay in his ivory tower. He lived off campus, and you could find him in the ghettos of Kingston, talking to the Rastafarians, giving a speech to unemployed youth, really relating to the people around him, and doing a lot of listening as well.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s through his speeches on Jamaican politics and African history, and through his overall interactions with the masses in Jamaica, that he developed his version of Black Power, which is adapted to the Jamaican and Caribbean context.<\/p>\n

Black Power<\/h4>\n

Black Power is a U.S.-born phenomenon first. But in America Black Power is very much the slogan of the Black minority, the Black minority that faces housing and job discrimination and violence at the hands of white police officers. For example, Stokely Carmichael, the key architect of Black Power, was mainly asking Blacks to fight for the control of the economies and the politics of their community, not the nation, but their community.<\/p>\n

When you\u2019re talking about the Caribbean context, however, you\u2019re talking about a whole different ball game, because the majority of the people are Black. The president in many countries is Black, or at least non-white. And the problem here is that the local Caribbean elite, after independence, continued to collude with the Western companies.<\/p>\n

In Jamaica, the mines were controlled by the Canadians and Americans and the Sugar Estates by the British. This elite, in collusion with the Western companies, also continued to keep the masses in terrible conditions, even after independence. And so Rodney\u2019s formulation of Black Power takes a more radical, ambitious tone, one that pays attention to the classes in Jamaican and Caribbean societies.<\/p>\n

He was really calling for the Black oppressed to break with imperialism and its local allies, for the Black masses to control the economies and the politics of the whole island, and to remake the islands of the Caribbean in their own image. A really powerful message.<\/p>\n

In Rodney\u2019s speeches and writing on Black Power, what comes out is a very political definition of Blackness, where you\u2019re not Black simply because you\u2019re of African descent or have some mystical tie to Africa. You\u2019re Black if you\u2019re a victim of racism and imperialism.<\/p>\n

What Rodney was trying to do in his speeches is to tie the destiny of the Black masses in Jamaica to the destinies of all the people in the third world who were fighting against imperialism and racism and for independence.<\/p>\n