Brilliant Pan-Africanist, Gone too Soon: Dr. Walter Rodney

By Dana Malcolm

Staff Writer 

#Guyana, March 2, 2023 – A brilliant scholar and historian, Walter Anthony Rodney was born in Guyana in 1942, and though he only lived 38 years, he managed to radically alter the worldview of Africa and the Caribbean during that time.

His most famous work, ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’ is a physical representation of what Rodney believed in and explored during his life. A champion of the working class and invested in the effects of colonialism and chattel slavery on Africa he made research his life’s work.

Born in Georgetown Guyana (then British Guiana) while it was still under colonial rule he proved to be a promising scholar from a young age securing scholarships to every level of his educational journey beyond Primary School. He went to the University of the West Indies Mona campus, from which he graduated when he was only 21 years old.

Three years later he held a doctorate in African History from the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies which made him Dr. Walter Rodney at 24 years old.

He was a strong critic of both colonialism and capitalism. He had harsh words for the Caribbean middle class and its role in subjugating the working class.

Dr. Mary Curry in a short biography of his life explains

“He was critical of capitalism because it promoted individualism instead of cooperative communal efforts. By combining political economic analysis with archival research, he demonstrated how colonialism resulted in economic inequality and racial ethnic divisions and how neocolonialism continued those damaging effects.”

This endeared Rodney to the working people, and made him an enemy of the middle class, especially in Guyana and Jamaica, where he was a lecturer at the University of the West Indies in 1968. While at the University, he met with working class groups, including Rastafarians, encouraging them to band together, for this, Rodney was banned from re-entering the country, effectively bringing his tenure there to an end and inciting riots in his Jamaican supporters.

Rodney taught across the globe in Tanzania, the United States, and more, even while being persecuted by the ruling class in the Caribbean.

After writing the six books and multiple scholarly articles on the topics of race, colonialism, the Caribbean and Africa, Rodney tried to move into politics, encouraging the disenfranchised to band together, threatening the hold of the middle and upper class on the Caribbean at large and especially in his home country Guyana.

He was assassinated on June 13, 1980 at 38 years old via car bomb.  No one ever confessed to the murder but Rodney is remembered as a Pan-Africanist and brilliant scholar both in Africa, where he spent much of his life, and in the Caribbean.