Walter Rodney

In 1974, Rodney returned to Guyana from Tanzania. He was due to take up a position as a professor at the University of Guyana but the Guyanese government prevented his appointment. Increasingly active in politics, he founded the Working People's Alliance, a party that provided the most effective and credible opposition to the PNC government. In 1979 he was arrested and charged with arson after two government offices were burned.

On 13 June 1980, Rodney was killed in Georgetown, at the age of thirty-eight, by a bomb in his car, a month after returning from celebrations during the independence in Zimbabwe in a time of intense political activism. He was survived by his wife, Patricia, and three children. His brother, Donald Rodney, who was injured in the explosion, said that a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force, named Gregory Smith, had given Walter the bomb that killed him. After the killing, Smith fled to French Guiana, where he died in 2002.

It is widely believed, but not proven, that the assassination was set up by Guyana's president, Linden Forbes Burnham.[3][4] Rodney believed that the various ethnic groups that had been historically disenfranchised by the ruling colonial class should work together, which was in conflict with Burnham.[5]

In early 2015, a Commission of Inquiry (COI) was held during which a new witness, Holland Gregory Yearwood, came forward claiming to be a long-standing friend of Rodney and a former member of the WPA. Yearwood testified that Rodney presented detonators to him weeks prior to the explosion asking for assistance in assembling a bomb.[6] Also, the same Commission of Inquiry (COI) concluded in their report that Rodney's death was a state killing, and that the then Prime Minister Forbes Burnham had to have knowledge of the plot. [7]

Rodney's most influential book was How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, published in 1972. In it he described how Africa had been exploited by European imperialists, leading directly to the modern underdevelopment of most of the continent. The book became enormously influential as well as controversial: it was groundbreaking in that it was among the first to bring a new perspective to the question of underdevelopment in Africa. Rodney's analysis went far beyond the previously accepted approach in the study of Third World underdevelopment.

"Instead of being interested primarily in the inter-relations of African trade and politics, as many of us were at that time, Walter Rodney focused his attention on the agricultural basis of African communities, on the productive forces within them and on the processes of social differentiation. As a result, his research raised a whole set of fresh questions concerning the nature of African social institutions on the Upper Guinea coast in the sixteenth century and of the impact of the Atlantic slave trade. In doing so, he helped to open up a new dimension. Almost immediately he stimulated much further writing and research on West Africa, and he initiated a debate, which still continues and now extends across the whole range of African history.

When teaching at the Universities of Dar es Salaam and the West Indies, he launched and sustained a large number of discussion groups which swept up and embraced many who had had little or no formal education. As a writer, he reached out to contact thousands in The Groundings with my Brothers (1969) and in his influential How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972)." — Remarks by Professor John Richard Gray, History Today, Vol. 49, Issue 9, 1980.

"When we think of Walter Rodney as a Revolutionary Scholar we are talking about two things, Radical Scholar and his revolutionary contribution to the study of History ie. History of Africa. Walter Rodney was a pioneering scholar who provided new answers to old questions and posed new questions in relation to the study of Africa." — Remarks by Professor Winston McGowan at the Walter Rodney Commemorative Symposium held at York College, USA, in June 2010.

"Walter Rodney was no captive intellectual playing to the gallery of local or international radicalism. He was clearly one of the most solidly ideologically situated intellectuals ever to look colonialism and its contemporary heir black opportunism and exploitation in the eye." — Remarks by Wole Soyinka, Oduduwa Hall, University of Ife, Nigeria, Friday, 27 June 1980.

In a new foreword to Rodney's book, academic and political activist Angela Davis remarks: "To mark time," he [Rodney] insists, "or even to move slowly while others leap ahead is virtually equivalent to going backward". In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney painstakingly argues that imperialism and the various processes that bolstered colonialism created impenetrable structural blockades to economic, and thus also, political and social progress on the continent. At the same time his argument is not meant to absolve Africans of the "ultimate responsibility for development."[8] Davis also draws attention to the fact that Rodney did not ignore gender issues. On the contrary, he addresses the role of gender. He pointed out that under colonialism, African women's “social, religious, constitutional, and political privileges and rights disappeared while the economic exploitation continued and was often intensified".

Rodney's community-grounded approach to mass education during the 1960s and his detailed descriptions of his pedagogical approach in Groundings (1969) document his role as an important critical pedagogue and contemporary of Paulo Freire.[9]

• The Groundings with my Brothers (London: Bogle L'Ouverture Publications, 1969)
• West Africa and the Atlantic Slave-Trade. (1970)
• A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970)
• How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972)
• World War II and the Tanzanian Economy (1976)
• Guyanese Sugar Plantations in the Late Nineteenth Century: a Contemporary Description from the "Argosy" (Georgetown, Guyana: Release Publications, 1979)
• Marx in the Liberation of Africa (1981)
• A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981)
• Walter Rodney Speaks: the Making of an African Intellectual (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990)
• Kofi Baadu Out of Africa (Georgetown, Guyana) - children's book
• Lakshmi Out of India (Georgetown, Guyana: The Guyana Book Foundation, 2000) - children's book
• The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World (New York: Verso Books, 2018)

Rodney's death was commemorated in a poem by Martin Carter entitled "For Walter Rodney," by the dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson in "Reggae fi Radni," and by Kamau Brathwaite in his poem "Poem for Walter Rodney" (Elegguas, 2010).

In 1977, the African Studies Centre, Boston University, inaugurated the Walter Rodney Lecture Series.

In 1982, the American Historical Association posthumously awarded Walter Rodney the Albert J. Beveridge Award for A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905.

In 1984, the Centre for Caribbean Studies of the University of Warwick established the Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture in recognition of the life and work of one of the most outstanding scholar-activists of the Black Diaspora in the post-World War II era.

In 1993, the Guyanese government posthumously awarded Walter Rodney Guyana's highest honour, the Order of Excellence of Guyana. The Guyanese government also established the Walter Rodney Chair in History at the University of Guyana.

In 1998, the Institute of Caribbean Studies, University of the West Indies, inaugurated the Walter Rodney Lecture Series.

In 2004, Rodney's widow Patricia and his children donated his papers to the Robert L. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center. Since 2004, an annual Walter Rodney Symposium has been held each 23 March (Rodney's birthday) at the Center under the sponsorship of the Library and the Political Science Department of Clark Atlanta University, and under the patronage of the Rodney family.

In 2005, the London Borough of Southwark erected a plaque in the Peckham Library Square in commemoration of Dr. Walter Rodney, the political activist, historian and global freedom fighter.

In 2006, an International Conference on Walter Rodney was held at the Institute of Development Studies of the University of Dar es Salaam.

In 2006, the Walter Rodney Essay Competition was established at the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan.

In 2006, the Walter Rodney Foundation was formed by the Rodney family. It is headquartered in Atlanta and aims to share the works and legacy of Rodney with the world.[10]

In 2010, the Walter Rodney Commemorative Symposium was held at York College.

The Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University established the Angela Davis/Walter Rodney Award of Academic Achievement.

The Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS) at the University of Michigan established the DuBois-Mandela-Rodney Post-doctoral Fellowship Program.

In 2012, the Walter Rodney Conference celebrating the 40th anniversary of the publication of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was held at Binghamton University.

Rodney is the subject of the 2010 documentary film by Clairmont Chung, W.A.R. Stories: Walter Anthony Rodney.[11]

The Walter Rodney Close in the London Borough of Newham has been named in honor of Rodney.

Walter Rodney is listed on the Black Achievers Wall in the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool, UK.

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