Remembering Dr. Walter Rodney

What Doctor Walter Rodney said about America over 40 years ago is like a prophesy fulfilled. In his famous book, titled, how Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Dr. Rodney wrote, “actually, if underdevelopment were related to anything other than comparing economies, then the most underdeveloped country in the world would be the USA, which practices external oppression on a massive scale, while internally there is a blend of exploration, brutality, and psychiatric disorder.

If what's happening today in the world is anything to go by, it is deceitful for one to deny this description of America by Rodney. Indeed, this is America in the true sense.

As Issa Shivji, the Tanzanian author and scholar says, "history will reward those thinkers whose ideals and actions remained aligned with the people". There is no doubt that Rodney's book had influenced the thinking of Africans at home and in the diaspora in the 70s and 80s. Therefore, never his memories and legacies or that of any scholar who had helped the cause of humanity would be thrown in the dust bin of history.

The greatest injustice is to forget the untiring efforts of our academics and leaders whose ideals and actions resonate with popular opinion. They have a distinguished place in our hearts and we will continue to appreciate them posthumously after their death.

As students of tertiary institutions in Nigeria, that period of polemical writings and intellectual debate was indisputably the best time in our entire academic lives. Indeed, the revolutionary spirit for radical changes amongst students, an abundance of cheap literature on communism, and the tutorship of left-wing academic orientation by scholars across our universities in the country attracted our passion for voracious reading and opened up our horizon to the evils of imperialism.

Like Nostradamus, the man who saw tomorrow, Rodney's critique of America's meddlesomeness in the internal affairs of countries, capitalism, and Western imperialism as the greatest obstacles to world peace, security, and development of the world is as clear as the day today. The world has never been threatened with the most destructive tendency towards war than now.

Dr. Rodney lived and died at the time when Pan-Africanism, the struggle to create a sense of brotherhood and collaboration among all people of African descent whether they lived inside or outside Africa was intense and at its highest peak.

The mid-80s was the time when books were our best companions because we did not have the luxury of the internet, and its attendant disruptive consequences. That could perhaps explain the reason for our appetite for books. We repeatedly read and took the communist manifesto, how Europe Underdeveloped Africa, wretched of the earth by Franz Fanon, and many other books written by the then African revolutionary scholars like gospel.

Much as the spirit for revolutionary zeal had died down following the downfall of the former Union of the Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR), and the fall of the Berlin Wall, arguably the 2 major historical events that have changed the course of world history, we cannot deny the fact that we benefited immensely from the brainpower and intellect of late Dr, Walter Rodney and other left-wing academics whose books we cherished, read and digested.

Dr. Walter Rodney was born on March 23, 1942, in George town Guyana, the only English speaking country in South America. He died in a car explosion at the prime age of 38 on 13th June 1980 in George town Guyana. Students and colleagues of Rodney accused the CIA and Guyana regime of assasinating the renown historian, pan Africanist, scholar and revolutionist.

The slain "Guarilla intellectual," a term Rodey introduced in a discussion with members of the Institute of the Black World, will be remembered in history as the archetype of bridging scholarship and activism to "foster a culture of grassroots change and empower people with tools to implement such change,” said his wife, Patricia Rodney.

Saleh Bature wrote in this piece from Limpopo street Abuja. The author can be reached via e-mail at [email protected]