Walter Rodney

Walter Rodney (born March 23, 1942 in Georgetown , Guyana ; † June 13, 1980 ibid) was a pan-African- oriented historian and politician from Guyana. A thought leader and practitioner of Black Power , he was killed in a bomb attack by the Guyanese army .

Life

Walter Rodney was born into a family of artisans. His father Percival was an independent tailor; later he worked in a factory. His mother Pauline was a dressmaker.

School and study

The parents and the teachers noticed early on that Walter was a gifted child. He was accepted into the scholarship class of his elementary school, which trained its students to obtain a scholarship through good performance and thus enable them to enter a secondary school whose tuition their parents could not have paid. From 1953, Walter Rodney was able to attend the renowned Queen's College in Georgetown. He won his high school public speaking and debating competitions , edited the school newspaper The Lictor , and was elected chairman of the Historical Society of Queen's College. In 1960 he passed the A-Level Exams with Honors and was awarded a scholarship to study history at the University College of the West Indies in Mona , Jamaica . In 1963 he graduated with honors (BA, first-class honors). The humanities faculty of the young University of the West Indies (the University College had been upgraded to university in 1962) awarded Rodney its 1963 annual award and thus a scholarship for postgraduate studies .

At the age of 21 Rodney began his doctoral studies in 1963 at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. His dissertation was on the history of slavery and the slave trade on the Upper Guinea Coast (the coast of today's states of Guinea , Sierra Leone and Liberia ). His sources included the business books and correspondence of Portuguese traders in England and Portugal. He benefited from having learned Spanish as one of his main subjects at school, as well as Portuguese and French. At the University College of the West Indies he had learned - just as importantly - to combine the methods of the historian with social science methods.

In his spare time - at least in the warm summers - Rodney often spoke to immigrants from the Caribbean at Speakers' Corner about the racism of British society and the exploitation of workers. In 1966 Rodney was awarded a Ph.D. PhD. His dissertation was published in 1970. It received a great deal of attention from historians because Rodney had set new standards and examined the history of the enslaved peoples from a new perspective and with new methods.

University lecturer

After completing his doctorate, Rodney accepted a teaching position at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania , where he taught in 1966/1967. In January 1968 he returned to Jamaica and taught history at the University of the West Indies (UWI). It was a politically troubled year, also in the Caribbean, when the Black Power movement found more and more supporters. Rodney participated actively in the debates of the Jamaican intellectuals, who rejected the government programs for the "black poor" as paternalistic- condescending tutelage on the part of the ruling elite and called for the self-empowerment of the "damned of this earth" ( Frantz Fanon ). He did not limit himself to the university campus in Mona. Rather, he also gave lectures "in the city" (= in Kingston ) on African history and slavery and its (late) consequences, not least in the working-class neighborhoods of Kingston and before Rastafarians . His little writing The groundings with my brothers , a look back at his encounter with the Rastafarians, became a key work for the Black Power movement in the Caribbean. Rodney refers, among other things, to writings and theses by Marcus Garvey .

By the summer of 1968 at the latest, Rodney's university and non-university activities aroused suspicion in the government. When he wanted to return from a "Black Writer" conference in Canada on October 15, 1968, she refused to allow him to return to Jamaica. UWI students, including Ralph Gonsalves , organized a protest march. There were riots in Kingston for days, with several deaths ( Rodney Riots ).

Rodney then returned to the University of Dar es Salaam , where he taught until 1974. He was in close contact with Yoweri Kaguta Museveni , Joaquim Chissano and John Garang . During this time he wrote numerous articles on the forms and causes of underdevelopment and the role of the state in class formation in Africa, many of them for Maji-Maji , the magazine of the TANU Youth League at the university. In 1972 his best known and most important book appeared: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (" How Europe Underdeveloped Africa "). In the Tanzanian archives he researched the history of forced labor and the colonial economy . He also learned German. The results of his research appeared in 1976 under the title World War II and the Tanzanian economy . For the Sixth Pan-African Congress, which took place in Tanzania in 1974, he wrote the contribution Towards the Sixth Pan-African Congress: Aspects of the International Class Struggle in Africa, the Caribbean and America . In between he made several long trips to the Caribbean, the USA and Europe. Later (1978) Rodney taught for one semester at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Hamburg .

Political activity in Guyana

In 1974 Rodney returned to his native Guyana after a 14-year absence. The University of Guyana , founded in 1963, had appointed him professor of history. But the government revoked the appointment. Nevertheless, Rodney stayed in Guyana and took part in the founding of the Working People's Alliance (WPA). He became one of the most famous and popular spokesmen for the resistance movement against the increasingly authoritarian regime of Forbes Burnham and his party, the People's National Congress (PNC).

On July 11, 1979, Rodney and seven others were arrested after a fire and charged with arson. From then on until he was murdered, Burnham regime agents persecuted, harassed, threatened and attacked him. At least once he narrowly escaped his death. On the evening of June 13, 1980, Walter Rodney was killed in the center of Georgetown by the explosion of a walkie- talkie filled with explosives , which he was given by Gregory Smith, a sergeant of the Guyana Defense Forces .

family

In 1965, Walter Rodney married his childhood friend, the nurse Patricia Henry. They had three children: Shaka, Kanini and Asha.

Honors

The poet and reggae musician Linton Kwesi Johnson wrote and composed reggae fi Rodney in memory of Walter Rodney. The American blues guitarist, singer and songwriter Corey Harris also dedicated a reggae song of the same name to Walter Rodney on his album Zion Crossroads (2007).

Quotes

“Of course, in Africa it is still expected that everyone who already has an education and earns money will in turn contribute to making at least one other member of his extended family an education possible. For this very reason, the extended family or the village community often made great sacrifices in order to initially enable a member to receive an education. This was true in Mauritania as well as in the reserves of South Africa [...]. "

- Rodney : Africa - The Story of Underdevelopment . Berlin 1975, p. 221

Fonts

• A history of the Upper Guinea Goast 1545-1800 . Clarendon Press, Oxford 1970.
• How Europe Underdeveloped Africa . Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications, London 1972.
  • German: Africa - The story of an underdevelopment . Wagenbach, Berlin 1973, ISBN 3-8031-1056-4 .
• World War II and the Tanzanian economy . Africana Studies and Research Center, Ithaca 1976.
• Migrant labor in Tanzania during the colonial period. Case studies of recruitment and conditions of labor in the sisal industry . Institute for Africa customers in the association of the German Overseas Institute, Hamburg 1983, ISBN 3-923519-56-7 (together with Kapepwa Tambila and Laurent Sago).
• The groundings with my brothers . Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications, London 1983.
• Walter Rodney speaks. The making of an African intellectual . Africa World Press, Trenton 1990, ISBN 0-86543-072-1 .

literature

in order of appearance

• A tribute to Walter Rodney. One hundred years of development in Africa. Lectures given at the University of Hamburg in summer 1978 . University of Hamburg, Institute for Political Science, Hamburg 1984.
• Rupert Charles Lewis: Walter Rodney's intellectual and political thought . University of the West Indies, Mona (Jamaica), St. Augustine (Trinidad) & Cave Hill (Barbados), 1998, ISBN 976-640-044-X .
• Gabriehu Aregai: Dangerous times. The assassination of Dr. Walter Rodney . Gibbi Books, Brooklyn, New York 2007.
• Arnold Gibbons: The legacy of Walter Rodney in Guyana and the Caribbean . University Press of America, Lanham 2011, ISBN 978-0-7618-5413-5 .

Web links

• Walter Rodney Foundation website
• Rodney biography (English)
• The "Walter Rodney Effect" (English)
• Lyrics by Reggae fi Rodney

Individual evidence

1. ^ Rupert Charles Lewis: Walter Rodney's intellectual and political thought . University of the West Indies, Mona 1998, p. 1.
2. ^ Rupert Charles Lewis: Walter Rodney's intellectual and political thought . University of the West Indies, Mona 1998, p. 6.
3. ^ Rupert Charles Lewis: Walter Rodney's intellectual and political thought . University of the West Indies, Mona 1998, p. 26.
4. ^ ^{A b} Rupert Charles Lewis: Walter Rodney's intellectual and political thought . University of the West Indies, Mona 1998, p. 7.
5. ^ Rupert Charles Lewis: Walter Rodney's intellectual and political thought . University of the West Indies, Mona 1998, p. 24.
6. ^ Walter Rodney: Walter Rodney Speaks: The Making of an African Intellectual . Africa World Press, Trenton 1990, p. 21.
7. ^ Arnold Gibbons: The legacy of Walter Rodney in Guyana and the Caribbean . University Press of America, Lanham 2011, pp. 193-201.
8. ↑ Michael O. West: Walter Rodney and Black Power: Jamaican Intelligence and US Diplomacy . In: African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies , ISSN  1554-3897 , Vol. 1 (2005), No. 2, pp. 1-50.
9. ^ Ralph Gonsalves: The Rodney affair and its aftermath . In: Caribbean quarterly , Vol. 25 (1979), No. 3, pp. 1-24.
10. ↑ Andreas Eckert : The Che among the Africa historians. Why to Rediscover Walter Rodney . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of December 12, 2012, page N4.
11. ^ Rupert Charles Lewis: Walter Rodney's intellectual and political thought . University of the West Indies, 1998, pp. 243-245.
12. ^ Rupert Charles Lewis: Walter Rodney's intellectual and political thought . University of the West Indies, Mona 1998, p. 32.