A Review - by Rupert Lewis
of

Walter Rodney Speaks:
The Making of an African Intellectual

With an Introduction by
Robert Hill
and a foreword by
Howard Dodson


Africa World Press, Inc New Jersey 1990 pp.122

This is not a collection of speeches. It is a narrative based on interviews with Rodney done on April 30 and May 1, 1975 at a round-table discussion held at the University of Massachusetts with African-American scholars Vincent Harding, William Strickland, Howard Dodson and the Jamaican scholar Robert Hill who were active in the Atlanta-based Institute of the Black World.

It is a sustained piece of reflection by Rodney about his early life in Guyana, his University education in Jamaica and at the School for Oriental and African Studies in London where he gained his Ph.d. at 24, his important years in Tanzania, his assessment of the situation in Africa, the Caribbean and the United States, his dissecting of the dynamic interaction of race and class, his incisive and clear exposition of the role of the black intellectual and academic and his exploration of his formation as a Marxist.

When Rodney did these interviews he had just turned thirty-three and had five more years to live. So this text is of necessity five important years short. However his reflections on this latter period are scattered in a number of archives on casettes, videotapes and in published speeches but it is unlikely that the quality of enquiry into Rodney's intellectual life which marks this book exists in any of these sources.

It is in this period that Rodney paid his dues to Caribbean history with the posthumously published - A History of the Guyanese Working People,1881-1905.

In 1975 Rodney had made the transition back to Guyana where after a period of intensive political activity in opposition he was to be murdered by the Forbes Burnham regime in 1980. This is as close to an autobiography of Walter Rodney that one is likely to get. Of course it falls short of real autobiography because the personal-psychological elements are marginal to the text. Moreover the expert pulling together of interviews as Robert Hill points out did not have Rodney's final editorial input since the decision to publish them was taken after his death.

There are a few problems with this. For example, towards the end of the book when Rodney is discussing the ideological situation within the left in the United States one feels a need to know what were the questions to which he was responding. The book could have done with an index, a few photographs and a listing of his publications.

After reading this book my over-riding impression is confirmation of the quality of his personal commitment and determination to contribute in his capacity as a historian, political theorist and activist to the greater freedom of Black People.

On a superficial level there are many Rodneys.

Rodney belongs to the tradition of Caribbean personalities who have made outstanding contributions to Africa from Edward Blyden in the nineteenth century to Frantz Fanon. Since Fanon no other Caribbean intellectual has had the impact on Africa as has Rodney.

Given Rodney's modesty not much of this contribution comes out from the interviews but the quality of mind that is reflected on these pages should alert the reader to the extradordinary analytical qualities that Rodney possessed and shared with so many in his brief life.

Ali Mazrui in a panel discussion on Walter Rodney at the African Studies Association meeting held in Baltimore in 1990 said Rodney symbolises "global Africa" and "was a walking piece of global Africa." He was referring to continental Africa and Africa in the diaspora.

Rodney's development as a Marxist intellectual was shaped by his political experience in Guyana in the 1950's when Cheddi Jagan's People's Progressive Party led the anti-colonial struggle and had a strong socialist orientation.

Speaking of himself and C.Y. Thomas (Guyanese economist and development theorist) Rodney said,

"We took with us, sometimes unknowingly, a willingness to accept at least the concepts of socialism/communism/Marxism/class struggle without any a priori rejection which many of our university colleagues did have. Many of the people with whom I was training at the University of the West Indies, Jamaicans in particular, were technically as skilled as any of us, but they had this fundamental reservation about socialist and Marxist thought which I don't think Clive Thomas and I ever shared...my own development has been sort of very incremental.

It didn't have to take a flying leap at some point over the unknown. I didn't have to break with some very serious religious or moral or philosophical concepts or any fears that might have even had roots in my psyche-fears that somehow I was going to take up something that was evil."(p.9-10)

This is important because for Rodney unlike a number of other Caribbean Marxists, Marxism did not become a belief-system akin to religion. Not having been converted he owed no allegiance to either the Soviet or Chinese interpretation of Marxism. Marxism was an intellectual tool.

The second factor shaping his development was his experience of the Jamaican people.Their dynamism had a big impact on him as a student in Kingston and London and later on for a few months as a lecturer in 1968.

Speaking of the 1960's he said:

"There is a different pace of life in Jamaica, probably due to the fact that the population is larger and more concentrated. But there definitely is a greater pace. Trinidadians try to assume the role of city slickers almost, and are clever and fast, but for staying power, for sheer energy, Jamacan people seem to have us all beat. It's not surprising that there should be a universalizing tendency when different Caribbean people get together to fall into certain Jamaican idioms, certainly to use the swear words.

Jamaicans can curse more proficiently than any other Caribbean people. They have such a range of words describing phenomena so neatly and I think this is a testimony to their combativeness. So that I always felt that there must be tremendous revolutionary potential in that island....One also saw it when one went to London.

The Jamaicans were the largest group in London and they were also the most important group. I would really say that their sense of combativeness nipped British racism in the bud..."(10-11)

There is a constant inter-relationship in Rodney's life between ideas and political reality and this was important in shielding him from the more bizarre forms of abstract Marxism that devastated the Caribbean left especially during the final weeks of the Grenada revolution in September-October 1983.

CLR James who led a study group which Rodney and other West Indian students attended in London in the mid-1960's had a major influence on his development as a Marxist intellectual. In writing How Europe Underdeveloped Africa Rodney emulated James's classic Black Jacobins in applying Marxist methodology to Africa's development over several centuries.

Speaking of his London study group Rodney wrote: "one of the most important things which I got out of that experience was a certain sense of historical analysis, ... CLR James was really a master of the analysis of historical situations...he has mastered a whole range of theory and historical data and analysis..."(28)

Rodney also said that "James has become a model of the possibilities of retaining one's intellectual and ideological integrity over a protracted period of time"(16) This sense of integrity and commitment to stand up for one's position reflected Rodney's strong moral sense. It is also a manifestation of Rodney's sense of belonging to an intellectual tradition of which James was a central intellectual and spiritual figure.

It was his years in Tanzania from 1966-1974 (except for several months in Jamaica in 1968) which were decisive in making him the figure he became. Tanzania offered the chance to play a role in the remaking of colonial society and put him in contact with the revolutionary movements of Southern Africa such as those operating in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau,Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Namibia,South Africa.

He was also in touch with the Vietnamese whom he admired. That experience was not possible in the Caribbean. It was the time when he did most of his research and writing and Africa and when through his teaching and participation in conferences developed close ties with Africa's intellectuals.

These in a sense were the most productive years of his life. It is out of this intellectual and political seasoning in Africa that he gives these interviews in 1975.

Rodney was of the view that "one's political contribution should come out of one's principal work activity." His was research into African and Caribbean history and its re-interpretation and presentation to as large an audience as possible. His was also work as a development theorist looking at the options possible for our people and an activist.

It is interesting to speculate in the 1990's as to what Rodney would think about the fundamental changes that have taken place within the world over the past few years with the demise of socialism in Eastern Europe and its incorporation within the world capitalist economy.

Certainly some of his notions about "delinking" from the world capitalist system are unrealistic but the ability which he demonstrated to grasp the essence of the changes that have taken place and are going on would lead him to apply a Marxist analysis to perestroika itself and to the developments in Eastern Europe and their consequences for African peoples.

That would be part of his research. That task is on the agenda for us today.

Rupert Lewis
This page was created by Rupert Lewis with assistance from (Richard Thelwell) .