Fragments from Memory WALTER RODNEY By Moses Nagamootoo Guyana Chronicle June 11, 2000 "RABBI get killed!" old man Katoon told me. My octogenarian neighbour was breathing heavily from walking across the street to my Bel Air, Georgetown apartment. I nearly jumped out of my bath towel. My instinctive response was a celebration: "Good for him!" Rabbi Washington was a despised enforcer for Burnham's unpopular regime. The self-proclaimed cultist was a political thug. I couldn't mourn his demise. I didn't have home telephone in 1980. So my editor, Janet Jagan, had instead telephoned the old man. Janet was holding the line at his house. I ran over. Her voice quivered: "Walter Rodney was assassinated last night. Come right away." As I left Katoon's house the state's radio was carrying news that an "unidentified person" had been killed in a bomb blast outside the Georgetown prisons. The inference was unimaginably simple: whoever was killed was trying to blow up the prisons. The official cover up had begun. As no one knew exactly how Walter Rodney had met his death, I gave no notice to a telephone call I received that morning at the office. A female, whose voice was distant, and sounded hysterical and desperate, pleaded: "Moses, please take care. They will kill you!" It was the voice of Joyce Smith. She was calling from Mabaruma. I took for granted that Joyce had known my political passions, and that she was concerned for my safety. I didn't pay attention that Joyce Smith was an army officer who had always carried a 9 mm gun on her person. She had told me who was her boss in the army. I should have remembered how frightened she was when she pushed me down in a bus shed one night as a mysterious car approached without headlights... But before I asked, "who will kill me?" the telephoned clicked. Joyce disappeared, and I have not seen her since. These happenings come back to me like photos on my mind, and as I had not said them publicly before, they appear the more intriguing. In Walter Rodney's death another Smith, Gregory Smith, had taken centre stage. According to the exclusive interview with Walter's brother, Donald, which was broken by Sharief Khan on the Caribbean News Agency (CANA), Gregory Smith was identified as an army agent-assassin. I doubted that Walter Rodney, in his revolutionary fervour, knew that a Gregory Smith had been assigned to him. I had had a chance meeting with this person in a Robb Street, Georgetown restaurant. He had introduced himself to me as a "brother", and I had no reason to disbelieve him. We had drinks together. The assumption that all enemies of the dictator were friends would prove fatal, and costly. It will be 20 years on June 13 since Walter Rodney was killed in a murderous bomb blast. Photographic fragments of him explode in my mind. Twenty years later his death still forms an emotional part of the gallery of my memories. His killers, and the intellectual authors of the killing, still remain at large. But Walter Rodney continues to live in the authenticity of his beliefs. I believe that the examination of his ideas will continue to attract scholarly attention. For now, however, it is also important for the fresh generation to know the person that he was; how he moved in history; why he entered it. I have tried before to capture him as he was, at least to me. I remember him wearing spectacles and beard, and with Afro hair (the composite image of a Patrice Lumumba, Che Guevara and an Angela Davis). Always smiling softly; speaking defiantly. The Rodney I knew was unassuming and modest to a fault, and shy. He would be seized by sudden impatience. He was a revolutionary intellectual who spoke out for the working class and other poor people. His Marxist orientation informed his efforts for bread and justice in Jamaica, Tanzania and Guyana. His was a life of struggle for over two decades between 1968 and 1980. That period represented a defeat of possibilities for Guyana to progress. Burnham's PNC had seized power by successive rigged elections, and had entrenched a dictatorship of a corrupt Black elite. The country was gripped in its worst ever crisis. Every one suffered. Dr Walter Rodney was returning to his Homeland from Africa, I believe in 1977. En route, he was interviewed by the Voice of Barbados. Burnham, I heard him say, was a Black petit bourgeois who had betrayed the working classes. I knew then that I liked this guy, not only for what he had said. More importantly, because an outstanding Black intellectual had said it. He showed conviction and courage. Rodney had made a class definition of Burnham. Later, he refined it metaphorically: Burnham was "King Kong". In saying that, Rodney had recognised the ethnic characterisation as well as the brutal nature of state power in Guyana. He had recognised also that the PPP, then led by Cheddi Jagan, could not alone get rid of the dictatorship. The PPP, he knew, had carried the struggle, and had become the main victim of Burnham's repressive rule. He too, (in spite of his race, and more probably, because of his race) was to become a victim when Burnham denied him a job at the University of Guyana. For him, class and not race was paramount in the struggle against Burnham. That was clear the very first time I saw him. Speaking to journalists inside the cramped law office of Miles Fitzpatrick he described himself as a Guyana Scholar who had studied at the expense of the state, from funds provided by working people. It was therefore immoral and wrong for the Burnham regime to disallow the children of the working class from benefiting by his education. Rodney's class approach to issues was always distinct. Even when he turned to an analysis of the race issue, there was always a class side to it. At that time a PPP activist, Arnold Rampersaud, was facing a third trial on a trumped-up charge of murder. He attended the trial, and later spoke of his disappointment over the testimony of black people. For him it was not simply a black man lying against an Indian. He was angry that Burnham was using the poor and dispossessed to fight his racist battle against another section of the poor and dispossessed. During his visits to Freedom House I sensed Walter's affinity with the cause of Cheddi Jagan's PPP, but I also sensed that he would not enlist in the party's ranks out of fear of Burnham's racism. A Walter Rodney in the PPP would be for Burnham just "another coolie stooge". That would set back the struggle. I always thought in my casual meeting with him that he was prepared to meet that with an alternative tactic. It was better if he operated as a "shock force" independent of and outside the PPP. That would better promote the general cause of removing the dictatorship. I shared the platform at what was Walter Rodney's first public meeting that was organised on his return from Africa by the PPP. There he was by Crutchor's Shop, at the corner of Sheriff and Campbell Avenue in Georgetown educating Guyanese about liberation struggles in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau. Walter excelled. His message was that the working people, in spite of their ethnicity, have common enemies. He identified Burnham and the PNC as the enemy who were holding back liberation of the working classes. He believed that the working people was the driving force of history, and invited his audience to "re-enter history" and to "re-write" it. Always, he was pained that black people were not speaking out sufficiently against the regime, although they too were suffering. He had felt that without Black support the Indian majority of the Guyanese people, who were directly oppressed, could not remove Burnham. The widest possible unity was needed to take out the unwanted regime. Once the broad consensus was for removal, and the basis existed for a new democratic government, any method to effect the removal was justifiable. I knew he was working for this. Walter Rodney rekindled the fire of rebellion. For a new generation of black youths and urban working people he became a symbol of resistance. In 1979, everywhere, that is, except in Guyana, dictators were falling. The Shah in Iran, Gairy in Grenada, and Patrick John in Dominica. And in February 1980, the army toppled an unpopular government in Suriname. Expectations ran high in Guyana. By then Burnham baptised his seizure of power with a new "socialist" constitution. He had made himself Executive President, seemingly a dictator for life. Rodney's impatience became evident. The lack of political unity did not help. That was what bothered him, and we talked about it when he invited my wife and I to his mother's home in Ruimveldt "to eat some cook-up". A particular scene at his house remained a photo on my mind. It was a contrasting portrayal of a man of culture with that of an impassioned revolutionary. He was reclined besides a sitar. Nearby, was a pile of Bob Marley's LPs, and "Redemption Song", which I didn't know then, was playing in the background. I was to hear it so many times during his funeral, and afterwards. Martyrdom, as he was to say, was not in his will. But Walter's martyrdom came by stealth. On the night of June 13, 1980, a remote control bomb was detonated in his lap in a back street of Georgetown. I claim no special formal relationship with the late historian-rebel who was posthumously awarded the Order of Excellence, the Nation's highest Honour. It is enough for me to remember that we looked each other in the eye, and we embraced on a thin edge of history... On January 7, 1993, when I made my maiden speech in Parliament, I mentioned that I found Walter Rodney an irresistible character who "in a very personal way has touched me as he would have touched many Guyanese in this era in Guyana". I want on this death anniversary to repeat what I said then: "When we weep for our dead, when we can honour our heroes, when we can make castles of memories of things great and exceptional, we are doing this not for Walter Rodney but we are ourselves putting a healing touch to the nation's wounded soul. "His death was a blemish to us all, that tiny Guyana was capable of such gigantic barbarity. Walter's was a soul of greatness, and I believe his Chair (at UG) would be an intellectual lodestar for Guyana for now and for a very long time to come." (Mr Moses Nagamootoo is Guyana's Minister of Information) Follow the goings-on in Guyana in Guyana Today