Walter Anthony Rodney, 1942-1980
Tuesday, June 13, will mark the twentieth anniversary of the assassination of Dr Walter Rodney, historian and political activist. Today, Sunday Stabroek brings you a feature on the late Dr Rodney, looking at various aspects of his life, career and achievements. The second of five children, Walter Anthony Rodney was born on March 23, 1942 in Georgetown to Edward and Pauline Rodney. At the age of eleven the future political activist won a scholarship to Queen's College, where he excelled both academically and at sports. In 1960, he left Guyana on a Caribbean scholarship to read history at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica. After graduating with a first-class honours degree, he won another scholarship - this time to the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. It was while here that he met Patricia Henry, who had been studying nursing, and whom he subsequently married. His PhD in History was conferred on July 7, 1966, coinciding with the day on which his first child - Shaka - was born. He and Pat later had two daughters, Kanini and Asha, both of whom were born in Tanzania. After the completion of his doctorate, Walter Rodney taught for a time at the University of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania, but in 1968 he decided to return to Jamaica. It was here that he was to become involved in direct political activity, working with the poor. It did not go down well with the Jamaican government, which seized the opportunity while he was attending a Black writers' conference in Canada in October to bar his re-entry. He had been there less than a year, and his banning led to riots. Rodney spent some time in Cuba before deciding to go back to Tanzania where he worked for the next six years. In 1974 the University of Guyana offered him the post of Professor of History. He accepted, but he was never allowed to take up the appointment, which was blocked by the University Council. This did not prevent him from lecturing to the students from time to time, such as the series he gave entitled 'An Examination of the Confrontation of West Africans and Europeans from the beginning to the Present,' and the ten presentations given on the French, Industrial, American, Russian and Chinese revolutions sponsored by the Students Society. He also served as external examiner for the History of West Africa course, and was named the external examiner for the Comparative Study of Revolutions; he was also one of the examiners for the M.A. History theses. Essentially, however, since he couldn't work within the country, he was forced to earn his living outside it by giving guest lectures in the United States and elsewhere from time to time. Involving himself in political activity in his homeland, he travelled the length of the country, talking to working people, or addressing larger gatherings. He soon joined the Working People's Alliance, and along with his family endured varying degrees of harassment until the time of his death. Following the burning down of the Office of the General Secretary of the People's National Congress and the Ministry of National Development in Camp Street on June 11, 1979, he was arrested along with Drs Omawale and Roopnaraine on a charge of setting fire to the building with intent to injure. The three accused appeared in the Georgetown Magistrate's Court on June 14, and were placed on $5,000 bail each. Thereafter Rodney found himself with a groundswell of support - people in the city and other parts of the country turning out in large numbers to hear what he had to say. The crowds were not dissuaded from attending the meetings by the intimidation and sometimes the violence meted out by agents of Forbes Burnham's government, both in uniform and out of it. The popular movement was not to last, however, because within a year Rodney was dead. According to evidence tendered by Rodney's brother, Donald, on June 13, 1980, the two of them went in the latter's car to Russell Street in order to collect a walkie-talkie from a Gregory Smith, who represented himself as a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force. (It later transpired that the sergeant also went under the names of William Smith and Cyril Johnson.) There the two brothers uplifted a brown paper bag containing the set. Donald Rodney said that Smith had instructed that the testing of the walkie-talkie be done near to the wall of the Georgetown prison, as he wanted to observe whether transmission would be interfered with by the extensive metal wall of that facility. It was while testing the set at around 8:00pm in John street, past the corner with Bent street (not outside the prison), that it exploded, killing Walter Rodney almost instantly and injuring his brother. Donald was later to be charged with the possession of explosives. He was taken out of hospital, transported to court, charged and placed on $4,000 bail. After the killing, the army denied that it had a Gregory Smith on its muster-roll, while the state media at the time were to claim in the teeth of the evidence that Rodney had died when he had tried to bomb the prison. The elusive Smith was spirited out of the country, later to surface in French Guiana, where he still lives.
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