On Thursday and Friday this week (August 11 and 12, 2005) the University of Guyana and the Faculty of Humanities and Education of the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, will be hosting an academic conference as part of the worldwide activities to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Walter Rodney's assassination. Walter Rodney after being offered an appointment at the University of Guyana (UG) as a Professor of History by the Appointments Committee of the university left the University of Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania for Guyana, but was never allowed to take up the appointment through the diktat of the government appointed University Council. Although he had held an earlyappointment at the University of the West Indies, that appointment was at the Mona Campus in Jamaica and lasted until the Jamaican government declared him persona non grata and denied him re-entry to Jamaica on return from overseas travel. For the next five years he never had full-time employment but did manage some brief teaching stints at universities in Europe and North America.
These details illustrate that Walter Rodney was an academic with a deep commitment to working in a university environment, taking on thereby all the responsibilities of an academic - teaching, research and public service. It is therefore fitting that an academic conference is being held as part of the commemoration activities here in Guyana, the land of his birth.
The theme of the conference is: 'Facing the Challenges of History, Poverty, Underdevelopment and Globalisation.' This is to my mind a most appropriate theme as it captures two essential aspects of Walter Rodney's work as an academic. One is the scope and range of his scholarship. Although an historian by training, his academic writings captured a broad range of developmental, philosophical, and political economy issues. If he were alive today, there is no doubt that he would have added breathtakingly original contributions to all elements of the conference theme.
The other essential aspect is that the conference theme's embrace of globalisation situates the conference not only in those issues alive at the time of Walter Rodney's assassination, but also in new developments that have exploded in significance and relevance to us all. Thus, when Walter Rodney died the concept of globalisation was not yet clearly articulated, even though several of the strands of analysis pertinent to globalisation were the subject of considerable intellectual discussion.
Walter Rodney's published works accept the philosophical and methodological premise of a constantly changing social reality and the need therefore for theory and practice to adjust and refine analysis to accord with the unfolding reality. This does not mean that his theoretical premises are ad hoc, what it means is that they are imbued with enough plasticity to accommodate a changing world around us. Since his death globalisation (and with it liberalisation) has emerged as a dominant force shaping global society as well as nations. No country is "too big" not to be severely constrained by the objective factors that drive globalisation. Here I refer to such factors as 1) the explosive growth in technology 2) the transformation of the global economy to the point where the dominant sector is now the international production of global transnational forms 3) the sudden and rapid dominance of services in national economies and international trade 4) the unparalleled financial explosion at both the global and national levels.
This list is by no means exhaustive, but enough has been indicated to let it be seen that if no economy is "too big" to escape buffeting from these developments then for small economies like Guyana and the Caribbean the situation is infinitely more complicated.
With such breathtaking changes Walter Rodney's view of the world and Guyana from 25 years ago cannot be uncritically applied in present-day circumstances. I am sure that at the forthcoming academic conference considerable time will be spent in discussing this and related issues of approach, method and analysis.
Economic ideas
Given my own academic interests, the changes are most readily apparent in areas of political economy and I shall illustrate what I mean with three brief examples. One of these is that in Walter Rodney's time (and indeed unto now) poverty and underdevelopment have dominated the global discourse on international development. Economic strategy in Rodney's time focused on alleviating and ameliorating poverty.
Today Walter Rodney's party emphasises wealth-creation rather than poverty reduction. This approach gives a more positive orientation to economic strategy. For example, it emphasises job creation and sustainable forms of development as indispensable. It also recognises that Guyana is by all resource measures (whether natural or human) a country of immense potential.
Another example is that since Walter Rodney's death, what economists term as growth accounting techniques have been developed and applied to countries around the world.
The results have shown unmistakeably that, it is not just more capital, more investment, more land, more workers that provide the bulk of economic growth in countries, but in fact the ability to use all these factors smarter and better.
By so doing one is emphasising productivity as the key to economic growth.
As a final example, in the late 1970s and early 1980s structural adjustment programmes of the IMF and World Bank had begun to acquire notoriety around the world.
Among the many concerns that were expressed was that they such programmes subjected the developing countries to the domination of what were called then 'imperialist' agencies and countries. Today, however, the domination is far more subtle and the struggle to secure autonomy for countries so that they can make their own 'policy spaces' in a rapidly globalising world has become one of the most urgent factors of our times.
These three examples - wealth-creation, productivity and an autonomous development path - are only some of the many ideas that will no doubt surface at the 25th Walter Rodney Commemora-tion Academic Conference. It is my fervent hope that the intellectual tenor of the contributions pay due respect and regard to the intellectual and academic legacy of Walter Rodney.