Walter Rodney was born in Georgetown, Guyana, on March 23, 1942. His mother was a seamstress and his father a tailor; and little Walter showed academic prowess early, winning an open exhibition scholarship to attend Queen’s College, a known preserve of the Guyanese elite. While at Queen’s College, young Rodney continued to excel academically, at the same time making a name for himself as an athlete and as a debater.

On completion of his secondary schooling, Walter again won a scholarship, this time to pursue Higher Education at the University of the West Indies (UWI) at the Mona, Campus in Jamaica. While at UWI he was active in student politics and in the campaign surrounding the Jamaica Referendum on the West Indies Federation in 1961. He began to come to official security attention during this period especially when he visited Cuba and the Soviet Union. He graduated with a first-class honours degree in History in 1963 and was awarded his third scholarship, this time to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

In London, he participated in many of the discussion circles, met the legendary C. L R. James and spoke at the famous Hyde Park. He was 24 years old in 1966 when he was awarded a Ph.D. with honours, after submitting his thesis on the slave trade on the Upper Guinea Coast. This groundbreaking doctoral research was published as A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800 by Oxford University Press in 1970. The work was widely acclaimed for challenging the assumptions of western historians and setting new standards for looking at the interrelationships between the peoples and the ecology of the region. Rodney’s research involved examining the records of Portuguese merchants, both in England and Portugal, and during the process he learned Portuguese and Spanish, adding them to the French he had learned at Queen’s College. He therefore became somewhat of a linguist and strengthened this faculty by travelling widely.

Rodney believed that the study of history should be used to help ordinary working people effectively struggle against racism worldwide. He tried to put these ideas into practice during his first teaching assignment at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania which was well known as the haven of pan African political thinking and activism. He thought that the university should play a more meaningful role in making a better society for working people and solving the practical political, economic and cultural problems of society. Those were the ideas that got him into trouble when he returned to Jamaica to teach a course in African History at Mona Campus, and took this message of Black Liberation into the gullies and ghettos of Jamaica. Kingston in 1968 was as hot as everywhere else on earth and Brother Wally, as they called him, had chosen to spend his time sharing the “knowledge of African history with one of the most rejected sections of the Jamaican society – the Rastafarians.” He found among the Rastafarians, heights of knowledge and thought gleaned from their struggle to shape a new identity under the most deprived conditions, and that they knew some of the philosophies and orientations that he had acquired at university and during his stay in Tanzania. His experiences with the Rastafarians gave birth to The Groundings with My Brothers, a pamphlet “… that became a bible for the Caribbean Black Power Movement.”

As 1968 progressed, the Hugh Shearer Government of Jamaica became extremely uncomfortable with Brother Wally’s groundings and began to monitor him carefully in the context of “…a society rigidly stratified and beset by economic problems, police brutality, and stagnation. On campus, he taught history with distinction, captivation hordes of students, some of whom even left other classes to attend his popular lectures.” In October 1968, when Rodney left Jamaica to attend a Black Writer’s Conference in Montreal, Canada, the government decided to ban him from re-entering the country. His plane landed on Tuesday, October 15, 1968 and Rodney was informed that he could not enter the country. As the news spread among the university community, the Rastafarians, his friends and supporters among the working class, “This action sparked widespread riots and revolts in Kingston in which several people were killed and injured by the police and security forces, and millions of dollars worth of property destroyed. These riots triggered an increase in political awareness across the Caribbean.”

October 17 “found Kingston in upsurge.” The university students marched for six miles from Mona Campus to the city headed for the Jamaican parliament building. High school students swelled their ranks and masses of working people joined in. By evening the crowds began rioting, stoning cars and buildings and later looting stores. Buses were especially targeted as people vented their anger at a recent increase in bus fares. “The demonstrations were violently suppressed by the Jamaican security forces. The deaths of two persons were reported and eleven policemen were injured while twenty-three protestors were arrested on various charges. Many demonstrators including students and groups of Rastafarians were beaten.” The Jamaican government, pressed for an explanation, said that Rodney was a foreigner, a communist and a terrorist “…out to subvert the society and overthrow the government.” The Minister of Home Affairs was even stronger: “In my term of office, and in reading the records of problems in this country, I have never come across a man who offers a greater threat to the security of this nation than does Walter Rodney.” UWI students at St. Augustine Campus in Trinidad and Cave Hill Campus in Barbados also rioted. The protests in Guyana spread across racial and political party lines, and at the University of Guyana classes were suspended in favour of rallies in condemnation of the Jamaica ban on Walter Rodney. Protests also took place in London, the USA and elsewhere, contributing to the “radicalization of Caribbean politics and culture in the 1970s” and challenging the Caribbean “to consider alternative ways of thinking about and building egalitarian societies in the early years after political independence.”

Rodney went to Cuba for short stay then returned to the University of Dar es Salaam where he continued to build his reputation as a prominent Pan Africanist activist scholar, and an important figure in the Black Power movement in the Caribbean. In 1972, his best known work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, was published by Bogle-L’Ouverture, London, in conjunction with Tanzanian Publishing House. In 1974 Rodney returned to take up an appointment as Professor of History at the University of Guyana only to find that the government had rescinded the appointment. He became increasingly active in politics, working for the Working People’s Alliance. Rodney died when an explosive designed as a walkie-talkie, given to him by a soldier in the Guyana Defence Force, blew up in a car in the middle of Georgetown on the evening of June 13, 1980. His death was widely blamed on the Guyanese government. His widow, now Professor Patricia Rodney, Director of Morehouse School of Medicine, and their three children Shaka, Kanini and Asha, were left to mourn and to continue the struggle. Here in Anguilla, Rodney is remembered in the name Rodney House, the space carved out by Bankie Banx in the plan for music development among youth at the Dune Preserve on Rendezvous Bay.

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