(This is one of a series of fortnightly columns from Guyanese in the diaspora and others with an interest in issues related to Guyana and the Caribbean)
By David Hinds
October 16 marked the 40th anniversary of the so-called Rodney riots that accompanied the banning from Jamaica of Walter Rodney, the eminent historian, scholar, thinker and revolutionary. At the time of his brutal murder by the then Forbes Burnham government in his native Guyana, Eusi Kwayana, another eminent Caribbean personage, referred to Rodney as a “prophet of self-emancipation.” Kwayana’s description was not idle adulation; it went to the heart of who Rodney was and what he meant to the broader Caribbean and the African diaspora.
After earning his PhD in 1966 at age twenty four, Rodney returned to Jamaica two years later to teach at the University of the West Indies where he had done his undergraduate studies. He was one of the children of the movement that struck the final blows against colonial rule. The world-view of this generation was largely shaped by the nationalist fervor engendered by the possibility of self determination after centuries of imperialist domination. It was this quest for self determination that led Rodney and others to quickly raise questions about the content and direction of that independence. In particular, they raised questions about the role of race and class in the shaping of independence—what did independence mean for poor working class and Black people? They were aware that the struggle against slavery and colonialism was essentially a struggle for Black and Brown self emancipation and self expression. And they were uncomfortable with the absence of these aspirations from the praxis of the new post-colonial order.
Similar questions were being raised by the younger civil rights activists in the USA who had, in the wake of the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 and in the face of continued white resistance to Black empowerment, raised doubts that this legal victory would actually translate into Black empowerment. It was this doubt that led them to proclaim Black Power the philosophy and guide for the next stage of their resistance. Rodney and other young Caribbean radicals, faced with similar doubts about independence, also proclaimed Black Power as their guide in the Caribbean.
The independence leadership, upon taking office, had quickly abandoned the alliance it forged with the lower social classes in the fight for independence. In the process they ditched the Black Nationalist and working class aspirations of the independence movement and entered into an alliance with local and global capital. Consequently, they embraced an economic model that kept the region’s economy mired in a dependent relationship with the former colonial rulers. This approach led to a brief macro bump in the economic fortunes of the region, but in the end unemployment and poverty remained rampant and the Black and working class citizens remained stuck at the bottom of the ladder.
It is in this context that Walter Rodney and October 16, 1968 must be seen. Rodney taught at the university and inspired his students academically. But there were no courses on African and Caribbean history. Rodney knew from his studies that no society could move forward without an understanding of its history and culture. He had studied Garvey and the Pan Africanists before him. He also understood something else—that the educated children of the working class and the sufferers had a duty to put their knowledge and talents to the service of their race and class. He therefore saw himself not as an armchair scholar but as a servant of the masses.
Rodney was a new type of scholar—one who saw his scholarship as a means towards a liberative end for the poor and the powerless. He took a side—the side of the downpressed and the sufferers. This led him to go into gullies of Kingston and elsewhere in Jamaica to ground with the brethren and the sisterin who had been abandoned by the independence leaders. He talked with them about Africa, blackness, race and class and liberation. He taught them that ultimate power lay in their self activity.
He was, therefore, dangerous. He was threatening the ruling class and had to be banished. Walter Rodney, an African Caribbean citizen, was banned from an African Caribbean country for talking about Africa. That was a defining moment in the Caribbean journey. It challenged the very essence of what it meant to be Caribbean in 1968. And as the masses of people have done many times before and after, they took over the public space and expressed themselves. Those events of October 16 1968 set off something that was inevitable in the Caribbean—a radical movement that defined the Caribbean in Caribbean terms. Calypsonian, Bro Valentino refers to this period as the “roaring 70s.” Throughout the Caribbean ordinary people began to organize to own their independence. This was self emancipation in practice.
Soon after October 1968, there was February 1970 in Trinidad and Tobago. In Jamaica, Michael Manley was swept into power in 1972 and in the process ushered in eight years of hope. In 1971, the Bird dynasty was toppled in Antigua and Patrick John, the Dominican “badjohn,” would fall in 1979. The radical groups challenged the PNC regime in Guyana, laying the ground for Rodney’s return Guyana in 1974 to lead the most creative mass movement against the most authoritarian Caribbean government. By March 1979, a revolution was produced in Grenada.
On the cultural front, a new popular culture reflecting Black Nationalism, Caribbean Nationalism and revolutionary hope for the future emerged. Cultural radicals, who calypsonian Gypsy calls “the children of the revolution” expressed this popular culture in song, dance, literature and sport—Bro Valentino, Chalkdust, Calypso Rose and Beryl McBurnie, Black Stalin in Trinidad; Gabby in Barbados; Short Shirt in Antigua; and Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff and Burning Spear in Jamaica. And on the cricket field the West Indies would rise to the top, transforming cricket into Liberation Cricket and taking it beyond the boundary. Viv Richards, Alvin Kalicharran, Lawrence Rowe and Gordon Greenidge, beautiful, daring and audacious. Andy Roberts and Michael Holding, fast and wonderfully furious. Clive Lloyd, languid, tactical and awesome.
Walter Rodney, therefore, inspired a whole generation of Caribbean activism and the most defining chapter in post-colonial Caribbean history. A week ago, the University of the West Indies in Jamaica fittingly held a conference to commemorate October 1968. Perhaps in the not so distant future the wider Caribbean will celebrate the significance of that date, that era and the gentle warrior, the prophet of self-emancipation who inspired it all.
David Hinds lectures in Caribbean and African Diaspora Studies at Arizona State University in the USA. His writings on Politics in Guyana and the Caribbean can be found on his GuyanaCaribbeanPolitics.com website.
