By Nigel Westmaas
“Respice, adspice, prospice” is a Latin phrase that roughly means “examine the past, examine the present, examine the future. Very few lived more completely under the embrace of this phrase than Walter Rodney. From the moment that Rodney (the 30th anniversary of whose assassination is being observed today) encountered the science of history he utilised it to serve society. In his own analytical approach he would go forth boldly to challenge assumptions that he thought required redefining if not shattering. All societies he touched experienced his restless and relentless search for the laws of social motion in the specific location, together with the method and the organization to engage the motor for change.
The lessons of Rodney’s activism in places like Jamaica and Guyana obviously have to be placed in context. It was a different time and place, but his spirit of resistance and human need to reach out beyond the corridors of academia to the poor and dispossessed (and feared and ostracized groups in Jamaica at times like the Rastafari) was a key legacy of his life and work, and is ever more needed today. Guyana is in some ways worse than even under the Forbes Burnham regime that Rodney was active in fighting. There are multiple reasons for this, among them the deterioration of institutions (including political parties and trade unions); the underestimated effects of mass emigration; fear of street protests; the drug culture and its association with the state; forms of bribery of sections of the population; and the regime’s ability to mask its electoral and political domination through its ‘victory’ at previous polls.
Yet, there is complacency at large today which does not befit the fighting spirit of the Rodney era. There are some who hold Rodney’s spirit and vision as too ‘radical.’ But this was Rodney’s zeitgeist. His academic and political work was characterized by the restless energy of one who was forever updating his science of society and action therein – whether in Jamaica, Tanzania or Guyana, among other venues. When Rodney left to take up a scholarship in the University College of the West Indies signs of his later scholarly activism or ‘groundings’ were already very prevalent according to new intelligence. Declassified Jamaican security reports (speaking of declassification has there ever been a public declassification of Guyana’s security reports?) spoke in great detail of Rodney’s activities during his time in Jamaica. But it soon became a pattern for intelligence agencies from Portugal to Guyana to follow, and watch Rodney closely. Rodney and his wife Patricia were consistently followed by Portuguese state security when he went to Portugal to research for one of his books.
Rodney’s bustle in Jamaica and Guyana and elsewhere prompted his friend and academic colleague Clive Thomas to advance some useful reasons for Rodney’s significant political activism while still a professional historian. For Thomas, Rodney’s activities included the notion:
1. that history is the science of social development and as such must be used as an instrument to promote the development of humanity;
2. that as a social scientist and academic one cannot exist either creatively or purposefully in isolation from the mass of humanity in which all must necessarily function;
3. that to live and function in any such pretended isolation leads to the reinforcement of that inertia which exists in all human society and which favours the status quo.
Caribbean novelist and poet George Lamming placed Rodney in context : “It is the supreme distinction of Walter Rodney that he had initiated in his personal and professional life a decisive break with the tradition he had been trained to serve…the reader is made to feel that his academic authority is always fused and humanized by a sense of personal involvement with the matters at hand. He lived to survive the distortions of his training and the crippling ambivalence of his class”
Groundings in context
It was these qualities in Rodney, so eloquently described by Thomas and Lamming, that came to be known as “groundings.” The master noun ‘groundings’ is the encounter, an equal meeting space that according to political scientist Anthony Bogues, “breaks the constructed barriers of race, class and education… and to collapse the distance between the object of his thought and his political practice.” In so doing Rodney symbolized the need for the intellectual to “attach himself/herself to the activity of the masses.” When Walter Rodney wrote Groundings with my Brothers in 1969, the Caribbean was in upsurge. The term ‘groundings’ although not fully defined in Rodney’s book is taken to mean political and social work off the regular track and in the gullies and shantytowns of Kingston.
‘Groundings’ for Rodney could be in a “sports club, it might be in a school room, it might be in a church, it might be in a gully… I have spoken in what people call ‘dungle’ rubbish dumps… I have sat on a little oil drum, rusty and in the midst of garbage…”
There are several active criteria that make the concept of ‘grounding’ especially as it relates to the activity of Rodney, come alive. ‘Groundings’ (taking context into account ) becomes ‘active’ in several ways, among them, public and open critiques at the level of the society in which he lived; in encountering danger on a daily basis; even unto death; promoting scholarship that is qualitative, but also ‘relevant’ to active life; the cultivation and active contact with a network of colleagues and comrades beyond academia; his identity of a public teacher with free classes (classes and lecture without fees for the oppressed) with the classroom taking on any form, from rickety bottom house chairs to holding classes atop a big rock in a yard or on a hill; and, not least of all, the push for diversity against ongoing racial discomfort and the frank appraisal of race and class.
During his sojourn in Jamaica government grew increasingly angry over Rodney’s political work and described him as a “threat to national security.” The Minister of Home Affairs at the time (circa 1968) was very blunt and direct on the nature of the ‘threat’ posed by Rodney: “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 land than does Walter Rodney.”
When he left Jamaica to attend a conference in Canada Rodney was banned from re-entering. The repercussions are well documented: Kingston rioted, buses were overturned and students and working people came on the streets to protest.
Guyana groundings
By 1974, after serving in Tanzania for a while Rodney returned to take up an offer to become Professor of History at the University of Guyana. But the Government of Guyana refused to accept his appointment. Out of official work, he was politically active for the next six years, holding meetings with Guyanese of all races. He became a leading member of the Working People’s Alliance and was active in public meetings that party held all over the country. Even while he was engaged in politics he was writing and studying.
Every WPA activist and any other Guyanese who came into contact with Rodney in that heady period would have their own tales to recount about the combined scholar and activist in him. I can relate a personal memoir of my own.
I once accompanied Rodney acting as cover for his secret visit to meet workers at Linden. I was part of the decoy operation as the driver’s (a pretty middle class woman) ‘son,’ while Rodney sat in the back seat, in the appearance of a ‘carpenter’ on his way assist with the furnishing of ‘our’ home. The idea was to ‘psychologically’ avoid a search or too close a look at the backseat occupant at the checkpoint to Linden. Rodney was dressed to perfection for the ruse, with a saw and tools, old clothes and a hat to pull down over his face. We were stopped on one occasion but got past the toll gate/security checkpoint with ease. On arrival in Linden, she dropped us off by design. And we were met by about a dozen bauxite workers and WPA activists who appeared suddenly out of the darkness by pre-arrangement. We sat in the middle of the night, in the open air, where Rodney was in his element. I recall him telling the group, “You have to hold strain, steel yourselves, things are going to happen,” and witnessed the dialectic of scholar-activism writ live.
Rodney and lessons for the present
Walter Rodney’s activism of the 1960s and 1970s is obviously not at the same tempo in Guyana of the 21st century. Student/faculty politics have changed; there is no longer activism on the same scale in the streets; no occupations of university buildings against paralysis and poor learning conditions and facilities. Students and faculty (with notable exceptions) are now into moveon.org or cynical.com and caught up with other pursuits. Labour unions in Guyana are dismally disunited and inactive and where active no longer possess the same power. Even the political discourse and culture has changed. This should not be unexpected as there are newer contexts and many different issues than in times past.
But as Rodney would often state, the struggle goes on, even if the tempo and the energy have changed. Are there lessons from past resistance for the present? If there are general rules of grounding and resistance that could be repeated then Rodney’s work and activity in Jamaica and with the WPA in its heyday are reminders of peaceful forms of resistance still available to the population and its institutions. Among these forms of resistance are petitions (or open letters) of which Eusi Kwayana was a master; anti-corruption research and exposure in and out of parliament (for which Kwayana again, was renowned); protest marches including the WPA’s ‘Long Walk’ from Georgetown to the Corentyne; ongoing public support and solidarity with workers and major and minor strikes; peaceful pickets as a mode of struggle whether individually or collectively; legal action in the courts often assisted by human rights lawyers; teach-ins (a forte of Rodney and Kwayana); vigils (Eusi Kwayana, master of the art from the 1950s); the production and distribution of flyers/handbills (for public meetings and issue oriented statements); hunger strikes; Day of Rest (a WPA innovation which involved the public downing of tools); public meetings (a customary form of struggle/protest/education); press conferences (made into an effective art by the WPA but restricted by the state media); cultural resistance in the use of the African and tassa drums; newspaper distribution; overseas diplomatic action and involvement of support groups; and booing and chanting.
For his involvement in the WPA’s resistance to the Burnham regime, Rodney, like fellow WPA activists Edward Dublin and Ohene Koama paid the ultimate sacrifice. What better way to conclude therefore, in this 30th year of his assassination, than with a passage from Rodney’s works that transcends time. Initially written to describe the PNC regime’s hold on power, the passage from the booklet People’s Power No Dictator reads eerily vividly and aptly today, with minor adjustments, as when it was first published thirty-one years ago:
“For a small nation, Guyana has produced a discouragingly large number of lackeys and stooges who hide in the shadow of the ‘Comrade Leader.’ Guyanese constantly complain of ‘square pegs in round holes.’ The square pegs are the misfits and soup drinkers who flourish because each one is prepared to be his master’s voice. There is a double tragedy in this situation. First there is the tragedy (with some mixture of comedy) of the incompetent, the mediocre and the corrupt making a mess of things. Secondly, there is tragedy in which men and women of ability and integrity have been dismissed or they have run away or they have been reduced to silence…”
Finally, in respect of ‘prospice’ or the future – and the still elusive (rather than delusive) struggle for multi-racial unity and constitutional change we also take careful note of a response Rodney once gave in response to the question,“ Do you think your party can run a government alone?”
Rodney replied, “Any set of individuals of political parties cannot be expected to solve all the problems of the people. In fact, we profoundly distrust the Messiah approach of political parties in Guyanese. We are trying to mobilise the energies of the vast majority of the population. We do not have a designated leader, because we found that one of the weaknesses of Guyana is the creation of a maximum leader, whether in politics or other organisations.
“Instead of trying to get together to solve problems, the people tend to look to the maximum leader, and this has a negative consequence. This had acted adversely to the democratic practices at all levels… it destroys initiatives and creativity.”