In The Diaspora

Wazir Mohammed teaches at Indiana University

By Wazir Mohammed
June 13, 2010 marked 30 years since Walter Rodney “the prophet of self-emancipation” was assassinated in Guyana. As we commemorate the life of Walter Rodney, we must remind ourselves and others that he was killed because of his impassioned commitment to what he described as the working people’s capacity for self-emancipation. We must remind ourselves that he was killed because he was the catalyst, he was the teacher who was helping to forge the unity between the mass of African and Indian Guyanese who had begun to meet together and discuss, and who had begun to march together, to demonstrate together and make demands on their rights to equality in their own name. We must also remind ourselves that he was killed because he was teaching the working people the meaning of real transformation. He was killed because of his commitment to self-emancipation, because of his commitment to racial unity, and because of his commitment to real transformation. He was killed, as our elder Eusi Kwayana puts it, because

“He was concerned with the deprivation of the oppressed classes inside any given country and also with the oppression of the subject peoples of the earth by oppressing nations. In relation to the fate of the oppressed classes in a given country, he believed that they must discover themselves in order to understand their historic mission in their own oppression. From the outset, Rodney knew that the emancipation of the oppressed could be brought about only by the oppressed themselves.”

He was killed because he was organizing the multi-racial working people of Guyana to bring about revolutionary transformation, revolutionary transformation of the economy and revolutionary transformation of the society.

Walter Rodney belongs to a select group of transformative leaders. While he was killed in Guyana, foreign interests played a pivotal role in his silencing. It was not the first time in the modern history of the world that a defender of the people’s right to equality was silenced, nor would it be the last time. Walter Rodney’s killing can be compared to that of Patrice Lumumba, the first elected Prime Minister of the Congo in 1961; Amilcar Cabral, leader of the African Party for the Independence and Union of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) in 1973 at the hands of Portuguese agents; the killing in 1983 of Maurice Bishop, Prime Minister of Free Grenada, at the hands of overzealous counter revolutionary agents in his party, the New Jewel Movement; the murder in 1973 of Salvador Allende, Prime Minister of Chile, at the hands of Pinochet acting in collusion with agents of international capital. These and other leaders committed one single crime; they had a passion for real change. They drew their examples for change from the working people, and created new ways, new approaches for dealing with the unequal relationship between the ruling classes and the poor. These were change agents. They recognized the historical problem of racial, economic, social, and cultural inequality between the then styled “third world” and the “first world,” and dedicated their lives to change the status quo in their respective countries. They exposed the role of local dictators who benefited from the status quo, and hence were invested in dictatorial processes that kept the working people in subjection.

These leaders were killed by agents of foreign and local capital over the period 1960 and 1990 to send a message to the working people of the former colonial world that international capital and their local lackeys are not prepared and will not tolerate any real demands for changes in the economic, political, social, and cultural status quo of the former colonies. This accounts in part for stagnation, retrogression, and continuous deterioration today of the conditions of ordinary people in most areas of the former colonial world. To this day, the dream of self-emancipation is still unrealized in every part of the former colonial world. Working people across the world today are farther than they have ever been from realizing the dream of economic, political, social, and cultural equality. This is true for the Caribbean, the birthplace of Rodney and Bishop; as it is true in Africa, the birth place of Cabral, Lumumba, Machel, Mandela, and others. Like Guyana, most of the former colonies in Africa, in Asia and in Latin America are yet to find solutions to deal with and turn back the historical damage of ethnic and racial divisions that threatens to consume these societies.

The assassination of Walter Rodney must be contextualized from the confines of the peoples’ struggle against foreign domination of mind and body, against foreign domination of thought and action. Walter Rodney did not wake up one day, like so many leader types, and decide that he wanted to take the reins of power over the land. He had no such ambition. He was thrust into the sphere as the recognized leader of the working people of Guyana because in their estimation he came closest to understanding and sharing their life of pain and suffering which abounded in part because of the shattered dream of democratic self-emancipation; a dream snatched away by the unraveling of the anti-colonial national movement of the 1950s. In the aftermath of this unraveling, political forces emerged to represent ethnic interests, and hence the outgrowth of political parties around which sections of the population coalesced because of the perception that they could provide ethnic security. Today, Guyana continues to suffer from the nightmare of ethnic politics. The unraveling of the national movement in Guyana, while it had importance to local players, occurred in the context of the global onslaught against such movements, a global onslaught against local self-determination which began with colonialism and slavery, and which has kept independent nations in subjection for the last 200 years.

Haiti is the most striking example, where for over 200 years the big powers have worked to snuff out the right of the Haitian people to self-determination. Like Duvalier in Haiti, Somoza in Nicaragua, the Shah in Iran, Gairy in Grenada, and the many countless dictators who stalked and stymied the spirit of self-emancipation in Latin America, Asia and Africa, the PNC dictatorship of Guyana emerged and grew into a position of dominance with the backing and support of big powers.

The interests of big powers in the politics of these countries were firstly about access to control their economies, especially their mineral and agricultural production, and secondly about their political support in the cold war period at the international level. As a young scholar, Walter Rodney, who studied the impact of big power politics on the creation of unequal development and inequality, was unsettled by the machinations of local leaders, be they in the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, or the United States of America.

In all these theatres, he was drawn into debates and discussion on local conditions as more and more people came into contact with his scholarship. Inevitably, it was the discussions and debates which his scholarship opened up which led to his banishment from Jamaica by the Shearer government 1968, the denial of a teaching appointment at the University of Guyana, and subsequently his assassination in 1980.

There is no separation between Rodney’s scholarship and his activism. His scholarship calls into question all those who sat on the fence and all those who continue to sit on the fence as the divide between rich and poor grows, and as the ruling classes concretize their mastery to use race, ethnicity and gender as a means of imposing varying dimensions of divide and rule in specific local settings. Having mastered the history of the Upper Guinea Coast in his doctoral studies, he explained that while local African leaders and “elites” colluded in slave trading, students of history must come to grip with the global dimension; that is the growth of markets for slaves as European trade and commerce expanded and in this expansion varying forms of exploitation in specific local areas emerged. He thus explained that “African agents of the Atlantic Slave Trade must be seen in a global perspective,” that is how the profit motive which was shaped by the growth of plantations in the Americas, created the conditions which lead to internecine warfare, with the primary aim of capturing the “enemy” who were then sold into slavery.

This work establishes his fascination with the methodology of capital in creating local lackeys, local agents through whom the tentacles of exploitation of the working people get constructed and deepened.

Rodney’s scholarship is not idle; it is a call to action. It is a call to action by the working people in local settings, be it in Africa where he was a combatant in the liberation struggle, in Jamaica where he helped students to recognize the ills of the society, in the USA and Europe where he implored people on the left to come to grips with the limitations of vanguard politics and the hegemonic character of the leading socialist countries, and in Guyana where he grounded with the people and helped them to understand and identify the local agents of foreign capital whose wealth and power is derived from their labour and misery.