Tomorrow will mark forty years since the assassination of Dr Walter Rodney in a car parked outside the Georgetown prison. The full background to the events leading up to that killing have never been placed in the public domain for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the PPP in government dithered for so long about holding an inquiry that certain key witnesses had died before they got around to it. The most significant of these was Gregory Smith, who had given Dr Rodney the walkie-talkie which he was supposed to test outside the wall of the jail, and which turned out to be an explosive device. Mr Smith subsequently took refuge in Cayenne, apparently with the assistance of the PNC government and presumably with the agreement of the French authorities, although at what level has never been revealed.
While French policy since the abolition of the guillotine has been to refuse to extradite suspects to countries which have the death penalty on their statute books, it is not clear why the PPP government did not seek extradition on the basis of a guarantee that that penalty would not be invoked should Mr Smith be convicted.
As already indicated, the PPP set up an inquiry very late in their administration. It was untidily organised, wasting time on lengthy evidence such as that from Mr Clement Rohee which had little to contribute to our understanding of what had happened. When the government changed in 2015, President David Granger moved with expedition to close it down, and proved deaf to arguments that certain key witnesses should first be allowed to testify, more especially former Crime Chief Cecil ‘Skip’ Roberts, who had been brought from the United States expressly for the purpose, and Dr Rupert Roopnaraine, who had spoken earlier about WPA intentions. For all of the Head of State’s haste, the Commission of Inquiry still held the PNC responsible for Dr Rodney’s death, a conclusion which most of those around in 1980 considered true in a general sense, even if details about who specifically in the then administration could be held accountable had not been unearthed.
Dr Rodney is always viewed as a public figure, and since his death has almost been regarded as public property. But he also had a personal life which as the years progressed was subject to constraints as a consequence of government actions, if not also because of his many commitments. He was a family man with a wife and three children, whom he was forced to support by travelling abroad to give public lectures, because the UG Board refused to allow him to take up the post he had been offered in the History Department.
He was in addition a man of great energy who was also abstemious and did not seek material reward or status, and he endeared himself to large segments of the population, not just on account of his talent for public speaking, but more because of his innate respect for everyone he met. It didn’t matter whether the person was an ordinary farmer with no education or someone more advantaged, he would give all their concerns and perceptions his undivided attention, so they felt they had a voice which was being listened to. Academic though he may have been, he was able to explain issues to ordinary people in terms they understood, but which did not patronise them. And as for relaxation, until politics came to consume his life towards the end, he was an avid bridge player, and was not averse to a game of chess.
Dr Rodney, of course, had two callings in life: one was history and the other was politics. In university circles outside this country it is as a historian he is known, and for his part he liked to keep the two spheres of his existence separate, not allowing his politics to interfere with his professionalism as a historian. Where history was concerned he remained a meticulous researcher all his life, in addition to being an elegant writer. Of his books, the one which many people here are familiar with is Groundings with my brothers, but that is not a historical work but a political one, coming out of his experience in Jamaica; in any case, he once said he had moved on from there.
The second most frequently mentioned book is How Europe underdeveloped Africa, although this arguably might not be his best work. Perhaps there are two – his first and his last, particularly the last – A history of the upper Guinea Coast, which was based on his PhD thesis, and A history of the Guyanese working people, unquestionably the best history on any period in Guyana in modern times. The great tragedy is that there was intended to be a second volume to this, but Dr Rodney was killed before he could even embark on it. Between those two remarkable publications are any number of scholarly articles in a variety of journals which are largely unknown in his homeland.
But inevitably it is Dr Rodney’s political activities which have cemented him in the Guyanese consciousness, and he has come to mind again in more recent times owing to the fact that the WPA joined the PNCR-based alliance prior to 2015 and has clung to a fabricated version of first the results, and then the conduct of the March 2nd election. Had Walter Rodney been alive would he have approved of all this? people wonder.
The first thing to be said is that the Guyana he knew was a different country, and the world a different place from the one it is now. Apart from anything else, rather uniquely the three parties confronting each other in 1979-80 were all Marxist parties – or Marxists of sorts. Would Dr Rodney have still been a Marxist now had he lived? Who can say? Desmond Hoyte abandoned the PNC’s brand of Marxist-inspired socialism after he came to office, and the PPP no longer behaves like a Marxist party of the Eastern bloc variety, although it still sometimes mouths the terminology. And as for the WPA it is much attenuated, and hasn’t sounded like the Marxist party it once was for a long time.
Were he still alive would a shift in his political ideology have affected his approach to modern events? Mr Ralph Ramkarran might seem to think that ideology was not an issue. Last Sunday in a column in this newspaper he described the discussions between the WPA and the PPP for shared governance in the late 1970s, discussions to which he would have been privy. The WPA’s eventual position, he said, which created an alignment of the positions of the two parties was: “1. Free and fair elections; and 2. Inclusion of the PNC in a unity government.” He went on to write: “The PPP and the WPA were making efforts to encourage the PNC away from exercising its own ethno-political dominance in the form of rigged elections and authoritarian rule. Both saw democracy, in the form of free and fair elections, as the essential basis for such an outcome.”
What he did not say was how in practical terms either Dr Rodney or the PPP envisaged this being implemented. In these matters the devil lies in the details. If more information exists on how this might have worked, perhaps for the sake of the historical record Mr Ramkarran or anyone else present could elaborate.
Certainly prior to 2015 Dr Rodney would not in principle one feels, have been opposed to an alliance with the PNC. What has invited criticism of his party for going that route has been the fact that it was responsible for his killing, and has never acknowledged that responsibility. One cannot help but feel either that he would have been strongly opposed to the treatment of the sugar workers, and might conceivably have come out of the alliance in consequence.
Whatever the case, the issues surrounding the March 2nd election are perhaps a little clearer. What the scion of the WPA in the coalition has done is to hold on to the second of the WPA proposals from the 1970s regarding a unity government, and ignore the first part about free and fair elections. In fact, worse, as mentioned above they have aligned themselves with the fiction dreamed up by President Granger and the PNCR about the poll.
The Walter Rodney whom everyone else knew would have had none of that. What he would have thought about how to achieve a unity government at this stage no one will ever know, but there surely can be no doubt about his commitment to free and fair elections, and that he would have insisted the election results be respected, and at an earlier stage the tabulation in Region Four conducted on the basis of the SoPs. Likewise, he would have wanted the Declaration to be made by Gecom on the basis of the recount. Historian that he was, he didn’t duck the facts.
