(In memory of Aziz Choudry, 1966-1921)
By David Austin
David Austin is the author of Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution, Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal (winner of the 2014 Casa de las Americas Prize) and editor of Moving Against the System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Shaping of Global Consciousness (2018). A version of this essay was delivered as a preface to a talk by Angela Davis on the legacy of Walter Rodney during the Walter Rodney Foundation’s annual conference, March 21, 2021.
Aziz Choudry was an activist, scholar and friend whose political imprint traversed the globe, including his various homes in New Zealand, England, Canada, and South Africa. He was also the author and editor of several books including: Activists and the Surveillance State: Learning from Repression (2019), Reflections on Knowledge, Learning, and Social Movements: History’s Schools (2018), Learning Activism: The Intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements (2015), and Learning from the Ground Up: Global Perspectives on Social Movements and Knowledge Production (2010). A prolific scholar, he had recently joined Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT) at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
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Editor’s Note: The Government of Guyana must be commended for its announcement, last Thursday, that it would be taking several steps to correct the historical record on the assassination of Walter Rodney, historian, Pan-Africanist and activist for the multi-racial unity of the working people of Guyana, including: taking steps to amend the death certificate from death by misadventure to assassination; resuming the Walter Rodney Chair at the University of Guyana; introducing Dr. Rodney’s writings into the school curricula; putting Dr. Rodney’s graveside and monument (the latter created by the international committee that organised the 2005 Groundings to mark the 25th anniversary of the assassination) in the care of the National Trust; digitising the records of the 2014 Commission of Inquiry and moving to adopt its findings and implement its recommendations.
This welcome announcement also comes on the heels of the Court of Appeal’s important, and long overdue decision to finally set aside the conviction of Donald Rodney for unlawful possession of explosives in the aftermath of the events that took the life of his brother on June 13th, 1980.
This was a week of profound loss for the Rodney family, grieving the loss of Hubert Rodney, and on the eve of the 21st anniversary of the assassination of Walter Rodney. As we celebrate this news, let us hold quiet space as well at this bittersweet time for Pat, Shaka, Kanini, Asha, Donald and the Rodney family, who have fought for justice for 41 years.
The announcement that Walter Rodney’s books and writings will be introduced into the school curriculum is an especially welcome move. For it is here that any hope of a viable future for all Guyanese across race, sexuality, gender, political affiliation, age, ability, geography and more reside, that we might really experience “a little freedom, different from this” (in the words of Martin Carter). In her anthology, The Point is to Change the World, Andaiye closes her final essay, a tribute to Walter Rodney, with the following lines:
“I want to close with a footnote about Rodney’s conviction that in Guyana (and other racially divided societies), racial unity and effective resistance are inter-dependent. The footnote arises out of the preface to Kofi Baadu Out of Africa. Unlike his other writing, the children’s books did not make the case for racial unity but were an expression of his focus on the need for racial unity. The preface made this explicit when it said “This collective effort, [of completing the book] hopes to make a modest contribution to revealing further aspects of our rich and varied heritage, so that the children, at least, might better understand themselves and each other.” Re-reading that after his death and again now I am struck by the words “at least” and the sense the words convey that in 1980, in a period of downturn of the political resistance, his faith in the will of adult Guyanese to racial unity was at least momentarily shaken.
The generation for whom he wrote his children’s books would now be in their 40s, and both racial unity and resistance are at their lowest point since the late 1980s. So the task is unfinished. It is as true today as it was when Rodney made the point, that working to build unity in struggle in the face of all that militates against it, is a precondition of the continued work of enlarging our freedom.”
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Malcolm X’s Grenadian mother, Louise Langdon Norton, arrived in Montreal in 1917 where she helped to organize a local chapter of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1919. She met and later married Earl Little, Malcolm’s father, in Montreal and the couple eventually moved to the US where she continued her work as an organizer within the UNIA.
The world was in a state of turmoil in 1917, gripped as it was by the First World War. The war ultimately contributed to the upsurge of the Russian Revolution, an event whose legacy and implications Rodney grappled with in his posthumously published book, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World (2018). Today, and as the global pandemic has highlighted, we are living in a particular moment of crisis that has highlighted the crass inequalities on local levels and has heightened our appreciation of the global nature of perpetual capitalist crisis. This moment has also demonstrated to us the extent to which we are all interconnected, transcending national boundaries and borders.
It is in moments like this that turning to Walter Rodney’s life and work – I would also like to mention here Guyana’s Andaiye and her wonderful book, The Point is to Change the World – takes on renewed significance. Rodney committed his life to genuine, deep-seated, and far-reaching social transformation, premised on the ideal of human dignity and the belief in the self-organization of so-called ordinary people. In this moment, Rodney’s political and intellectual legacy suggests that he would not be partial to partisan politics or any party that contributes to the oppression of any group based on race, gender, class, or any other form of dispossession or marginalization, be it in his native Guyana, Jamaica, Tanzania, North America, or any other part of the world.
In this spirit, it is worth quoting Angela Davis’ short Introduction to the new edition of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. In it she speaks of his “determination to rid the planet of all of the outgrowths of colonialism and slavery.” She also suggests that he was someone who recognized “that the ultimate significance of knowledge is its capacity to transform our social worlds” – the idea that we think and reason in order to do, and that thinking and acting in the world continuously informs our understanding and knowledge of it.
In this sense, Walter Rodney was a philosopher, much like Davis who trained as one, but not in the narrow sense of that word. Rodney was a philosopher in the most expansive sense of its meaning – a lover of knowledge and ideas, and their profound capacity to contribute to genuine, and deep-seated social transformation.
Rodney’s was a politics and philosophy of the dispossessed, and in Canada, the UK, and US, who is more dispossessed today than the incarcerated – the disproportionate numbers of people of African descent who, along with Indigenous peoples and the persistently poor in general, languish behind prison bars under a permanent state of exceptional or emergency measures?
Regardless of their circumstances, they are political prisoners insofar as they are the victims of the political-economic system that reproduces systemic and mundane forms of inequality that make both crime and criminalization an integral part of the polity. These represent layers of exclusion whose existence has been magnified in our minds over the course of the last year, exclusion that represents a challenge to conventional conceptions of what constitutes a democratic society.
On this point, I would like to encourage you to read Mariame Kaba’s now best-selling book, We Do This ‘Til They Free Us. Kaba has been a model of political consistency in the face of great adversity in relation to the carceral system and policing in a manner that I think Walter Rodney would – and I’m quite certain Angela Davis does – recognize and appreciate.
Rodney was committed to a renewed vision of socialism, which we can only understand as the radical transformation of the existing global economic and political system that has wrought human and environmental havoc across the globe. For Rodney, this meant a society in which so-called ordinary people, not the parties that presumably represent them, played the active and decisive role in shaping their own lives. A world, it is important to add here, in which the lives and humanity of the people of Palestine, and their right to exist and live a life of dignity, matters too.
If we define socialism as a social and economic system that provides, but is not limited to, meeting the basic material needs of the population; as a set of ideas, beliefs, and values tied to the collective will of a society in which the majority of the population plays the defining role in determining its fate, while striking the delicate balance between collective rights and the freedom of individuals to develop and realize their creative potential as human beings; as a way of life that encourages us to creatively create in ways that nourish the human spirit while not subsuming it to the collective will; and to be able to do so without fear of discrimination, recrimination, or reprisal based on gender, sex, race, sexuality, or any other form of exclusion that denies us our humanity; – to the extent that this is socialism, and as the work of Walter Rodney and Angela Davis suggest, then socialism is a universal ideal that cannot simply be reduced to a set of ideas and practices that evolved within the context of Europe, or be limited to a Western conception of the world tied to pseudo-social and pseudo-scientific notions of progress and development.
A few years ago, following a presentation that I delivered on the ideas of C.L.R. James, which emphasized the importance of thinking about race in relation to class, and vice-versa, I was asked by a young student from the University of Cape Town whether the ideas of Rodney and James were still relevant. In the spirit of Rodney, I tried to reason, to ground, with the student by suggesting that today, more than ever, the critical engagement of Rodney’s ideas are crucially important. I also suggested that, as we venture into familiar but yet uncharted territory in our struggle for a more just and humane world, and in the midst of the bacchanal that too often passes for politics today, to be radical and to demand radical social, political, and economic change, is far from radical in the partisan political sense of that word, but is, or at least should, be considered normal.
This is not to simply question of language, the right dialect, or word-spinning that can often descend into empty phraseology, but about a dialectic (a word that is justly coming back into favor) in which we imagine and struggle to bring into being a radically better world. It is this world for which Walter Rodney committed and ultimately paid the price with his life, premised on the promise that another world is not only possible, but an absolute necessity, and especially in the midst of these dangerously dread and destitute times.