Chaos theory argues that the world’s weather is in such a state of delicate flux that a single flap of a butterfly’s wings in the Amazon rainforest can cause a tornado in Wichita, Kansas.
So too with politics, religion. When in 1519 a German priest hammered his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg castle, he set in motion a centuries long religious hurricane in which millions would die. An indigent, exiled Karl Marx would pen a slim manifesto in 1845 and trigger, albeit decades later, world revolution and ultimately the end of British imperialism. Some-times it is an act of violence: the nervous assassin Gavrilo Princip standing on a Sarajevo street corner on the lookout for Archduke Franz Ferdinand. If only the driver had not gone the wrong way, 20 million lives would have been spared!
Not really. Such individual actions spring from and only have consequences within prevailing circumstances: someone else would have taken the place of Luther or Princip and rich people had been getting pretty tired of paying indulgences to the Roman Catholic church on the hope of staying out of hell. Western powers and Russia were itching for a fight, pre-1914.
The French philosopher Rene Girard proposed that humans are driven by mimetic desire – our desire for a certain object is provoked by the desire of another for it. This can be the latest designer handbag, a love interest, a piece of land, bitcoin or, yes, oil money….This fuels a deep rivalry and conflict, a politics of envy, which often turns violent. Girard argues that this can only be relieved through what he called the scapegoat mechanism, where an individual or group is collectively identified for sacrifice resulting in a cathartic cleansing, an outpouring of grief and introspection that often means the victim or victims become sanctified. The Lamb of God that taketh away the Sins of the World….and it might be that Western culture is simply recycling that story and those of Greek tragedies both in real life and in its literature. Hamlet comes to mind or Lord of the Flies; the films of Martin Scorsese with their tribal and religious overtones.
God fearing and violent, America is particularly good at throwing up examples of Girard’s theories: Abraham Lincoln, JFK, RFK, and MLK who was hardly universally admired in his lifetime, but now has his own national holiday. Even this depraved culture of mass shootings may have its roots in this impulse for blood-letting. That said almost all countries have their martyrs, many distilled into single names: Biko, Lorca, Romero, Che, Lumumba. Bob Marley was becoming an icon and leader for many around the world but succumbed in May 1981.
Guyana has its own martyrs: Cuffy, the Enmore Five and Dr Walter Rodney who was murdered 42 years ago this week. One wonders what might have happened were he to have survived that attack? One can only imagine this alternative history, of him staggering from the smouldering Mazda Capella. Of him arrested, given the perp walk, charged and convicted for “terrorism”. Released from prison a decade later upon the ascent of the PPP/C, he continues the struggle for the solidarity of the working class, but is harried, unable to earn a living thanks to a different leadership, scrounging on op-eds slipping into anachronism, in the era of the “Death of History”. Or he migrates like so many of his colleagues. Another alternative: his failed assassination by the state ignites a nation around him, sweeping the race-based parties aside. He is freed from the Brickdam lockups under duress and goes on to create a utopia of his and others’ beliefs. That seems the least likely scenario or were it to have happened perhaps it would have gone the way of Grenada’s New Jewel Movement whose leader Maurice Bishop was murdered only a year after Rodney. (At least the airport is named after him. Rodney’s legacy has been more complicated – awkward for the PNC – his name removed from the National Archives – and more of a convenient hammer for the PPP)
None of that happened and instead upon his death his memory and iconic image were instantly frozen, his writings preserved for posterity in university libraries, a man of words now – “scattered among a hundred cities/And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections” to quote WH Auden. No longer a man of action and revolution.
Many of his Marxist ideas are those that a living human being might be ridiculed for uttering these days. Are we not reminded daily how communism failed and how we now live in the best of all possible worlds, full of opportunities – cake making scholarships and part time jobs (if we are not lazy) and a car in every driveway? In other words, we can safely look back with reverence at Walter Rodney’s writings exactly because he died.
The commission’s report into his death concluded, “Getting him off the political scene was definitely an objective of the government of the day. His death clearly set back and weakened the opposition forces.” Then again perhaps his murder also brought about the end of the PNC regime. It was one atrocity too far, and eventually led to democratic elections although there would be many more atrocities in the decades to follow including ambiguous murders of political critics, while Guyana (and the world for that matter) is, in 2022, nowhere near the type of society one might guess Rodney had imagined. A minimum wage of $44,200? A working class even more divided by race, unable to see the validity of a common cause as they tumble over one another, arms outstretched?
Maybe the circumstances were not right then and aren’t even now. Perhaps generations hence will act upon his ideas. As MLK said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”