A book review by Christopher Ram – Part 2
For many Guyanese, chapter 3 of Dr Maurice Odle’s memoir is the most exciting and interesting, covering a period from the late sixties to the year 1980, the year of the assassination of Walter Rodney. Odle’s return to Guyana in 1967, armed with a degree from the London School of Economics, coincided with the country’s early years of independence and a time of great political and social upheaval.
It was during Odle’s tenure at the University of Guyana – where he attained the position of Head of the Department of Economics and later Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences – that political tensions in Guyana took a turn for the worse, with Odle himself drawn into activism against the increasingly authoritarian government of Forbes Burnham. According to Odle’s telling, it was the refusal of the Board of the University of Guyana to appoint Rodney to a position in the institution after being refused re-entry to Jamaica that prompted a more overt resistance to the Burnham’s increasing authoritarianism.