Dr Walter Anthony Rodney: The man who never got to see his kids grow up

The name Dr Walter Anthony Rodney is forever etched in Guyana’s history because of everything he stood for. The larger-than-life man was such a threat to the then Government of the day that they played a heavy part in his assassination.
Today marks 41 years since the June 13, 1980 assassination of Dr Rodney. He would have been 79 years old.
Dr Rodney was married to Dr Patricia Rodney and together they have three children – Shaka, Kanini and Asha. A scholar, activist and leader, Dr Rodney did not spend all his time writing or engaging in political activism but was every bit of a family man. On the morning of his assassination, Dr Rodney took the children to school and returned home where he and his wife discussed an invitation for him to work at the university in Zimbabwe. He had in the past ignored many such invitations from other universities.
On this occasion, he was particularly keen and actually decided to go to Zimbabwe. Later the evening, he was dead.
“Walter never got to see his children grow up. He was assassinated when he was 38 years old. My oldest son Shaka was 13, Kanini, 10 and Asha, 8. He never got the chance to meet his grandchildren…As you know Walter Rodney was assassinated on Friday June 13, 1980,” Dr Patricia Rodney said at a Guyana SPEAKS event on Sunday, October 27, 2019, in London.
Dr Rodney was killed in the height of his professional career and his family was not only deprived of his presence but also his financial contribution. The then Government led by Forbes Burnham did not recognise his death as an assassination since they were involved in its planning and execution. That, in return, resulted in the Rodney family not being able to benefit from his life insurance policy.
Dr Patricia Rodney was left as a single parent to raise her three children in a state that wanted to suppress them. In fact, at the 2019 forum, she spoke about moving to Barbados after her husband’s murder and then having then Prime Minister Burnham labelling them as enemies of the State.
“Two friends from Barbados, George Lamin and Margaret Hope, came and took myself and the children to Barbados. I hadn’t made any plans, what I would do, I know why I would do, I just knew I could not stay in Guyana because it wasn’t safe. And I realised it wasn’t safe because when I got to Barbados, Prime Minister Burnham called up Prime Minister Tom Adams to tell him he was harbouring the enemy – me and three small children were the enemy. So even in Barbados, the Barbadians had to provide security while I was in Barbados because they wanted to cover themselves. So that the harassment of the Rodney family didn’t stop with just killing Rodney, it continued,” she recounted.
Dr Patricia Rodney stayed in Barbados for nine years with her children because of a promise she and her husband made to each other. They wanted to ensure their children grew up somewhere in the Caribbean so that they could have an “identity.” The opportunity to leave Guyana served as a catalyst for the family to begin healing and getting back to some normalcy to their lives.

“One of the things that had happened in Guyana, because we had moved around so much, I had moved around with the children and Walter I was never able to finish my first degree. So when I got to Guyana, I was working with the Georgetown City Council in charge of the early childhood development day-care centre. I took the opportunity once again to go to University of Guyana, where I did a diploma in social work and then the university because University of Guyana had separated itself from the University of the West Indies, it was an independent University in order to do the degree programme in social work one had to go to Jamaica and this was the first time students were going on this particular arrangement. So, two students were selected from that programme – myself and another person took to Jamaica to finish up. While I was away from Guyana, my parents, Walter’s parents and Walter and also looked after the children so I spent a year in Jamaica. So, in Barbados, that I was able to get a job where I could be at home by the time the children, finish school…then I emigrated to Canada and it’s in Canada that I continued my studies…We know that several times, when you with men who are committed to politics or activism that your work gets left undone. And so, after Walter was killed, I was determined that I will continue my own education.”
Dr Patricia Rodney would later move to Atlanta, Georgia, where she and her children started the Walter Rodney Foundation and began to take ownership of his work. His work was at the time being used and profited off of by a number of persons.
To this date, the Rodney family is still healing.

Dr Walter Anthony Rodney
Dr Rodney was born to Edward and Pauline Rodney in Georgetown, Guyana, on March 23, 1942. He came from a working class family of five sons. His father, Edward, was a tailor and his mother, Pauline, was a seamstress.
He attended Queen’s College, the top male high school in Guyana, and in 1960 graduated first in his class, winning an open scholarship to the University of the West Indies (UWI). He pursued his undergraduate studies at UWI Mona Campus in Jamaica, where he graduated with 1st class honours in History in 1963. Dr Rodney then attended the School of Oriental and African Studies in London where, at the age of 24, he received his PhD with honours in African History. Dr Rodney’s thesis, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, was published by Oxford University Press in 1970.

He developed into an intellectual and scholar and is recognised as one of the Caribbean’s most brilliant minds. Dr Rodney’s academic record is filled with awards, open scholarships and honours.
Dr Rodney combined his scholarship with activism and became a voice for the under-represented and disenfranchised – this distinguished him from his academic colleagues. His interest in the struggles of the working class began at a young age with an introduction to politics by his father, and continued with his involvement in debating and study groups throughout his student years.
His PhD thesis illustrated his duality as an intellectual and activist as he challenged the prevailing assumptions about African history and put forth his own ideas and models for analysing the history of oppressed peoples. Influenced by the Black Power Movement in the US, third world revolutionaries and Marxist theory, Dr Rodney began to actively challenge the status quo.
In 1968, while a UWI professor in Jamaica, he joined others to object to the socio-economic and political direction of the Government. Unlike his counterparts, however, Dr Rodney involved the working class, including the Rastafarians (one of Jamaica’s most marginalised groups) in this dialogue. His speeches and lectures to these groups were published as Grounding with My Brothers, and became central to the Caribbean Black Power Movement. Dr Rodney’s activities attracted the Jamaican Government’s attention and after attending the 1968 Black Writers’ Conference in Montreal, Canada, he was banned from re-entering the country. This decision was to have profound repercussions, sparking widespread unrest in Kingston.
In 1974, he returned to Guyana to take up an appointment as Professor of History at the University of Guyana, but the Government rescinded the appointment. But Dr Rodney remained in Guyana, joined the newly formed political group, the Working People’s Alliance (WPA). Between 1974 and 1979, he emerged as the leading figure in the resistance movement against the increasingly authoritarian People’s National Congress (PNC) Government. He gave public and private talks all over the country that served to engender a new political consciousness in the country. During this period, he developed his ideas on the self-emancipation of the working people, “People’s Power”, and multiracial democracy.
As the WPA gained popularity and momentum, the PNC began a campaign of harassment including Police raids, house searches, and beatings. On July 11, 1979, Dr Rodney, together with seven others, were arrested following the burning down of two Government offices. Dr Rodney and four others (known as the “Referendum Five”) faced trumped-up charges of arson, but without proof and scrutiny from international supporters, the Government was forced to drop these charges.
Dr Rodney’s voice was not confined to Africa and the Caribbean but was also heard in the US and Europe. In the early-mid 1970s, he participated in discussions and lectures with the African Heritage Studies Association at Howard University; the Institute of the Black World in Atlanta, Georgia; the African Studies and Research Center at Cornell University; and the State University of New York at Binghamton.
The persecution, however, continued: two party members were killed, and the Government denied Dr Rodney and others permission to travel. Despite this, Dr Rodney continued his political work and attended Zimbabwe’s independence celebrations in May 1980.
On Friday, June 13, 1980, Dr Walter Anthony Rodney was assassinated by a bomb in Georgetown, Guyana. He was 38 years old.
Though Dr Rodney lived with constant Police harassment and frequent threats against his life, he nonetheless managed to complete four books in the last year of his life: An academic work: A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905; A political call to action; People’s Power, No Dictator, and two children’s books: Kofi Baadu Out of Africa and Lakshmi Out of India. (Extracted from the Walter Rodney Foundation)