Next Monday will be the 36th Anniversary of the death of Dr Walter Rodney. The Commission of Inquiry that examined the circumstances of his death has made its Report public. But Rodney made too much of an impact during his short life for his legacy to be reduced only to his death.
Rodney was deeply influenced by the three ideological currents that swept the Caribbean after WWII – Marxism, anti-colonialism and Black Power/Pan Africanism. A member of a study group that coalesced around CLR James in London as he studied for his PhD (1966) (“History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800”), he obviously agreed with the assessment of the great Marxist: “The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.”
Rodney did not return to Guyana because of the complexities the racial hostilities engendered between 1962 and 1964 among the Indian and African segments. In Tanzania, where he taught at the University between 1966 and 1968, he criticised the transfer of power by the British to local African leaders from a Marxist perspective as a “briefcase revolution”. Refused a teaching appointment at UG in 1968 we went on to the Mona Campus of UWI, where he had studied for his first degree in history. He dismissed the Jamaican leader Hugh Shearer as another “briefcase leader”.
His slim 1969 book, “Grounding with my brothers” summarised the lessons he took outside the classroom and into the “gullies” of Kingston. He opened their eyes to Black Power: “Black power is a doctrine about black people, for black people, preached by black people….the colour of our skins is the most fundamental thing about us….In doing so I am not saying that is the way things ought to be. I am simply recognising the real world – that is the way things are.”
He pointed out the power of oppression to sustain identities: “So long as there are people who deny our humanity as blacks for so long must we proclaim and assert our humanity as blacks.”
Speaking in Jamaica with its 1% Indian population, and away from the challenges of his native Guyana, Rodney yet noted its racial divisions and pleaded for working class unity. He pointed out that to “whites” there were no differences between Africans and Indians: “Today some Indians (like some Africans) have joined the white power structure in terms of economic activity and culture; but the underlying reality is that poverty resides among Africans and Indians in the West Indies and that power is denied them. Black power in the West Indies therefore, refers primarily to people who are recognisably African or Indian.”
Describing Black Power as, “The hope of the black man (remember Rodney uses this term to include both Black and Indian) that he should have power over his own destinies”, Rodney made a point that is very apropos to Guyana today, “This is not incompatible with a multiracial society where each individual counts equally. Because the moment that power is equitably distributed among the several ethnic groups then the very relevance of making the distinction between groups will be lost.”
But after he returned to Guyana he acknowledged the salience of culture over class. While pointing out the homogenising impact of creolisation, Rodney conceded that Indians and Africans had not overcome their cultural differences to develop working class consciousness.
In his last book published posthumously in 1981, he concluded:
“…the existing aspects of cultural convergence were insufficiently developed to contribute decisively to solidarity among the working people of the two major race groups. The obverse of this race-class conjuncture is that the development of class forces and class consciousness was inadequate to sustain unity of the working people across the barriers created by legal distinctions, racial exclusiveness, and the separate trajectories of important aspects of culture.”
Where do we stand today to create a Guyanese unity?
