By: Kimberly Ramkhalawan
October 14, 2022
October 12, has come to be known as Reparations Day. And The UWI’s way in stimulating discussion of the topic, which is becoming an area of urgency among regional governments and entities like CARICOM, was to focus on a work published in 1972, some eight years before his assassination, ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’ by Guyana born, Walter Rodney.
October 12 is said to also represent African holocaust day, as well as Indigenous people’s genocide day. Some fifty years later, this working textbook continues to the lay the foundation for the justification that reparations are due to Africa and its people. And in celebrating 50 years of Rodney’s Publication, The UWI sought to gather similar intellectuals to Rodney to highlight just how much his work has left a legacy, but paves the way forward. Opening the session, Professor Verene Shepherd, Director, Centre for Reparation Research, The UWI shared while he was considered an intellectual, he was an activist bringing awareness through his studies and enlightenment, and how “Rodney helped all his readers to understand that the negative consequences of colonialism in Africa sprung mainly from the fact that Africa lost its power because of colonialism”. He argued persuasively that every struggle planted a seed of creative disruption and aided the process that released new social forces in the continuing drama between capital and labour.
To Professor Shepherd, she says Rodney left us the legacy of scholar activism, groundings with my brother, as one should not imprison themselves within the walls of academia, but take one’s knowledge to the community.
Professor Owen Sichone, Former Director of The Dag Hammarskjold Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, Copperbelt University, Zambia shared on the influences Rodney’s writing had on the curriculum at the University of Zambia. In Humanities and Social Sciences, it became a key text within the first year of social sciences courses, branching out even into Natural Sciences, where an African Studies course became compulsory for all students who would later become Lawyers, Engineers and Doctors, so that they would know about the society they would be operating within. For some, Professor Sichone shared has even resulted in students shifting away from Natural sciences to Social Sciences following what he described as some “light bulb moments in the course of their first-year studies.”
The course was called African Studies 100 and was compulsory for natural sciences students, with a mix of some history, sociology, economics and technology and to show how these were linked, something he says’ Rodney’s book managed to capture ‘beautifully’
Professor Hassan O. Kaya is the Director of the DST-NRF Centre in Indigenous Knowledge Systems, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa began his key lecture by noting Rodney’s contribution to student intellectual development.
Delving into how Rodney intertwined these areas of study with Africa and its rich contribution to the world, Professor Kaya showed at the time of Rodney’s alignment with the University of Dar es Salaam, it was undergoing a transformation of its curriculum with the inclusion of development studies and an East Africa Society and Education, EASE, course as mandatory. This included having debates in which the university engaged in on where the continent was going including Africans within and outside the continent. Development studies allowed students to be exposed to Marxist-Lennist social class tools of analyzing society at a continental, and international level that the problem of Africa and its people, was not always on racial terms, but on class terms as well. He shared insights into the enemy against Africa being much more than international capitalism but through a class of ownership and control within the continent who are used by international capitalists to exploit the resources of Africa and its people. In the 1970s, Rodney brought enlightenment to these issues, bridging the gap in what was taught academically in research culture along with the materials Eurocentric intellectuals provided, with something new they could they call their own with academic materials for citations. Professor Kaya explained that Rodney’s works sought to break the molds of ‘academic Elist’, where writings were too difficult to grasp and understand by the average student, as they were often highly exclusive and shaped in sophisticated, language used by western academia.
Rodney did so by integrating learning with research, learning with living, and excellence with relevance, something western learning materials often leave behind, stopping short at excellence. This led to his contribution at Dar es Salaam of student activism and radicalism, as he was often taken up with the concerns that continent continued to be under Western domination or neo-colonialism, exploitation and marginalization.
Similarly, Professor Sichone says this kind of studies within their university curriculum came as a stark difference to what they were used to through Eurocentric studies fed to them through the traditional Cambridge University syllabus ahead of their GCE and A Level exam which often had very little good to say about Africa. Professor Sichone said it was refreshing to see Africa shared in a positive light, he describes it as a “pleasant shock to see what the schools were teaching was actually in reverse, and an Afrocentric reading of the same historical encounter would lead to a slightly different conclusion, namely that the countries that appear to be wealthy are actually the poorer ones, especially in terms of natural resources”. The poverty that they encountered in Africa, which was presented, as a traditional if not natural problem, was actually as a direct result of this encounter with Europe. From a Zambian perspective, Professor Sichone shares Rodney’s book as an eye opener from an Afrocentric perspective in their history and a reassessment of the relationship between Europe and Africa. While the influence is still visible in the classroom, despite the focus of the students interest with the curriculum having changed today from what it was in the 1970s and 80s.
Widow of Walter Rodney, Dr Patricia Rodney, who is an Adjunct Professor at American HBCU Morehouse School of Medicine, and also the CEO of the Walter Rodney Foundation, shared how the book came to formation. She shared the process of writing for Rodney as never being a solitary exercise, as he often engaged with family, friends and colleagues in various ways, carrying a pen and paper with him at all times for note taking.
Noting its intent of being an academic textbook, it has also become a fascinating read to be “consumed by and be relatable to a much wider audience”, providing a new conceptual framework to study the underdevelopment processes of Africa. His widow shared how “he also took the classroom out of the formal lecture halls into other spaces to include the political platforms, bottom houses, holding classes in a gully, a yard or our home”. She shared his belief that “history was a way of reordering knowledge, by becoming an active part of the consciousness of a mass of ordinary people and which could be used by all as an instrument of social change”. She shared the book challenged assumptions of Africa made by western colonials, so-called experts, and Africanists and could be described as “a political project that was important to show the struggles by Africa for self-emancipation, from mental colonialism of post-colonial generations”.
One other intellectual to have crossed paths with Rodney, was Bajan poet, Kamau Brathwaithe, who died in June 2020. Both men while different in many ways, shared the love for teaching and opening up minds through their writings and prose. Professor Rupert Lewis, Distinguished Fellow of PJ Patterson Institute for African-Caribbean Advocacy, at The UWI linked Rodney’s influence on the Bajan poet, who described Rodney’s concept of freedom which “has the realization of environmental potential and as the deep set of the heartbeat of the book”, going on to describe “How Europe underdeveloped Africa” as “having to teach, taught as verbal bomb and bullet designed to refute and make the way clear for rightful building. The idea of rightful building is of strong ethical impulse drawing of the Rastafarian language of ‘uptfulness’.”
Dr. Gosnell Yorke, Executive Chair and President of the Pan African Development Forum, who hails from St.Kitts and Nevis, and also made known during the lecture, that he too followed in similar footsteps as Rodney, having studied African history, made his way through the motherland of Africa, Dr. Yorke shared he too had settled in Zambia, as a Senior Lecturer, The Copperbelt University. He says this was proof, that those in the diaspora should never underestimate their ability to make a meaningful “impact on the continent, in terms of conscientizing their brothers and sisters in Africa”.
As a radical change agent, Dr. Yorke shared that “it was no secret that Rodney at the University of Dar es Salaam was not always on even keel with his colleagues, who often thought themselves better than Rodney to lead the way despite not being in tune with the African ways, culture, realities and challenges to be involved in such a process”. To that Dr. Yorke said Rodney was not one afraid of conflict, if it meant it was bringing meaningful change. He added that the entire Pan-African movement originated not from within the continent but externally among the diaspora outside, such as George Padmore who supported the movement.
In this breath, Dr. Yorke says scholars from the diaspora should be seen as a homecoming, when people of the diaspora return to the continent to share their intellect and add to the conversation of Pan-Africanism, and should not be minimized or diminished.
On Saturday October 22, the British Film Institute will showcase the Arlen Harris directed documentary of “Walter Rodney: ‘What They Don’t Want you to Know’ + Q&A”.Harris shared that Rodney disputed and showed proof of the development the continent had prior to the Europeans arrival in Africa. Apart from that, Harris says in his research for the film, showed that Rodney came under security surveillance when him and other students were invited to Russia in 1961 and later to Havana, Cuba. His arrival in Jamaica’s Mona campus prompted security monitoring, where he would be later dispelled from the country. The film delves into the significance of these happenings in his life. In the case of Jamaica, Harris says, the film notes “how a newly independent government was still embedded in cold war politics” who viewed Rodney as someone to be feared because of what he was teaching and the people he was talking to, leading to him being falsely accused of attempting to overthrow the government and banned. The film sits down with this brothers Donald and Edward, along with his widow, to discuss what he was doing to unify the indo and afro communities in Guyana, and the impacts it was having on the then regime, which led to his untimely death, but how this went on to impact the shape of the country.
Other works by Rodney include ‘A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905’, which showed that working people African and Indian decent in Guyana had a history of active struggle, something Professor Shepherd has remarked as traditional history having omitted.
Walter Anthony Rodney was a Guyanese born. On June 13, 1980, Rodney was assassinated in Georgetown, Guyana at the young age of 38, by a bomb explosion in his car, just one month after his return from celebrations of independence in Zimbabwe at a time of intense political activism. It is believed he was allegedly assassinated by the then Burnham led administration, as Rodney’s thinking that the various ethnic groups historically disenfranchised by the ruling colonial class should work together, something which was said to have threatened Burnham’s hold on power.