A Revolutionary for Our Time

The Walter Rodney Story

Leo Zeilig

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2022
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781642596786
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Walter Rodney was a scholar, working class militant, and revolutionary from Guyana. Strongly influenced by Marxist ideas, he remains central to radical Pan-Africanist thought for large numbers of activists’ today. Rodney lived through the failed –though immensely hopeful -socialist experiments in the 1960s and 1970s, in Tanzania and elsewhere.

The book critically considers Rodney's contribution to Marxist theory and history, his relationship to dependency theory and the contemporary significance of his work in the context of movements and politics today. The first full-length study of Rodney’s life, this book is an essential introduction to Rodney's work.

CHAPTER 1

Beginnings

Born on March 23, 1942, to a working-class family in Georgetown, Guyana, Walter Anthony Rodney was the second of six children. Walter’s father, Edward Percival, was a tailor who worked largely for himself.¹ However, when work was scarce, Edward would accept lower-paying work for a weekly wage at a small outlet in Georgetown. Walter’s mother, Pauline, worked from home as a seamstress.

In the 1940s, Guyanese society was divided between “Indian” and “African,” and Black and white. As Walter would later recall, “One interrelated with Indian families and with Indians at school,” but there was little day-to-day contact with other groups. It was commonplace, among his African peers and neighbors, to accord an idealized status to those in the Indian community: “You see those Indian students. They go to school and they go back home, and they help their parents. So, you must help your parents…. He’s studying hard. So, one must study.”² Though this division was not always strict or hostile, it would later become so. These racial fault lines had deep roots in Guyana’s colonial past—a long history for which we must account before we can begin to understand the trajectory of Rodney’s life and political development.

Politics and Economics in Rodney’s Guyana

Since its very germination, Guyana had been structured to the demands of capitalism. Its primary exports were unprocessed raw materials ranging from sugar and rice to gold and bauxite. Sprawling sugar plantations— an instrument that would become a key area of study for Rodney—had long been a feature of Guyana’s export-oriented economy. In contrast, bauxite—a rock with a high aluminum content—has been mined (and exported) for a little more than a hundred years in the country.

Established as a slave economy in the seventeenth century by the Dutch, the country saw successive occupations, including on the part of the French and eventually the British. There were numerous slave rebellions in the nineteenth century, the most famous of which took place in 1823, when the colony was known by its British name, Demerara-Essequibo (later to be renamed British Guiana). Though it was eventually crushed, the rebellion saw thousands of slaves throw off their chains. It also made an indelible mark on the history of the territory by forcing an acceleration in the pace of abolition. When this was finally and formally accomplished fifteen years later, in 1838, thousands of former slaves left their plantations, giving rise to an Afro-Guyanese peasant class. The appearance of this new working class served to undermine the planters’ political power and the colony’s economic activity—which remained, principally, the export of sugar from large plantations.

Following the abolition of slavery, labor shortages forced the British authorities to source workers from other colonial possessions; eventually, this led them to bring thousands of indentured workers to Guyana from India. Known as “East Indians”—many coming from eastern Uttar Pradesh, and a minority from the Tamil- and Telugu-speaking regions in southern India—these laborers were transported to the Caribbean to work, ostensibly, for a finite number of years, where they were tied to planters. After their period of “service,” they were formally permitted to return to India with money saved from their work in the sugar fields. This was, however, a rare occurrence. Poverty and famine in British-occupied India drove the continuing trade in indentured labor—a form of unfree labor that bore many similarities to the recently abolished slavery. Indeed, unfree labor was a central pillar of the sugar plantations’ profitability.

The Caribbean activist and economist Clive Thomas—a close friend of Rodney—describes the fundamental role of the Caribbean in the new global economy: “I don’t think that we can easily forget that … the Caribbean was the cradle of capitalism. We … forged … through the plantation, and through slavery, through all of those experiences, the prototypical institutions.”³ In their nascency, these relations and means of production were, Thomas argues, “cutting edge” transformations. Brutal and terrible though the plantation system was, it represented the birth of a new system—built from the blood and bones of an entire people.

Due to the shifting political economy of late-nineteenth-century British Guiana, sugar production gradually became less profitable—even though sugar exports continued to dominate production and exports until the 1880s. Plummeting cane sugar prices subsequently fueled a move to timber production, the cultivation of rice, and the mining of precious metals and gems. However, despite the best efforts of the scions of British Guiana’s founding capitalist class, the exploitation of gold and diamond deposits in the colony remained a minor revenue stream.

The political and economic landscape was dominated for generations by the London-based Booker Group of companies. By the late nineteenth century, its owners controlled most of the cane sugar plantations in the colony; by 1950, they held all but three. Leading the expansion and diversification of the economy in the twentieth century, the Booker Group increasingly invested in rum, medicines, printing, marketing, and timber. Indeed, their monopolies and profits were so secure under the British colony that the country became known by the nickname “Booker’s Guyana.” In sum, the company emblematized the modern-day efforts of an entrenched capitalist class to promote and profit from indentured labor.

However, it was bauxite that became a larger and more important export in the twentieth century—part of the country’s primary product diversification. The need for bauxite, the raw material for producing aluminum, meant the country was the object of near-obsessive interest of northern countries, which increasingly depended on the metal for their development. During the US and European economic boom following the Second World War, the metal was used in armaments, airplane construction, and a host of other industries, such as cans, foils, kitchen utensils, window frames, and beer barrels. Among Guyana’s bauxite customers, the United States was the most powerful of all, producing almost half of the world’s aluminum.⁴

US engagement escalated considerably during this era, and it would remain a powerful influence throughout the twentieth century. Now the foremost and undisputed power in the Americas, the United States adopted an aggressive approach toward Guyana and its rich supply of bauxite. Without doubt, the postwar stance of the US State Department was inflected by a fear of communist influence; however, there were also other, more pressing economic motivations. Uruguayan historian Eduardo Galeano, in his 1972 classic, Open Veins of Latin America, emphasized the political impact of US intervention and the country’s dependence on Guyana’s bauxite:

Minerals had much to do with the fall of Cheddi Jagan’s socialist government, which at the end of 1964 had again won a majority of votes in what was then British Guiana…. The CIA played a decisive role in Jagan’s defeat. Arnold Zander, leader of the strike that served as a provocation and pretext to deny electoral victory to Jagan, afterward admitted publicly that his union had dollars rained upon it…. The new regime—very Western and very Christian—guaranteed the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) against any danger to its interests in Guyana: it could continue tranquilly removing the bauxite and selling it to itself at the same price as in 1938, although the price of aluminum had since soared…. The danger was indeed past.⁵

US involvement in the extraction and export of bauxite in Guyana dates to the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1913, only a few years after the ore’s discovery on the banks of the Demerara River, Alcoa president Arthur Vining Davis turned his attention the Guyanese reserves. Given the scarcity of bauxite in the United States, Alcoa was determined to capture as much of the ore as possible. Initially duping the British into thinking it was purchasing land for citrus plantations, by 1916 Alcoa had obtained access to the majority of the rich deposits along the Demerara.

The same forces that had propelled Guyana and its Caribbean neighbors into the maelstrom of global capitalism in the seventeenth century, with the birth of the plantation system and slavery, now exposed the region once more to the iron laws of economic and imperial control—tying it to the production of raw materials for export. Ultimately, Walter Rodney would come to understand these historical shackles as the primary challenge facing the Guyanese people and would dedicate his life to confronting them.

A Georgetown Childhood

Walter’s father, Edward, had traveled for work in the 1930s to Curaçao—a Dutch-held Caribbean island, off the coast of Venezuela—before joining the nationalist movement in Guyana led by union activist Cheddi Jagan. When Walter was eleven years old, his father encouraged him to participate in the 1953 election campaign, leafleting and canvassing for the People’s Progressive Party (PPP). In fact, following the PPP’s victory in 1953, Walter Rodney would be among the first batch of bright children from working-class homes to be selected for a new scholarship program initiated by the party.

Rodney’s schoolmate Rupert Roopnaraine, who would later become a Guyanese politician, recalls, “You could not be at Queen’s [College] at the time and not know of his skills at debating, his activities on the sports field, and his academics.”⁶ The Georgetown secondary school was, at the time, exceptionally hierarchical, informally divided between the “carthorses” and the “thoroughbreds,” terms used by students. Walter was one of the school’s talents.

Founded in January 1950, the PPP was a merger of the British Guiana Labour Party, led by Forbes Burnham, and the Political Affairs Committee, led by Jagan. From its beginnings, the party was a remarkable formation, the first mass organization in the country, with an impressive multiethnic base and the support of workers and intellectuals. After the election in 1953, Jagan became chief minister. However, his reforms, regarded by some as too radical, provoked the fury of the British, who worried about the possibility that a revolution might be provoked.

Walter’s parents would sometimes host branch meetings at their home, and the party’s activists were often coming and going. His father gave his son political tasks to carry out: “I was given the sort of humdrum task to distribute party manifestos,” he recalls, “which one doesn’t necessarily understand, but you come up against certain things.” Thus, at the age of eleven, Walter was already learning about popular politics, canvasing, leaflet distribution, and class: “[Without] knowing anything about class, I knew that there were certain kinds of Guyanese into whose yard we did not … carry a PPP manifesto. You could tell from the kind of house or the shade or complexion of the lady reclining, sipping her tea, or whatever she may be doing.”⁷ This instinctual class feeling meant that he quickly understood the city—that is, he read its dynamics of wealth and politics. As such, he avoided houses with long drives but knocked confidently on those doors where you could “go right up” to the people.

In this way, as a young boy, the struggle made sense to Walter. He felt it—as children can—in his gut. There was not a gender divide in political activity inside his home. “My mother,” he records, “would walk far distances from our house to go to political meetings, perhaps carrying a little bench in hand so that ultimately she could sit down, since these meetings lasted for hours.”⁸

Walter not only studied; he excelled also at sport. It was not enough to be academically excellent; one had to be whole, or complete, and that meant shining in a range of activities. He loved cricket and knew all about it; he could talk about its history and field and bowl impressively. He was also an athlete at school, a high jumper. As Roopnaraine remembers,

In those days, we didn’t see any great conflict in excelling academically and excelling at sports or going to parties. We lived quite fully … Walter led an extremely full life at school. He was an absolutely outstanding academic. He was a debater of rare quality. He was a sport person. He partied with the best of them. He was quite a dancer.⁹

Rodney, however, was critical of the place and its teachings. “There was training in what was called debating, which was to talk about nothing provided you said nothing as cleverly as possible and as entertaining as possible. Then you got full marks. If you said anything too substantial, your marks would come down.”¹⁰ Saying clever things as long as they meant nothing, a skill that was handed down to the secondary schools across British colonies. This form of public discussion—one that contemporaries of Rodney often celebrate—was in fact one of a number of devices used to herd and control political discussion. Master of the form though he may have been, Rodney was nonetheless scathing about its purposes.

The desire for “completeness” of which Walter speaks—a refusal to be compartmentalized—lent itself to the development of a radical politics. All facets of life, he came to understand, were connected, and all skills were relevant to living in the world. Rodney seems to have excelled in all subjects, including science, literature, and languages. He took two languages at “O” level—French and Spanish—and continued with Spanish to “A” level: a language proficiency which would equip him for the archival work he would later pursue in Europe, as well as during public meetings of liberation movements in Dar es Salaam—for which he would sometimes provide Spanish translation.¹¹

Joining the school as a teacher in October 1955, Robert “Bobby” Moore encountered Walter:

His peers enjoyed his self-confidence, which did not come with arrogance. They bonded with his sense of humour. They were impressed by how much reading he had done and how much of it he could quote from memory. On top of all that, his teachers were clearly taken with his writing: lucid, concise, questioning, and flavoured with the Rodney wit.¹²

Walter’s passion for history was stirred by Moore in 1956, when he was thirteen years old. At the time, the course syllabus focused almost entirely on the British Empire, starting with the sixteenth century and ending in the late 1940s. However, faculty and students had already caught on to the fact that changes to the history curriculum were taking place at the University in Kingston. Queen’s, they insisted, had to catch up. Moore explains,

In 1957, there was no history textbook of the West Indies suitable for those lively teenagers of the Upper Fourth forms. A very scholarly History of the West Indies did come out that year, but its style was much too magisterial to ignite the interests of students in their mid-teens…. After much reflection, I realized that the notes I made at Dr. Elsa Goveia’s lectures of 1953–54 at [University of the West Indies] would be the best temporary substitute for a textbook…. She was a convinced West Indian, eager to witness the creation of a West Indian political entity.¹³

Such radical improvisation captured the imagination of the students, and Walter, the keenest of all, suggested that Moore allow the students to type up his notes to create a text resource that could be distributed to every student. By this route, West African history found its way into the body and soul of Queen’s curriculum. As we will see, Rodney spent much of his working—and political—life involved in such initiatives (curriculum development, as it is called today) in Jamaica and Tanzania. History was the essential tool in raising political consciousness.

Walter grew up in an environment where slavery—the real history of the West Indies—was gradually, and hesitantly, becoming an urgent and legitimate scholarly topic. Other global issues were also beginning to influence students. After South Africa’s formal introduction of apartheid, Moore’s ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Beginnings
• 2. Socialist Africa or African Socialism?
• 3. On an Oil Drum
• 4. African History and Black Power
• 5. Revolution and History
• 6. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
• 7. A Book to Change the World
• 8. Class, Race, and Politics in Tanzania
• 9. Returning Home
• 10. Building the Party
• 11. From Georgetown to Hamburg
• 12. Those Heroic Months of Revolt
• 13. The Enemies of the State
• 14. Walter Rodney’s Legacy Today
• Selected Bibliography
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover