Quotations excerpted from Walter Rodney’s public speeches to the peo-
ple of Guyana, 1977-1980; text in italics by Lewanne Roopnavaint-Jones,
member of the New York Working People’s Alliance Support Committee.
Assassination is the act of any
one man-any one man can as-
sassinate a leader. But only the
people can make a revolution. And
the day has come-when the real
revolution will begin-the revolu-
tion in the economy, the revolution
in the society, the revolution to
bring us back to a level where we
can hold our heads up high. And it
is on that day that we need the
participation of the people.
… There are many people who
believe that a revolution is about.
blood. It is true that at times in a
revolution blood flows. Very often
innocent blood, very often the
blood of the best amongst us. But
one must be prepared to take a
stand against evil and injustice in
the society. We will have to realize
that the time is now to make pre-
cisely that stand.
In brutal retaliation for his
courageous stand against the
violent and oppressive Guy-
anese state, Walter Rodney
was assassinated. The interna-
tionally renowned Marxist
historian and Pan-Africanist was
killed instantly when a powerful
bomb exploded in his car on
June 13, 1980. A key figure in
Guyanese politics for the last
decade, Rodney had been in-
strumental in forging links with
liberation struggles in Africa,
40
Latin America and elsewhere in
the Caribbean.
Although born and raised in the
former colony British Guiana,
Rodney is far better known on
the continent from which his
forbears came and where he
lived and worked for some
years-Africa. He taught in
Tanzania and Jamaica before
returning to Guyana in 1974.
How Europe Underdeveloped
Africa, Rodney’s best known
work, is an important contribu-
tion to African history and to
concepts of “development” in
the Third World. Only three
weeks before his tragic death,
Rodney was commissioned by
the newly inaugurated Prime
Minister of Zimbabwe, Robert
Mugabe, to write the official
history of that country.
By nature an energetic activist,
Rodney was always concerned
with the particular social and
political situation wherever he
was. While devoting enormous
amounts of time and energy to
radical forms of teaching
among the people, he managed
to continue his own extensive
research and publication.
In my own career I have had
tremendous good fortune to be ex-
posed to people’s struggles in the
rest of the Caribbean, particularly
in Jamaica, to see Black people
struggle in Britain against racism,
to participate … in the struggles
of Black people in the United
States, in knowing what it is like to
combat imperialism and racism in
Southern Africa… I think I have
benefitted enormously from those
experiences, and in some way or
other, I have to try to integrate that
experience with what is happening
in Guyana. It doesn’t do the Guy-
anese people any good if that’s
simply locked away as an element
of my own personal develop-
ment …
When Rodney returned to
Guyana in 1974 to assume the
chairmanship of the Depart-
ment of History at the Universi-
ty, he was denied that position
and, effectively, any employ-
ment in his own country by the
Burnham regime. In the follow-
ing six years, most of Rodney’s
“students” were working class
men and women of all ages; the
vast majority of these “stu-
dents” labored in the bauxite
mines and cane fields which
dominate Guyana’s economic
life. Rodney’s special talent lay
in relating their everyday hard-
ships to their particular oppres-
sion under the Burnham regime
and in affirming their collective
responsibility and ability to ef-
fect the necessary changes.
Most Guyanese live on the
coastlands. These coastlands
were once desolate swamps flood-
ed by the sea and the savannah
waters. The dams and the canals,
the roads and the houses, the
fields and the factories, the
schools and the churches, the
words and the gestures-all of
these represent our common
heritage. Our foreparents planted
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their strength, their seed, and their
intelligence in a country which is
now ours. Neither the land nor the
rights of the people are gifts of the
Burnham dictatorship. On the con-
trary, that dictatorship has placed
the nation in reverse gear. It is
destroying the economy and it is
stealing the rights of the
people. …
Few individuals want willingly to
invite their own death. Yet many
will be found who are prepared to
fight fearlessly for their rights even
if their lives are threatened. The
human spirit has a remarkable
capacity to rise above oppression;
and only the fools who now mis-
rule Guyana can imagine that our
population alone lacks such
capacity. During the famous 1763
slave rebellion in Berbice, there
were numerous examples of the
undying courage of our fore-
parents. The Dutch slave masters
captured Accabre, one of the
leaders of the rebellion, and he
simply laughed scornfully when
they tormented him. Soon after,
Accabre and eight other freedom
fighters were put to death by
roasting over a slow fire. Even
their enemies were impressed by
the fact that Accabre’s men were
firm to the end and did not flinch.
The wide-ranging spectrum of
Rodney’s work demonstrates
his keen understanding of the
role of Marxist intellectuals in
the Third World. In addition to
his scholarship and teaching,
Rodney recognized the abso-
lute necessity of participating in
an organization in and through
which the people’s liberation
would be realized. As a foun-
ding member of the Working
People’s Alliance, and part of its
collective leadership, he strove
with fellow members to forge
JulylAugust 1980
new theories and practices of
class struggle and political
organization in the Third World.
We’re trying to do what has
never been done before, to try to
define our specific type of society,
the peripheral, as it is now called
by the capitalist society, and to
give it specificity. Africa was
peripheral and so was Latin Amer-
ica and Asia; but we each have
our own uniqueness. That uni-
queness really doesn’t matter at a
certain level, as we have common
responses to various problems;
but it certainly does matter in the
realm of politics….
In his public speaking for the
Working People’s Alliance, he
clarified the problem of race
and clas that has plagued the
country the last quarter century
and more.
Who benefits from the division
of the working class? I was struck
on one occasion reading an old
book on the history of Guyana by a
planter way back in slavery times,
corresponding with friends in
England. And they asked him,
“How come you manage to con-
trol so many slaves when you are
just a handful, even though you
may have the guns? If they were to
rush you all at one time they would
overwhelm you.” But the planter
was quite confident in his
response. “Not to bother,” he
wrote, “the trick is that we keep
them divided.” You see, exploita-
tion is always carried out by the
few over the many. …. And the on-
ly way that the few can maintain
themselves over the many is, the
many must be divided….
If the working class is to realize
that power which comes from the
fact that they are the ones who
produce, whether it be in the fields
or in the factories, on the docks or
on the buses, they will obviously
have to strengthen the basis of
their own organization. Classes
take power to the extent that they
are organized to do so. You don’t
just walk off the street and take
political power or take power over
your daily life. You have to
organize.
The Guyanese people have
been struggling for their own
liberation since the days of
slavery and indenture, and, in
this most recent period of neo-
colonial repression, Walter
Rodney was their most artic-
ulate spokesman. The brutal
and desperate act which took
his life at the height of his
political intervention is not only
the extremist measure of a
regime which knows its days
are numbered; it is also part of a
strategy of collaboration with
imperialism in the Caribbean
and in Central America, a
strategy which has determined
that there will be no more
Cubas, Nicaraguas, or Gren-
adas.
Nobody gives somebody else
freedom. Freedom is something
for which you fight, and then you
win. If someone gives it to you as a
gift, it is not really freedom.
Because once it is given, it can be
taken away. And those who mani-
pulate us into a position of thinking
that they gave us freedom are
precisely the ones who have en-
sured that that freedom has been kept
from the hands of the majority of
the people.
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