50 Years Ago – Walter Rodney remembered

Oscar Allen died on July 28, 2017, and this piece is in his honour. Over the past years Oscar had been reminding me of our pledge to do articles around June 13 in memory of Walter Rodney for whom we had the highest regard. This year I am doing it at the anniversary of Oscar’s death.

50 years ago, Caribbean people became aware of the name, Walter Rodney. Rodney, for about a year, had been lecturing in African history at UWI, Jamaica. He attended a Black Writers Congress in Montreal and was prevented from landing in Jamaica when his plane touched down on October 15. Once the word got around, the UWI Students Guild, then headed by Ralph Gonsalves, organised to take a petition to the offices of the Minister of Home Affairs and Prime Minister Hugh Shearer. They walked and were joined by hundreds of secondary school students, urban youths, Rastafarians and concerned Jamaicans. Things got out of hand with the stoning of buses, damage to buildings and deaths of a few persons.  The police left no stone unturned in dealing with the unrest.

Now, who was Walter Rodney? He was an exceptionally bright and talented Guyanese who entered UWI as a student in 1960. In 1963, he graduated with first class honours and had made his mark as a top-class debater, representing the University overseas on different occasions. After graduation he was accepted at the School of Oriental and African Studies to do a doctorate, which he completed in 1966 and then accepted a position as a lecturer at University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, with the intention of going later to Jamaica, which he did in 1967.

Before I look more closely at Rodney, it is necessary to describe the situation in 1968 that contributed to his being banned. The period was one that marked the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and protests against the Vietnam War. Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy were assassinated in that year, King in April, and Kennedy in June. These were beginning to have an impact on Caribbean societies. Jamaica was particularly worrisome. It was an era marked by economic and social inequality and trade union and political rivalry leading to the emergence of garrison constituencies. The Rastafarian movement was on the move, inspired too by the arrival in Jamaica in April 1966 of the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie.

Rodney began lecturing in African history at Mona in 1967 and immediately attracted  attention. Students who were not even doing history attended his lectures. He was somewhat different from the average university lecturer. He refused to live on campus, being critical of whom he called the “rum-sipping and soul-selling intellectuals” that frequented the bar at the Senior Common Room. He began having lectures and what he called ‘Groundings’, with Rastafarians and grassroots groups in different parts of the country. Despite the reputation he had begun to build as an academic he was a humble individual and was widely accepted by these groups.

The connections he was building alarmed the Jamaican government and prompted their decision to ban him from Jamaica. Students at the other UWI campuses and the University of Guyana and young people throughout the region were alarmed by the banning and were even beginning to question CARIFTA that had become a reality in May 1968. In SVG, the EFP, Yulimo, and other black power groups, along with others in the region, were formed. The Sir George Williams affair in Montreal erupted in 1968. A new era that embraced Black Power, political activism and hope had begun, despite the actions of repressive governments that banned books, people and feared new ideas. This lasted until the collapse of the Grenadian revolution in 1983, three years after Rodney’s assassination. (To be continued)  

Dr Adrian Fraser is a social commentator and historian