Remembering Walter Rodney 46 Year On
On 13 June 1980, a 38-year-old prominent Marxist scholar, activist and author, Walter Rodney, was killed by a state-planted bomb in Georgetown, Guyana. His landmark 1972 political economy book fundamentally re-evaluated the relationship between European colonialism and the deliberate economic suppression of the African continent, and his death was widely regarded as a devastating blow to the international struggle for working-class liberation and Pan-Africanism. He taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania during the late 1960s and early 1970s, deeply influencing African national liberation movements and post-colonial socialist development ideas.
Walter Anthony Rodney was a prominent Guyanese historian, political activist and preeminent academic who became a globally recognised voice for Pan-Africanism, Marxist theory and the working class. Born in Georgetown, British Guiana, on 23 March 1942. He won a scholarship to the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Jamaica and completed his Doctoral Degree in African History at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London by age 24. While teaching at UWI Jamaica in 1968, his radical advocacy for the working poor and Rastafarian communities led the Jamaican government to ban him from re-entering the country.
This triggered massive civil unrest known as the “Rodney Riots”, which sparked a wave of political consciousness across the Caribbean. The 1968 Rodney
