Walter Rodney
Updated: Sep 27
Dr. David Dabydeen on the Assassination of Walter Rodney:
The greatest sin that we've committed, I'm not talking about slavery, indentureship, which was done to us, was the assassination of the great historian Walter Rodney. Anybody who thinks about history or literature or cultural studies in the context of the Caribbean has to remember Walter Rodney. The Commission of Inquiry in 2014 or 2015 ended its International Commission of Inquiry and stated explicitly that Walter Rodney was assassinated by the PNC, collaboration, the police and the army, under the watchful eye of Forbes Burnham. Now, have our politicians apologized for killing our greatest scholar and historian? Here I am talking about education attainment, and we killed our best. Our worst has killed our best. The PNC, very talented people in the PNC as well, very able and educated politicians who really care for Guyana, many of them.
But I was hoping that the PNC would actually stand up and say, yes, we committed this great crime, not us, but previously, 40 years ago. But we, our party, apologizes for it and will redeem ourselves by pledging never, ever to commit political violence again. Now, you know, even I would put my hand in my pocket and donate some money, right? It could revive not just the PNC, certainly the PNC, but also politics in Guyana.
Some Context:
In October 1968, the Jamaican government banned a Guyanese university lecturer from returning to the island. The decision sparked the most significant mass uprising in Jamaica since the 1938 labor rebellions.
His name was Dr.Walter Rodney, and he had been in Jamaica for less than a year. He was born on March 23rd, 1942, in Georgetown, Guyana. He earned his Ph.D.
in African history at age 24, making him one of the youngest scholars in the Caribbean. His book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, became a foundational text for the black power movement across the Americas.
In 1968, he came to Jamaica to teach at the University of the West Indies at Mona. For nine months, he did something the Jamaican government found dangerous.
He left the campus. He went into downtown Kingston. He worked with the poor. He taught about decolonization and black power. His lectures and writings, published as Groundings with My Brothers, challenged the Caribbean's middle-class elite and the post-independence governments that ignored their poorest citizens.
The government took notice.
After Rodney attended the Black Writers Conference in Montreal, Jamaica's Prime Minister, Hugh Shearer, banned him from re-entering the country. No hearing, no trial, just a ban.
October 16th, 1968, students at the University of the West Indies organized a protest march against Rodney's expulsion. In what became known as the Rodney Rebellion, unemployed youth, workers, and the working poor from downtown Kingston joined the students. It represented the first time since the labor rebellions of 1938 that the African Jamaican masses had returned to the stage of history in this mass and militant way.
The ban sparked widespread student and civil unrest across the UWI Mona campus, its surrounding communities, and Kingston. There were protests throughout the Caribbean, Tanzania, Canada, and London.
The U.S. government, represented by its embassy in Kingston, took a keen interest, viewing it as part of an international black power. Rodney went on to teach in Tanzania, then returned to Guyana to found the Working People's Alliance.
In Guyana, Rodney united Afro‑Guyanese and Indo‑Guyanese communities against authoritarian rule — a rare achievement in a politically divided society.
On June 13th, 1980, he was assassinated in Georgetown by a car bomb. He was 38 years old.
Rodney was targeted because his organizing threatened the authoritarian state and because he was building a broad, multiracial working‑class movement.
Walter Rodney showed that understanding history is a weapon — and that liberation requires both knowledge and collective action. His assassination was not random; it was the silencing of a revolutionary voice that threatened the powerful.
Source: IG jus_Yaad
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