African Revolutionary
Writers, Part 10c
Walter Rodney
Walter Rodney was a revolutionary intellectual, born in Guyana, who
is also eternally associated with the Dar-es-Salaam University school of
African Revolutionary Writers, of which we have already featured two others in
this series, namely Issa Shivji and Mahmood Mamdani.
Rodney was assassinated in
his birthplace of Georgetown, on 13 June 1980, while running for office in
Guyanese elections.
There is another biography of
Walter Rodney here.
The downloadable text linked
below is a 4-page extract from the 44-page Chapter Six of Walter Rodney’s “How
Europe Underdeveloped Africa”. The
entire book can be downloaded in PDF format by clicking here
(1069 KB).
More writings of Walter
Rodney are available in the MIA Walter Rodney Archive. In
particular, the following five articles are recommended:
·
The
African Revolution, 1972
·
Marxism
and African Liberation, 1975
·
Class
Contradictions in Tanzania, 1975
“How Europe Underdeveloped
Africa” made a huge impact when it was first published. It still continues to
have legendary status among the African Revolutionary writings, and rightly so.
Rodney marshals the facts and
the literature and he makes the arguments. He takes on Imperialist theories of
“underdevelopment” head-on, and he overturns them.
Bourgeois theorists and
academics, to the surprise of the naïve among us, proceeded to ignore Rodney after
his death, and to revert to even more reactionary theories than before in their
universities. Hence the importance of maintaining the currency of this
literature, and keeping the dialogue around it fresh, in a virtual University,
or Republic of Letters.
The late Walter Rodney was himself
a scholar of the literature that we have attempted to revisit, and sample, in
this CU African Revolutionary Writers Series. This is apparent from the essays
that are in the Walter Rodney Archive, linked above. Rodney is a very good
example for us. Rodney gives his reflections on the historic place of many of
our chosen African Revolutionary Writers, including Kwame Nkrumah and Julius
Nyerere, as you will see if you read these essays.
Not only did he have his own
ideas, but he also knew where they fitted in relation to past writers, and to
contemporary writers. As an example of this, the essay “International Class
Struggle in Africa, the Caribbean and America” is given, prepared like all the
other files for printing as a booklet, in this case 20 pages.
This essay was written in
preparation for a 6th Pan African Congress, in the tradition of the
ones organised by the likes of W E B du Bois and George Padmore. The 6th
Pan African Congress was supposed to take place in Tanzania. Whether it did, or
not, the CU does not know. The essay is full of class analysis, and comparisons
are drawn between African struggles and struggles in other places and times.
Among other things, Walter Rodney wrote, 40 years ago, and 17 years after 1958:
“The African
radicals of 1958 are by and large the incumbents in office today. The radicals
of today lead at best an uncomfortable existence within African states, while
some languish in prison or in exile. The present petty bourgeois regimes would
look with disfavour at any organized programme which purported to be
Pan‐African without their sanction and participation.”
There is a great deal in this
essay about the petty-bourgeois nature of the new independent regimes. Rodney
writes that “the petty bourgeoisie during this early stage of the independence
struggle constituted a stratum or fraction within the international
bourgeoisie”.
The works of Walter Rodney
can serve well to conclude our series, as a critical summing up by an eminent
scholar as well as by a leader and revolutionary martyr.
Viva, Walter Rodney, Viva!
Viva all the African
Revolutionary Writers, Viva!
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-texts: Walter
Rodney, Colonialism, System for Underdeveloping Africa, C6, 1973 and International
Class Struggle in Africa, the Caribbean and America, 1975.
