Dr Walter Rodney. Photo credit: Roape.net

By Omoniyi Ibietan

Walter Rodney would have been 82 on Saturday 23 March 2024 if his life was not cut short in an assassination on June 13, 1980, by dark forces of African and Black’s underdevelopment who saw him as one of their fiercest critics. He was 38.

Rodney studied history and made a first class honours at the University College of West Indies in Jamaica, and obtained a Ph.D. at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He started teaching at the University of Dar-es-Salaam after his doctoral studies in 1966.

The SOAS Centenary Timeline had noted, “Rodney’s thesis was published by Oxford University Press as A history of the Upper Guinea coast 1545-1800. During his graduate years Rodney was a member of the weekly SOAS African History Seminar, the first such seminar in the world, and was a contemporary and companion of a remarkable international cohort of young historians who were to establish African historical studies in a large number of significant centres.”

A revolutionary scholar, at age 30 in 1972, he published, HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA, a classic and consequential offering that brought fresh insightful constituents of underdevelopment, having re-storied a novel, perceptive Marxian perspective of slavery and colonial correlates of African underdevelopment.

While many Africans have continued to underdevelop Africa, Rodney’s book, an unprecedented illuminator of the social fabric, opened a new vista in the study of development of Africa and the Caribbean.

Born March 23, 1942 in Georgetown, Guyana, Rodney was a great representation of the intellectual, deservedly enlisted in the pantheon of our ancestors that deployed uncommon intellection and organisational ability to enable a deeper understanding of the relationship between slavery and colonialism in the saddening story of Africa and Black’s existence in backward conditions.

At a memorialisation forum convened by radical scholars and students in Oduduwa Hall, University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) on Friday, 27 June 1980, Prof. Wole Soyinka remarked:

“Walter Rodney was no captive intellectual playing to the gallery of local or international radicalism. He was clearly one of the most solidly ideologically situated intellectuals ever to look colonialism and its contemporary heir black opportunism and exploitation in the eye.”

Soyinka’s characterisation calls for fresh reflection in the wake of continued pitiable condition of the African person. So, while we continue to remember Rodney for his avant-garde life and works, may African and Black elites be enabled to take lessons gleaned from Rodney’s treatise to organise afresh to remake Africa and its diasporan communities.

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