Walter Rodney

Walter Anthony Rodney was born in Georgetown, British Guiana, on the twenty-third of March 1942, the son of a tailor and a homemaker. A government scholarship carried him to the elite Queen's College, and an open scholarship to the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica, where in 1963 he earned a first-class honours degree in history. At only twenty-four he completed a doctorate in African history at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, his thesis becoming A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800.

From 1966 he taught in Africa and the Caribbean, above all at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, where he stood among the liberation movements and refined a Pan-African, socialist reading of history. In 1968 Jamaica banned him for his organising among the poor, an act that ignited the Rodney riots. In 1972 he published How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, a searching account of how the slave trade and colonialism enriched Europe while impoverishing a continent.

Returning to Guyana in 1974, Rodney was barred by the government from his promised professorship at the University of Guyana. He turned to organising, becoming a leading voice of the Working People's Alliance, which sought to replace ethnic division with class solidarity and to challenge the rule of Forbes Burnham.

On the thirteenth of June 1980, at thirty-eight, Walter Rodney was killed in Georgetown by a bomb concealed in a radio device; a later commission of inquiry found the state complicit in his assassination. Scholar, teacher, and fearless voice of the oppressed, he taught the world its own history and never bent his conscience to power. May his name endure among the honored.