Walter Rodney, born in Guyana on 22nd of march in 1942, Pan-African, Marxist intellectual who was assassinated by the Guyanese government in 1980 at 38 years old.
Rodney attended the University College of the West Indies in 1960 and was awarded a first class honors degree in History in 1963. He later earned a PhD in African History in 1966 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England, at the age of 24.
Rodney traveled extensively and became well-known as an activist, scholar, and formidable orator. He taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania from 1966-67 and 1969-1974, and in 1968 at his alma mater University of the West Indies.
On October 15th, 1968, the government of Jamaica declared Rodney a “persona non grata” and banned him from the country. Following his dismissal by the University of the West Indies, students and poor people in West Kingston protested, leading to the “Rodney Riots”, which caused six deaths and millions of dollars in damages.
In 1972, Rodney published “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”. Historian Melissa Turner describes the work this way: “A brutal critique of long-standing and persistent exploitation of Africa by Western powers, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a powerful, popular, and controversial work in which Rodney argued that the early period of African contact with Europe, including the slave trade, sowed the seeds for continued African economic underdevelopment and had dramatically negative social and political consequences as well. He argued that, while the roots of Africa’s ailments rested with intentional underdevelopment and exploitation under European capitalist and colonial systems, the only way for true liberation to take place was for Africans to become cognizant of their own complicity in this exploitation and to take back the power they gave up to the exploiters.”
On June 13th, 1980, Rodney was killed in Georgetown, Guyana via a bomb given to him by Gregory Smith, a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force, one month after returning Zimbabwe. In 2015, a “Commission of Inquiry” in Guyana that the country’s then president, Linden Forbes Burnham, was complicit in his murder.
“If there is to be any proving of our humanity it must be through revolutionary means.”
Walter Rodney
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Decolonial Marxism Essays From The Pan African Revolution
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I just got banned from /c/[email protected] for being a Hexbear. Modlog reason: “Hexbear user in tankiejerk, waddaya expect?”
Meanwhile, there’s like 20 of y’all in this thread and are left untouched. I guess that makes me the one true leftist, the only one who isn’t a liberal.
Here is the evil authoritarian statement I made that got me banned:
Spoiler
Specifically what this person doesn’t understand and needs to learn about is Hegemony.
Like others have said, they don’t have a materialist understanding of either the world or the politics of who they’re calling “tankies” so they are relying on idealism (vibes) to ironically and mistakenly accuse others of idealism. Basically what they’re saying is “My conclusion based on nothing but vibes is that these other people are wrong because they came to their conclusions based on nothing but vibes.” What this person doesn’t know but that the people they’re disparaging do know, is that the current world order is undeniably dominated by a hegemonic super power: the US. “Tankies” don’t single out the US as the primary evil in the world due to some reverse-psychology American Exceptionalism, but because they recognize the role the US plays as world Hegemon.