Walter Rodney

Works

• 1969The Groundings with My Brothers

  Talks Rodney gave in 1968 to Rastafarians and the urban poor of Kingston, published after he was barred from Jamaica: on Black Power, African history and the intellectual’s duty to learn with the people.

• 1972How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

  History of Africa from the fifteenth century to independence, written in Dar es Salaam for students and a wide public: development and underdevelopment are two sides of one process – the Atlantic slave trade and colonial rule drained Africa’s labour and surplus to Europe and blocked its own development.

Position

Rodney is on the map as the author of the most influential history of Africa written from the standpoint of underdevelopment, and as a Pan-African socialist thinker. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) argued against the view that Africa’s poverty was an original state that colonialism had begun to remedy. Before the fifteenth century, African societies were developing at their own pace; from then on, the Atlantic slave trade drained their labour, encouraged war and turned economies outward, and colonial rule from the late nineteenth century extracted raw materials and surplus, built transport only for export and gave little education – so that development in Europe and underdevelopment in Africa were two sides of one process of capitalist expansion. The book combined historical materialism with the dependency theories of its time and was written for students and a wide public in Africa and the Caribbean. In “Tanzanian Ujamaa and Scientific Socialism” (1972) he read Nyerere’s Ujamaa sympathetically as a path towards socialism, while arguing that it needed the class analysis of scientific socialism. In Jamaica and Guyana he joined scholarship and political work: in The Groundings with My Brothers (1969) he described the task of the intellectual as learning with the people – “grounding” – rather than speaking for them. The book has been reprinted many times; the Verso edition of 2018 carries a foreword by Angela Davis.

Life & context

Walter Rodney was born on 23 March 1942 in Georgetown in British Guiana, the son of a tailor and a seamstress active in the People’s Progressive Party. He studied history at the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica and took his doctorate at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in 1966 with a thesis on the Upper Guinea coast, published in 1970. He taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania (1966–67) and then at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, where his talks with Rastafarians and the urban poor led the government to bar him from re-entering the country in October 1968, which set off riots in Kingston. He returned to Dar es Salaam (1969–74) and there wrote How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Back in Guyana in 1974 he was denied the professorship he had been offered and became a leader of the Working People’s Alliance against the government of Forbes Burnham. He was killed by a bomb in Georgetown on 13 June 1980; a commission of inquiry concluded in 2016 that the state had been involved in his killing.

Further main works

• A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800 (1970)
• Tanzanian Ujamaa and Scientific Socialism (African Review, 1972)
• A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905 (1981)