At the outset, before anything else is written, we need openly to acknowledge how difficult it has been for us to come to terms with the undeniable fact that Walter Rodney, our brother, friend and comrade, is dead. On June 13, 1980, the author of this unparalleled work of historical analysis became the best-known victim of a systematic campaign of assasination and other forms of ruthless repression carried out by the governing authorities of his native land, Guyana.
The end was predictable, for Walter had determined that the only path to true human development and liberation for the majority of the people of his country was through the transformation of their own lives in a struggle to replace and reshape the neo-colonialist government that dominated their society and prescribed their existence. However, Forbes Burnham, the President of Guyana, had made it clear on many occasions that, in this struggle for the minds and hearts of the people, he knew no limits in the determination to “exterminate the forces of opposition.” In the opinion of many, there is no doubt that the bomb that tore away the life of Walter Rodney was the result of Burnham’s deadly pledge.
Hard as his death is to accept and absorb, we must begin here, not primarily for purposes of sentiment or political invective, but because no new introduction to How Europe Underveloped Africa is possible without a serious and direct encounter with Walter Rodney, the revolutionary scholar, the scholar-revolutionary, the man of great integrity and hope. For, more so than most books of its genre, this work is clearly imbued with the spirit, the intellect and the commitment of its author—both the man who produced the audacious and wide-ranging study before he was thirty, and the man who moved with an unswerving integrity to live out its implications in his relatively brief years.
With Rodney the life and the work were one, and the life drives us back to recall the essential themes of the work. In spite of its title, this is not simply a work about European oppressors and African victims, serving primarily as a weapon to flay the exploiters and beat them at their own intellectual games. (Of course, it has done yeoman service in that limited role.) Rather, there is much more to this masterly survey, and at its deepest levels it offers no easy comfort to any of us.
At one point, early in the book, Rodney summarizes its basic message:
The question as to who, and what, is responsible for African underdevelopment can be answered at two levels. Firstly, the answer is that the operation of the imperialist system bears major responsibility for African economic retardation by draining African wealth and by making it impossible to develop more rapidly the resources of the continent. Secondly, one has to deal with those who manipulated the system and those who are either agents or unwitting accomplices of the said system. The capitalists of Western Europe were the ones who actively extended their exploitation from inside Europe to cover the whole of Africa. In recent times, they were joined, and to some extent replaced, by the capitalists from the United States; and for many years now even the workers of those metropolitan countries have benefited from the exploitaiton and underdevelopment of Africa. (27–28)
All this Walter supported with a profuse and creative set of precise examples from many sources, periods and places. Yet, he was not satisfied to pour well-documented blows upon the oppressors—though he was a master at this activity. Nor did it suffice to remind many of us who live in the United States that our blackness provides no exemption from our willing participation in the benefits of our country’s exploitation of Africa. Rather, his summary of the book’s central themes concluded with words that moved beyond accusation or guilt. He said,
None of these remarks are intended to remove the ultimate responsibility for development from the shoulders of Africans. Not only are there African accomplices inside the imperialist system, but every African has a responsibility to understand the system and work for its overthrow. (28)
Unlike many of us who read and write such words, Walter took them seriously. He knew that they were meant for him, for the children of Africa in the Caribbean and the United States of America; for Indians, Asians and many other sufferers at the hands of European-fueled underdevelopment. Indeed, he knew they were meant, too, for all those Europeans and Americans who claimed solidarity with the Third World struggle for development and liberation.
Rodney envisioned and worked on the assumption that the new development of Africans and other dependent peoples of the “periphery” would require what he called “a radical break with the international capitalist system,” a courageous challenge to the failing “center” of the current world order. Of course, he also knew that any such break or serious contestation would participate in and precipitate profound revolutionary changes at the center itself. Thus, from his perspective, what was ultimately at stake, what was absolutely necessary was a fundamental transformation in the ordering of the political, cultural and economic forces that have dominated the world for almost half a millenium.
This was an awesome vision, especially since Walter dared to say and believe that such a stupendous transformation must be initiated by Africans and other dwellers in the nether regions of exploitation and subordination. Nevertheless, he did not flinch from the implications of his own analysis. Instead, he continued—especially by his example—to encourage all of us to move toward a radically transformed vision of ourselves and of our capacities for changing our lives and our objective conditions. Quietly, insistently, he urged us to claim our full responsibility for engaging in the struggle for a new world order.
No one could ignore Walters work, nor question his call, for he set the example by assuming his own part of the awesome responsibility. That is why he was in Guyana in June 1980. That is why he had been there since 1974, developing the leadership of what was called the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), struggling to support his family, somehow finding time to carry on research and writing on the history of the working people of his country and other parts of the Caribbean. That is why he was murdered.
In the midst of our sorrow and indignation none of us who knew Walter could honestly say that we were surprised by the news of his death. For his life carried a certain consistency and integrity that could not be ignored or denied. Indeed, in his relatively brief time certain patterns were established early. Born on March 13, 1942, Rodney grew up in Georgetown, the capital of what was then British Guiana. From the outset, he was part of a family that took transformational politics with great seriousness. His parents, especially his father, were deeply involved in the development of the Peoples Progressive Party (PPP). A multi-racial party, it was at the time the only mass political organization in the Caribbean that was opening the common people to the world of Marxist/Socialist thought, as well as raising the possibilities of alternative futures that might go beyond the mere establishment of independence within the British Commonwealth.
So, even before he entered his teens, Walter was already engaged in leafletting, attending party meetings and absorbing the thousands of hours of political discussions that went on in his home. Then, when he entered Queens College, the highly regarded secondary school in Georgetown, the young political activist also became one of the “scholarship boys” so familiar to West Indian life at the time. Bright, energetic and articulate, he excelled in academics and sports (he broke his school record for the high jump), and when he won the coveted Guyana scholarship to the University College of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica, the traditional path to academic prestige and distinction was open to him.
In 1963, Rodney graduated with first class honors in history from UCWI, and was awarded a scholarship to the University of London where he entered the School of Oriental and African Studies to work on his doctorate in African History. Walter’s political instincts and early nurturing would not allow him to settle into the safety of conventional academic life. Instead, the years in London (1963–1966) were among the most important of his continuing political and intellectual development. He immediately became part of a study group of younger West Indians who met regularly under the guidance of the man who was then the exemplar of the revolutionary intellectual, C. L. R. James, the Trinidadian Marxist scholar, best known for his history of the Haitian revolution, Black Jacobins.
The experience with James and the study group was a crucial supplement to Rodney’s earlier exposure to the day-to-day life of radical Caribbean politics, and it was also an important source of grounding in intellectual reality as he moved through the sometimes surreal world of the academic community. By the time he left London for Tanzania in 1966, Rodney was prepared to write history from what he later described as “a revolutionary, socialist and people-centered perspective.” (Within the boundaries of an academic thesis, his excellent dissertation: “A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800,” addressed itself to the subject from that perspective.)*
During the 1966–67 academic year, Walter taught history at the University College in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. In 1968, he returned to Jamaica to take a post in History at his alma mater and to develop what he planned to be a major program in African and Caribbean studies. More importantly, he wanted to test his convictions about the need for revolutionary intellectuals to remain grounded in the ongoing life of the people. Walter met with initial success in both of these endeavors, but it was precisely this success, especially in his work among the common people of the Jamaican streets, hills and gullies, that led to a drastic foreshortening of his stay in that country. In less than a year Rodney had come in touch with and helped articulate the profound discontent and unrest that filled the lives of the ordinary people of Jamaica, as well as many of the university students. As they began seriously to talk and listen together—to ground with one another—about the ways to organize for change, as they heard and pondered the implications of the powerful calls for Black Power rising in this country, it was obvious that a deep and unpredictable ferment was at work, and the conservative Jamaican government readily identified Walter as an undesirable foreign element. Thus, in October, 1968, while attending a Black Writer’s Conference in Montreal, Walter Rodney was officially expelled from Jamaica. The government action led to several days of protest in Kingston, but Rodney was kept out.
It was this political activity, combined with his powerful participation in the Montreal conference, that first brought the twenty-six-year old Caribbean historian to the attention of many of us in the United States. Then, following the Jamaican government’s action, Walter’s fellow members of the C. L. R. James study group and other Caribbean activists based in London, pressed Walter for the opportunity to publish some of the lectures that he had delivered in Jamaica. With that purpose in mind they formed the Bogle-L’Ouverture Publishing House, and in 1969 brought out Walter’s first widely-read book, Groundings With My Brothers.* Walter returned to Dar es Salaam, teaching again at the University (1969–1972), while Groundings was making a profound impression on many people in this country, especially among those of us who were involved in the struggle for hegemony over the definitions of the black (and white) experience in the United States, a struggle temporarily crystallized in the Black Studies movement.
Not surprisingly, it was at one of the many conferences spawned by that movement that Walter Rodney was first introduced to a major audience of Afro-Americans. In May, 1970, he participated in the second annual gathering of the African Heritage Studies Association at Howard University. While one of the contributors to this introduction (Robert Hill) had already met and worked with Walter at the University of the West Indies, the Howard conference provided the first opportunity for the other two of us.
Like many persons at the conference, my first impression of this slightly built, soft-spoken, dark-skinned brother from Guyana was his capacity to speak without notes—and largely without rhetorical flourish—for more than an hour, and yet have his highly informative material so carefully and cogently organized that it would have been possible to take it directly from a transcript and publish it. Eventually, we discovered that this tremendous intellectual discipline (and political instinct) was matched by a disciplined force of spirit, a mastery of—but not slavery to—dialectical materialism, and an unflinching commitment to collective work on behalf of the wretched of the earth. All this was insulated from self-righteousness by a dry and ready sense of humor. In other words, it was clear to us that Walter Rodney was a moral, political and intellectual force to be reckoned with, one of Africa’s most beautiful children.
From the point of our first encounter, we knew that we had met a brother, teacher and comrade. At the time of the Howard conference, Robert Hill, Bill Strickland and I were working with others in the development of the Institute of the Black World (IBW), an Atlanta-based center for research, publication and advocacy. Immediately, we began to explore with Walter some of the ways in which he might share with us in this experiment in collective intellectual work. As a result, in a series of visits he spent quiet, unhurried time among us. In our homes we also shared the company of his wife, Pat, and their lively children, Shaka, Knini and Asha.
As our ties were being developed and cemented, the first edition of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was jointly published by Bogle-L’Ouverture and the Tanzanian Publishing House in 1972. For all of those who could obtain copies of the work, it was like a mighty, uplifting gust of fresh air. Without romanticising pre-colonial Africa, Walter had placed it in the context of human development across the globe, traced its real historical relationships to the colonizing forces of Europe and suggested the path for Africa’s movement toward a new life for its people and a new role in the re-shaping of the world.
The book immediately struck an exciting and responsive chord among many in this country. Among politically-oriented black people it played something of the same formative role as Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth almost a decade before. Indeed, both men were dealing with the ravages of colonialism and neo-colonialism; both were calling for a break with the exploiting, ravaging system in order to move forward and create a new order. Both were living examples of the transformation they demanded.
Like Fanon’s seminal work, Rodney’s also began from an African/Caribbean perspective, but we in the United States of America immediately recognized the global connection. Although Walter ended his primary historical analysis with the close of the 1950s, he nevertheless offered a brief, cogent and powerful treatment of the contemporary role of the United States in the exploitation of Africa, implicitly warning us against our own active or passive participation in that damaging work. But there were also connections perhaps even more directly related to the Afro-American struggles in the early 1970s, especially in his treatment of colonial and neo-colonial education and its effects on the African mind and spirit. For instance, Walter wrote, “In the final analysis, perhaps the most important principle of colonial education was that of capitalist individualism. . . . In Africa, both the formal school system and the informal value system of colonialism destroyed social solidarity and promoted the worst form of alienated individualism without social responsibility.” (254–255)
We Afro-Americans immediately recognized that condition. Indeed, one of the central themes of the movement for Black Studies and Black Power had been the call for social solidarity among black people and resistance to the destructive individualism of the mainstream American way of life. For we were painfully aware of the rising alienation among our young people as they moved ever more fully into the cultural flow of mass American society with its powerful networks of formal and informal mis-education. Thus, it was natural that those of us at the Institute of the Black World (IBW) invited Walter Rodney to participate with us in two projects directly related to those concerns. The first was as a contributor to a book-length monograph, Education and Black Struggle, that we organized and edited for Harvard Educational Review in 1974. His paper was on “Education in Africa and Contemporary Tanzania.”
The second project was of a different nature. Early in 1974 Walter had received an appointment as professor and chairman of History at the University of Guyana. The appointment was considered a clear victory for Walter and his supporters, a vindication of his vision. We invited him to spend part of the summer in Atlanta with us before his return to Guyana. He spent more than a month at IBW, primarily in the development and leadership of a Summer Research Symposium. Colleagues from other parts of the nation and from the Caribbean joined us in the venture as we experimented with models for an educational program that would provide broader scope and new alternatives for young black people in colleges and universities across the country.* At the same time, in an act of vision and courage, the Howard University Press was publishing the first American edition of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
The extended time that Walter spent at IBW that summer was critical to us all. It helped to crystallize much of our thinking about the role of black intellectuals in our own society, and the role that IBW might play in that development. Concurrently, it provided Walter with an opportunity to explore more deeply the implications of the unique black-American experience. Moreover, it brought us all into community with an exciting group of students and co-workers, and we looked forward to the many ways in which we could continue to work together with Walter in his new post at the University of Guyana.
However, even before Walter left Atlanta, we had begun to receive signals that all was not well with the university appointment. By the time he arrived home the official word was given. At the last moment, in an unprecedented move, the appointment had been cancelled, apparently the result of pressure from the highest levels of government. From that point on, Walter Rodney, revolutionary-scholar, began once more to dig deeply into the soil of his native land. In spite of invitations and appeals from many places, he steadfastly refused to leave Guyana on any permanent basis.
He had set himself two major tasks, both consistent with his definition of his role as a black intellectual who was committed to the liberation and development of his people. Both required his presence in Guyana. The first was to develop a major, multi-volume work on the history of the working people of his country. The second task (and this was all-encompassing) was to immerse himself in the contemporary life of those same people and search with them to find a way to resist the power of a government that had clearly betrayed their hopes and their trust, a government that now stood in the way of their development. In other words, Walter was still trying to deal with the neo-colonial implications of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, dauntlessly carrying the search for solutions to the center of his own life and the life of his nation. All the while, especially since Pat, his wife, had also been denied an opportunity to work at her profession of social welfare, Walter had to find ways to feed, clothe and house his family.
Even though it was hard for some of us to imagine how he did it in spite of a situation of constantly heightening tension and danger, Walter managed to find time and energy to spend long hours in the Guyana National Archives and in the Caribbean Research Library at the University in Georgetown. In addition to a number of monographs, the ultimate fruit of that disciplined and sacrificial work will appear when the Johns Hopkins University Press publishes Walter’s History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905. He also published during this period of intensified struggle an important text, Guyanese Sugar Plantations in the Late Nineteenth Century.
Meanwhile, he continued to organize. Before 1974 was over Walter had helped to centralize the Working Peoples Alliance. This became his political base in the relentless struggle to build a force that would bring about the revolutionary transformation of the Guyanese society.
With the help of many persons in the United States and other parts of the world, Walter found opportunities to lecture and teach in an attempt to keep in touch with his comrades outside of Guyana and to earn the funds his family needed. (James Turner, Director of the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell and Immanuel Wallerstein of the State University of New York at Binghamton, were especially helpful to those of us who were trying to organize these activities.)
Whenever Walter travelled abroad, especially as the government’s repression increased, many friends urged him to leave Guyana and bring himself and his family to some place of relative safety. Walter’s response to us generally had two parts. First was his sense of the responsibility he had to his comrades and the people of Guyana. He said that he was working among them to encourage them in a fearless struggle for the transformation of themselves and their society, and that he could not leave simply because he happened to have ready access to the means of escape. Second, Rodney said he felt he had been singularly privileged in the broad set of contacts he had been able to establish in the course of his work and travels throughout the Third World. For him, this privilege carried with it a responsibility to continue to share with his people the content and spirit of that international network of women and men involved in liberation struggles. Thus, without any trace of a desire for martyrdom, but with a clear recognition of the situation he faced, Walter’s response was always the same: “It is imperative that I stay here.”
Toward the end, all these dangers, hopes and tensions were concentrated in the events of one last, year-long outpouring of life and death. In June, 1979, the WPA formally announced that it had transformed itself into a political party, one that would work untiringly for the overthrow of the strong-hold that Burnham’s Peoples National Congress had established in the country. In the following month, a government building in Georgetown was set afire and Walter and four other WPA members were among the eight persons arrested and charged with arson.* Because it was a government bulding, the charge was very serious. But it was also clear to many observers that the action was entirely set up as part of the measures for breaking the force of Rodney’s small but influential organization. On the day of the arraignment, Father Bernard Danke, a priest who was a reporter for the Catholic Standard, was fatally stabbed in the back as he stood observing a pro-WPA demonstration outside the court building. From that point on, a repressive situation deteriorated into what might be called a long night of official terrorism, including bombings, police beatings and escalating threats of “extermination” by Burnham against Walter and other leaders of the opposition WPA.
By the end of February 1980, two of Walter’s close associates in the WPA, Ohene Koama and Edward Lublin, had been killed by the police, others shot and beaten; still others jailed, their houses raided, ransacked and bombed. By then, some of the leading members of the WPA were actually being held as political prisoners in Guyana, for their government refused them permission to leave the country. However, Rodney managed to get out in May 1980, accepting an invitation from the Patriotic Front to attend the independence ceremonies in Zimbabwe. Then Walter returned to Guyana, continuing to work in the Archives, to organize among the people. He had ominously told some of us in this country that we might not see him again.
On June 2, the trial for arson began, witnesssed by concerned observers from the Caribbean, the United States and England. Within a few days it was clear that the government had no case and could not prosecute Rodney and his co-workers. As a result, on June 6, at the request of the government, the trial was adjourned until August 20.
One week after the adjournment, on Friday evening, June 13, Walter was sitting in his brother’s car, waiting for Donald Rodney at the driver’s seat. They had stopped at the house of a man who we now know had infiltrated the ranks of the WPA. Donald Rodney went in to pick up what the man said was a walkie-talkie that Walter wanted. As they stood in the infiltrator’s yard around 7:30 p.m., he told Rodney to drive off and wait for a test signal at 8:00. Donald returned to the car and drove away. When the signal came, it turned out to be the explosion that ended Walter Rodney’s life.
A few weeks before his death, Rodney had been persistently interviewed about the dangers that he faced and his plans for defending himself against them. He said,
As to my own safety and the safety of a number of other persons within the WPA, we will try to guarantee our safety by the level of political mobilization and political action inside and outside of the country. Ultimately, it is this rather than any kind of physical defense which will guarantee our safety. None of us are unmindful of the threat that is constantly posed. We don’t regard ourselves as adventurers, as martyrs or potential martyrs, but we think there is a job which needs to be done and at a certain point in time we have to do what has to be done.
Again, Walter’s courageous sense of commitment and integrity evokes sharp memories of Fanon. He too sacrified his life for the liberation of his people and died before he was forty. He too called the children of Africa and all those damned by Europe to seize the initiative and change our ways. He too asked us to resist all temptations to live out our lives as permanent victims, angry accusers or fawning imitators of Europe. It was he who said,
Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended. . . . Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration. . . . we must find something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe we have taken the liberty at this point of changing “Europe” to Europe/America—we think Fanon would permit that.
The Third World faces Europe/America like a colossal mass whose aim should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe/America has not been able to find the answers.
So comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe/America by creating states, institutions, and societies which draw their inspiration from her.
. . . If we want humanity to advance a step further, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe/America has shown it, then we must invent and we must make discoveries.
If we wish to live up to our people’s expectations, we must seek the response elsewhere than in Europe/America. For Europe/America, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and we must try to set afoot a new man. (Wretched of the Earth. 252–255)
From Walter’s perspective, that was the “job that needs to be done,” the challenge that he and his comrades had determined to take on; experimenting, inventing, risking, trying to work out new forms of organization, new modes of struggle, new visions and concepts to guide and undergird them, starting on their own home ground. For Walter Rodney, the WPA was one element of the job and his research and writing was another. He saw no contradiction between them. All elements of the task were held firmly together by the righteous integrity of his life, the disciplined power of his visions and his undying love for the people and their possibilities.
Thus, he went about doing the job that needed to be done. But, as it was said of Malcolm X, so it could be said of Walter: “He became much more than there was time for him to be.”
Now we are starkly aware of the fact that the time he no longer has is really ours, that the job he took on is in our hands, to continue, to redefine, wherever we are, whoever we are. The call that he tried to answer is here for us all: “if we want humanity to advance a step further . . . we must invent and we must make discoveries . . . we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and we must try to set afoot a new [humanity].” (255, Wretched of the Earth)
It is our courageous, creative attempts to respond to such a magnificent summons that we begin to break the chains of our underdevelopment and shake the foundations of all human exploitation. And is it not clear by now that the process of exploitation leads to an underdeveloped humanity both at the “center” and at the “periphery”? Do we not see that the underdevelopment of the center, in the homeland of the exploiters, is simply covered over with material possessions and deadly weaponry, but that the nakedness and human retardation are nevertheless there? So who among us does not need to break the coils of the past, to transcend and recreate our history?
Perhaps it is only as we take up the challenge of Walter and Fanon that we will be prepared to give up all the deadly games of the last half-millenia, seeking out new means of defense, new forms of struggle, new pathways toward revolution, new visions of what truly humane society demands of us. Only as we begin to entertain such thoughts, consider such inventions, will we be prepared to carefully examine again and then move beyond the marvelous limits of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, pressing on—in the spirit of Rodney and Fanon—to ask a new question: how shall we re-develop the world?
Beginning with ourselves, beginning where we are, what must we tear down, what must we build up, what foundations must we lay? Who shall we work with, what visions can we create, what hopes shall possess us? How shall we organize? How shall we be related to those who raise the same questions in South Africa, in El Salvadore, in Guyana? How shall we communicate with others the urgency of our time? How shall we envision and work for the revolutionary transformation of our own country? What are the inventions, the discoveries, the new concepts that will help us move toward the revolution we need in this land?
Neither rhetoric nor coercion will serve us now. We must decide whether we shall remain crippled and underdeveloped, or move to participate in our own healing by taking on the challenge to re-develop ourselves, our people, our endangered nation and the earth. No one can force us toward this. By conventional measurements, there are no guarantees of success—as the blood of our martyrs and heroes, known and less known, like Walter Rodney and Frantz Fanon, Ruby Doris and Fanny Lou, Malcolm and Martin, fully testify.
But there is a world waiting for us; indeed, many worlds await us. One is the world of our children, not yet born, or just beginning, but wanting to live, to grow, to become their best possible selves. This will not happen unless, as Walter suggests, the center is transformed and fundamentally changed. That will not happen unless we are transformed, re-developed and renewed. The future of our children depends upon these rigorous transformations.
Then there is another more difficult world that awaits us: the world of the sons and daughters of Europe/America who have begun to discover their own underdevelopment, who recognize the warping and desensitizing of their spirits. Without rehearsing all the old political arguments about coalitions and alliances, neither forgetting the past nor being bound by it, we must find some way to respond to them and to allow them to come in touch with us. This is no passing luxury, in the old “race relations” style. Rather, we now realize that the children of the oppressed and the children of the oppressors are involved in a dialectical relationship that is deeper than most of us choose to recognize, and that there is no fundamental redevelopment for one without the other. This is a heavy burden, but it represents a great possibility as well. In this country, with our peculiar history, it is also an undeniable reality.
So, it is by the way of these difficult issues that we return to Walter and his great work. Now, what seems demanded of us as we re-visit How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, is that we read it this time in the light of Walter Rodney’s life and death; this time in the consciousness of the dangerous, explosive American center; this time in the company of our children; this time in the presence of Fanon’s insistent call to us all.
Then we shall likely see more clearly than ever before that Europe’s underdevelopment of Africa, and other worlds, required Europe’s ravaging of itself and everyone—and everything—that came under its sway. So the wounded are all around us and within us. Now, opening ourselves to all those who recognize the brutal dialectics of underdevelopment, who acknowledge the cohesive powers of our common needs, our common dangers and our common possibilities, we can begin to stand in a newly grounded solidarity and reach out toward each other, facing the harsh but beautiful fact that we must either re-develop ourselves and our world or be pushed together into some terrible, explosive closing of the light.
Of course, if we choose to go the way of our essential community, we cannot go far by responding primarily to the urgency of fear (for that would repeat history rather than transform it—and that would be unfaithful to a courageous brother like Walter). Instead, we must be drawn by the fact that there is much to attract us. For instance, one of the hopeful elements on the other side of the patterns of domination/subordination of the past 500 years has been the drawing of humankind into networks of communication and interrelatedness that hold great possibilities for the establishment of new communities beyond the traditional, national barriers. Reshaped and re-directed, the mechanisms of exploitation may actually place some vital means of re-development within our grasp.
Now it is in our hands—to overcome our history, to break the shackles of the past, to re-develop ourselves, our people, our nation and our world—to find humane, creative and fearless ways of dealing with those who presently oppose such development. These are audacious visions, and truly awesome responsibilities. But we must go forward. Indeed, it seems clear to us that even without any guarantees of success, we must move in the flow of humankind’s best, most creative imagination, in the direction of our most profoundly renewing dreams.
Anything less is inadequate for the perilous times. Anything less would be unworthy of the memory of our brother, the needs of our children, or the magnificent, untapped capacities of our own best selves.
March 1981
VINCENT HARDING
ROBERT HILL
WILLIAM STRICKLAND
*The dissertation was published by Clarendon Press in 1970, and recently reprinted in paperback by Monthly Review Press.
*The new press was named after Paul Bogle, the leader of the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica and Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Haitian leader. Among those most actively involved in the endeavor were Andrew Salkey, Jessica and Eric Huntley, Richard Small, John LaRose, Selma James, Earl Greenwood and Chris Le Maitre. Not long after Rodney’s assassination, Bogle-L’Ouverture Book Store was renamed the Walter Rodnev Book Store.
*Among the colleagues who participated in the Summer Research Symposium (SRS) were C. L. R. James, St. Clair Drake, Katherine Dunham, George Beckford, Edward Braithwaite, Lerone Bennett, Mary Berry, Tran Van Dinh, Mack Jones and Frank Smith.
*Known as the “Referendum Five,” they included Walter Rodney, Rupert Roopnarine, Maurice Omawale, Kwame Apata and Karen De Souza. All five were denied trial by jury.