Quotations excerpted from Walter Rodney's public speeches to the peo- ple of Guyana, 1977-1980; text in italics by Lewanne Roopnavaint-Jones, member of the New York Working People's Alliance Support Committee. Assassination is the act of any one man-any one man can as- sassinate a leader. But only the people can make a revolution. And the day has come-when the real revolution will begin-the revolu- tion in the economy, the revolution in the society, the revolution to bring us back to a level where we can hold our heads up high. And it is on that day that we need the participation of the people. ... There are many people who believe that a revolution is about. blood. It is true that at times in a revolution blood flows. Very often innocent blood, very often the blood of the best amongst us. But one must be prepared to take a stand against evil and injustice in the society. We will have to realize that the time is now to make pre- cisely that stand. In brutal retaliation for his courageous stand against the violent and oppressive Guy- anese state, Walter Rodney was assassinated. The interna- tionally renowned Marxist historian and Pan-Africanist was killed instantly when a powerful bomb exploded in his car on June 13, 1980. A key figure in Guyanese politics for the last decade, Rodney had been in- strumental in forging links with liberation struggles in Africa, 40 Latin America and elsewhere in the Caribbean. Although born and raised in the former colony British Guiana, Rodney is far better known on the continent from which his forbears came and where he lived and worked for some years-Africa. He taught in Tanzania and Jamaica before returning to Guyana in 1974. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney's best known work, is an important contribu- tion to African history and to concepts of "development" in the Third World. Only three weeks before his tragic death, Rodney was commissioned by the newly inaugurated Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, to write the official history of that country. By nature an energetic activist, Rodney was always concerned with the particular social and political situation wherever he was. While devoting enormous amounts of time and energy to radical forms of teaching among the people, he managed to continue his own extensive research and publication. In my own career I have had tremendous good fortune to be ex- posed to people's struggles in the rest of the Caribbean, particularly in Jamaica, to see Black people struggle in Britain against racism, to participate ... in the struggles of Black people in the United States, in knowing what it is like to combat imperialism and racism in Southern Africa... I think I have benefitted enormously from those experiences, and in some way or other, I have to try to integrate that experience with what is happening in Guyana. It doesn't do the Guy- anese people any good if that's simply locked away as an element of my own personal develop- ment ... When Rodney returned to Guyana in 1974 to assume the chairmanship of the Depart- ment of History at the Universi- ty, he was denied that position and, effectively, any employ- ment in his own country by the Burnham regime. In the follow- ing six years, most of Rodney's "students" were working class men and women of all ages; the vast majority of these "stu- dents" labored in the bauxite mines and cane fields which dominate Guyana's economic life. Rodney's special talent lay in relating their everyday hard- ships to their particular oppres- sion under the Burnham regime and in affirming their collective responsibility and ability to ef- fect the necessary changes. Most Guyanese live on the coastlands. These coastlands were once desolate swamps flood- ed by the sea and the savannah waters. The dams and the canals, the roads and the houses, the fields and the factories, the schools and the churches, the words and the gestures-all of these represent our common heritage. Our foreparents planted NACLA Reportupdate * update . update * update their strength, their seed, and their intelligence in a country which is now ours. Neither the land nor the rights of the people are gifts of the Burnham dictatorship. On the con- trary, that dictatorship has placed the nation in reverse gear. It is destroying the economy and it is stealing the rights of the people. ... Few individuals want willingly to invite their own death. Yet many will be found who are prepared to fight fearlessly for their rights even if their lives are threatened. The human spirit has a remarkable capacity to rise above oppression; and only the fools who now mis- rule Guyana can imagine that our population alone lacks such capacity. During the famous 1763 slave rebellion in Berbice, there were numerous examples of the undying courage of our fore- parents. The Dutch slave masters captured Accabre, one of the leaders of the rebellion, and he simply laughed scornfully when they tormented him. Soon after, Accabre and eight other freedom fighters were put to death by roasting over a slow fire. Even their enemies were impressed by the fact that Accabre's men were firm to the end and did not flinch. The wide-ranging spectrum of Rodney's work demonstrates his keen understanding of the role of Marxist intellectuals in the Third World. In addition to his scholarship and teaching, Rodney recognized the abso- lute necessity of participating in an organization in and through which the people's liberation would be realized. As a foun- ding member of the Working People's Alliance, and part of its collective leadership, he strove with fellow members to forge JulylAugust 1980 new theories and practices of class struggle and political organization in the Third World. We're trying to do what has never been done before, to try to define our specific type of society, the peripheral, as it is now called by the capitalist society, and to give it specificity. Africa was peripheral and so was Latin Amer- ica and Asia; but we each have our own uniqueness. That uni- queness really doesn't matter at a certain level, as we have common responses to various problems; but it certainly does matter in the realm of politics.... In his public speaking for the Working People's Alliance, he clarified the problem of race and clas that has plagued the country the last quarter century and more. Who benefits from the division of the working class? I was struck on one occasion reading an old book on the history of Guyana by a planter way back in slavery times, corresponding with friends in England. And they asked him, "How come you manage to con- trol so many slaves when you are just a handful, even though you may have the guns? If they were to rush you all at one time they would overwhelm you." But the planter was quite confident in his response. "Not to bother," he wrote, "the trick is that we keep them divided." You see, exploita- tion is always carried out by the few over the many. .... And the on- ly way that the few can maintain themselves over the many is, the many must be divided.... If the working class is to realize that power which comes from the fact that they are the ones who produce, whether it be in the fields or in the factories, on the docks or on the buses, they will obviously have to strengthen the basis of their own organization. Classes take power to the extent that they are organized to do so. You don't just walk off the street and take political power or take power over your daily life. You have to organize. The Guyanese people have been struggling for their own liberation since the days of slavery and indenture, and, in this most recent period of neo- colonial repression, Walter Rodney was their most artic- ulate spokesman. The brutal and desperate act which took his life at the height of his political intervention is not only the extremist measure of a regime which knows its days are numbered; it is also part of a strategy of collaboration with imperialism in the Caribbean and in Central America, a strategy which has determined that there will be no more Cubas, Nicaraguas, or Gren- adas. Nobody gives somebody else freedom. Freedom is something for which you fight, and then you win. If someone gives it to you as a gift, it is not really freedom. Because once it is given, it can be taken away. And those who mani- pulate us into a position of thinking that they gave us freedom are precisely the ones who have en- sured that that freedom has been kept from the hands of the majority of the people.
