I never met Walter Rodney. Not in life. I had never heard his name, never read a single word he wrote. That all changed in August 1980, when I walked through the gates of Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria, as a fresh student at the School of Basic Studies.
From the main entrance to the Senate Building, from the hostels to the cafeterias, from faculty offices to the very tree trunks lining the pathways, his face was everywhere. Posters. Hundreds of them. At the top, his photograph. Below it, his name: Walter Rodney. Then the dates of his birth and death. And beneath that, a bold quotation that stopped me cold: “This act in itself will not delay their day of judgment.”
I was consumed by questions. Who was this man? What happened to him? Why were his posters plastered across the entire campus? Was he killed? What act? Whose judgment? Was there some judgment day beyond the one known only to God? The questions gnawed at me. That Friday, I couldn’t sleep. I went home to Kaduna, but Rodney followed me in my thoughts. There was no internet then. No one to ask.
When classes began, I chose history. Every lecturer, from history to political science, invoked his name. One Zimbabwean teacher we called Dzimbo, whose country had just won independence through armed struggle, spoke of Rodney as if the entire course was about him. They introduced us to his book, “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.” A must-read, they said, for anyone who wanted to truly understand the continent’s history. The argument was stark: Western Europeans, and before them the Arabs, laid the concrete foundation for Africa’s underdevelopment. Invasion. Plunder. The kidnapping and enslavement of millions. The theft of resources to build Europe, America, and Canada. The result was a shattered continent, forced into colonialism and unequal trade, robbed of its own history.
Dzimbo and the others called Rodney’s book a condensation of African history, one that shattered the imperialist, neo-colonial lies we had been fed in secondary school and the media. It was critical. Thought-provoking. Scientific. Revolutionary.
I was mesmerized. I had known history could be radical. Books like “The Growth of African Civilization” had already made me an infantile radical. But scientific? How could history be scientific like biology or chemistry? And why would a historian, unarmed and without an army, be bombed to death by the CIA and the Guyanese government for writing a book?
These questions tormented me. I bought “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” from the university bookstore. I read it with pain and with hunger. At the ABU Gossip Centre, where male students gathered to watch female students walk by and trade campus rumors, Rodney was unwrapped for me: an extraordinarily intelligent African-Caribbean historian, an unrepentant Pan-Africanist, a thoroughbred comrade, an uncompromising radical.
In the student movements I joined, the Movement for a Progressive Nigeria and the Youth Solidarity on Southern Africa, Rodney was painted as a scholar who believed, like Marx and Lenin, that the point is not just to interpret the world but to change it. As a Pan-Africanist, he had contributed to liberation struggles in Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, and South Africa while teaching in Tanzania. He educated freedom fighters. He preached revolution. He lived Lenin’s dictum: without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement. In the struggle for power, the proletariat has no weapon but organization.
In 1974, Rodney left Tanzania for Guyana to become a full-time professional revolutionary. He worked to unite socialist forces under the Working People’s Alliance, aiming to seize state power for the socialist transformation of his homeland.
In my faculty, we were made to critique his book. At first, we felt it was unfair, even wicked, to ask ordinary undergraduates to critique a giant like Rodney. Then we learned the truth: to critique doesn’t mean to criticize or debunk. It means to summarize, to highlight relevance, to identify what must be done to reverse Africa’s underdevelopment, and to determine which social forces will do it.
By the time we submitted our essays, we knew Rodney. How could we not? We had dialogued with him on every page. We agreed with him that colonialism was a one-armed bandit. We agreed that there were African accomplices inside the imperialist system. We agreed that Africa’s development required a radical break from that system.
Walter Rodney was murdered on July 13, 1980. He was born on March 23, 1942. He lived only 38 years. But those years were filled with theoretical, ideological, and political struggle for the liberation of Africans everywhere.
Continue to rest in power, Brother Walter Rodney.
