Eusi Kwayana, Walter Rodney: His Last Days and Campaigns, Birmingham, R. Ferdinand - Lalljee Publishers, 2010, pp.140. ISBN 978-976-8159-05-2.

A review by Frank Birbalsingh
Walter Rodney: His Last days and Campaigns consists of a hundred-page treatise by Kwayana, preceded by a Foreword from Publisher Robert Lalljee, and an Introduction by Professor Clem Seecharan. The volume assesses the career of the martyred Guyanese historian and politician Walter Rodney who was born in 1942, and killed on 13th June, 1980 by a bomb placed in an electrical device given to Rodney by Gregory Smith, a member of the Guyana Defence Force. There is reason to believe that Rodney’s public declaration: “the PNC [the People’s National Congress party led by L.F.S. Burnham] must go and they must go by any means necessary” may partly have provoked his murder, although no one has yet been convicted or even charged with such a crime. All we know is that, by the late 1970s, Guyana was perishing under the dictatorship of Burnham’s PNC which had already ruled continuously for more than a decade by means of rigged elections. Among individuals and groups opposing the PNC, Rodney had emerged as the regime’s most serious threat, although Kwayana’s assessment is more measured. He writes that Rodney: “affected the pace of things at home, affected the Working People’s Movement for freedom, and the Patriotic Movement for Freedom, and led to the modification of the state and its organs.”
After his early studies at Queens College in Guyana, Rodney took a Bachelor’s degree in history from the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, before completing his Ph.D. at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London in 1966, and publishing his Ph.D. thesis A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800 in 1970. In 1968, after accepting a post with the History Department of the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, his early activism angered Premier Hugh Shearer who banned Rodney from re-entering Jamaica while he was attending a Conference in Canada. From 1968 to 1974, Rodney next worked as a lecturer in African History at the University of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania, publishing his influential How Europe Underdeveloped Africa in 1972. But after his return to Guyana in 1974 he was prevented by the Burnham Government from taking a post at the University of Guyana, and became increasingly active in anti-Government Movements, and joined with Opposition forces that later became a political party, the Working People’s Alliance, of which both he and Kwayana were founding members.
Kwayana claims that Rodney was: “concerned with the destiny of the poor” and “with the deprivation of the oppressed classes inside any given country and also with the oppression of the subject peoples of the earth by the oppressing nations.” Because of endemic and polarised political rivalry between Indians and Africans in Guyana, Kwayana is keen to show that Rodney’s support of Black power includes: “the masses of oppressed in the West Indies and in particular the (Asian) Indians;” and to drive his point home, he quotes from Rodney’s first book The Groundings with my Brothers (1969): “Black power in the West Indies, therefore, refers to people who are recognisably African or Indian.” In any case, Rodney leaves no doubt about his political ideology when he states at a press conference: “I aspire to be a Marxist Leninist,” and asserts his belief in: “the theme of the self-emancipation of the working class.”
In the beginning, Kwayana notes: “as a member of the Executive of the pre-Party formation of the WPA, [Rodney] worked inside and outside of the organisation.” In view of such hectic political activism, it is hard to imagine how Rodney could also find time to research and write. Yet Kwayana reveals: “He [Rodney] saw it as his task to update and explain the many features of the landscape, labour organization, and social and political life” on Guyanese sugar plantations, as described by an anonymous writer in Guyanese Sugar Plantations in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Contemporary Description from the “Argosy,” 1979. It is even harder to imagine that this was also the period – the late 1970s – when Rodney evidently was writing his posthumously published masterpiece A History of the Guyanese Working People 1881-1905, 1981 - a work of unforgettable scholarship which, because of its exhaustive research and humane insight, more than compensates for any Marxist bias that Professor Seecharan suggests in his Introduction. No wonder that Kwayana acknowledges in Rodney a: “combination of academic interest and competence with revolutionary activity which typifies our hero in such a marked degree.”
At the same time, Kwayana does not shield us from the sordid details of thuggery, tyranny and terror unleashed by the Burnham regime on Guyanese people because of their “Civil rebellion.” In July, 1979, for instance, anti-Government protests were launched against “the great referendum fraud” of the previous year, when Burnham had deployed another rigged election to obtain public approval of a Constitutional amendment that would allow him to prolong the life of his regime. After a protest meeting held by the largest Opposition Party – The People’s Progressive Party led by Dr. Cheddi Jagan - at which Rodney was a guest speaker, the Office of the General Secretary of the PNC and the Ministry of National Development went up in flames, following which Rodney and several other leading members of the WPA were arrested and imprisoned.
On 14th July when crowds gathered to celebrate the release of five of members of the WPA who were granted bail, they were confronted by well known Government allies from the House of Israel, a group of ruffians led by an American fugitive from justice. A Catholic priest, Father Darke, who was taking photos was stabbed to death, while two other members of the crowd were seriously wounded. It was after this outrage that a meeting of the WPA was held on 20th July, and Rodney made his fateful declaration about the PNC having to go by any means necessary.