Walter Rodney, born in Guyana on 22nd of march in 1942, Pan-African, Marxist intellectual who was assassinated by the Guyanese government in 1980 at 38 years old.
Rodney attended the University College of the West Indies in 1960 and was awarded a first class honors degree in History in 1963. He later earned a PhD in African History in 1966 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England, at the age of 24.
Rodney traveled extensively and became well-known as an activist, scholar, and formidable orator. He taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania from 1966-67 and 1969-1974, and in 1968 at his alma mater University of the West Indies.
On October 15th, 1968, the government of Jamaica declared Rodney a "persona non grata" and banned him from the country. Following his dismissal by the University of the West Indies, students and poor people in West Kingston protested, leading to the "Rodney Riots", which caused six deaths and millions of dollars in damages.
In 1972, Rodney published "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa". Historian Melissa Turner describes the work this way: "A brutal critique of long-standing and persistent exploitation of Africa by Western powers, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a powerful, popular, and controversial work in which Rodney argued that the early period of African contact with Europe, including the slave trade, sowed the seeds for continued African economic underdevelopment and had dramatically negative social and political consequences as well. He argued that, while the roots of Africa’s ailments rested with intentional underdevelopment and exploitation under European capitalist and colonial systems, the only way for true liberation to take place was for Africans to become cognizant of their own complicity in this exploitation and to take back the power they gave up to the exploiters."
On June 13th, 1980, Rodney was killed in Georgetown, Guyana via a bomb given to him by Gregory Smith, a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force, one month after returning Zimbabwe. In 2015, a "Commission of Inquiry" in Guyana that the country's then president, Linden Forbes Burnham, was complicit in his murder.
"If there is to be any proving of our humanity it must be through revolutionary means."
-
Walter Rodney
Megathreads and spaces to hang out:
- 📀 Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
- 💖 Come talk in the New Weekly Queer thread
- 🔥 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread
- ⚔ Come talk in the New Weekly PoC thread
- ✨ Talk with fellow Trans comrades in the New Weekly Trans thread
reminders:
- 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
- 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
- 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
- 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can reserve a spot here nerd
- 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog
Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):
Aid:
Theory:
It's a beautiful story, just bittersweet since that future hasn't yet come to pass
I want nothing more than to be one of the old people in that story... talking to people who have never experienced or seen the horrible things that I have
It probably won't happen in our lifetimes but... it's not impossible...
I guess we gotta work to make it happen
I don't remember who said this but something like this has stuck with me after I heard it once: If we look back on the history of world-historical revolutions, they tend to come in waves. Considering socialist revolutions, the first wave seized only Paris and it took just the French army to suppress it. The second wave, which began with the October Revolution in Russia nearly seized the whole world and it took the combined might of the entire capitalist world for the majority of a century to put it down. I wonder what the third one will look like?
The bloomer and most useful way to look at the state of hellworld rn is that while the challenges have never been greater: global boiling, genocide, looming economic collapse, war, possibly a world war, global pandemic, etc etc etc, so are our opportunities
Idk why I'm writing this cuz I'm sure you know all this, maybe just as an affirmation to myself cuz my life has been a wreck lately and I haven't been doing much to build that revolution :(
Also I clicked reply before I finished writing so that's why you maybe saw a deleted reply lmao
I feel you on that, like I yell on the bear website but irl I might as well be a lib, I do not have the social or physical energy to go join an org or anything. I have my hands full just trying to keep afloat.
I like this bloomer outlook though & while I do know most of it I'm always happy to listen and learn more :)
Yeahh, I know what you mean :(
I'm like barely hanging on in general rn and not doing anything so I'm basically just a lib too lol
I haven't given up entirely yet, sometime I'll reach out to an org again
Hoping we can both figure this shit out soon lol