Walter Rodney

Walter Anthony Rodney was born in Georgetown, British Guiana, on the twenty-third of March 1942, the son of a tailor. He took a first-class undergraduate degree at the University of the West Indies and a doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in 1966 — at the age of twenty-four — on the upper Guinea coast in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

He taught at the University of Dar es Salaam under Julius Nyerere's Tanzania and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. His 1968 banning from Jamaica — the government refused to renew his work permit after he had organized study groups with Kingston working-class youth — triggered the Rodney Riots and the radicalization of Caribbean university politics for the next decade.

His major work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), reframed the analysis of African economic history: it argued that the underdevelopment of Africa was not a passive condition of the continent but an active product of European extraction over five centuries, structurally analogous to the development of Europe itself. The book has been continuously in print for fifty years and remains the foundational text of African development economics in the Pan-African tradition.

He returned to Guyana in 1974 and co-founded the Working People's Alliance — a multi-racial socialist opposition to Forbes Burnham's ruling People's National Congress. His political work made him the most dangerous opposition figure in the country.

He was assassinated in Georgetown on the thirteenth of June 1980 by a remote-detonated bomb concealed in a walkie-talkie handed to him by a Guyana Defense Force agent. He was thirty-eight.

He is honored here as the historian whose analysis of underdevelopment Africa still reads.