Walter Rodney at 80: Iconoclastic notes

Apr 09, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – In 2022, Rodney would have been 80 years if he was alive. It meant that Guyana would still have the benefits of his thoughts as some of his contemporaries – Clive Thomas, Rupert Roopnaraine and Eusi Kwayana. What would those thoughts and his activism have been like if he was still alive?
For me, I no longer welcome and accept the activism of those three names cited above. Since Rodney is not with us, it is impossible to ascertain what the shape of his politics would have been in 2022.
It is an accepted position in academia that we learn more of the good and the faults of an historic figure as the ages pass and secrets and previously unannounced action and deeds are revealed. In the US, the Me Too Movement has been a gold mine for researchers because it has emboldened women to highlight wrongs done to them by men that were seen in a positive light.
The difference in the biographical details with Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham on the one hand and Rodney on the other is that the first two served in politics almost five times the years Rodney spent in struggle and thus had become more controversial than Rodney. Both Jagan and Burnham were governmental heads in Guyana and would have rightly or wrongly earn their share of detractors. Rodney never had state power.
One of the biographical advantages Rodney has stems from two situations. He was a popular anti-dictatorship actor and he was assassinated. Biographies on him start from a position of unadulterated praise. And they have all been written in that vein without exception.
A forthcoming biography by a first-rate scholar should be out shortly. I have no idea what critical pages that book will contain, but here are a few iconoclastic notes of mine which I feel after 42 years since his assassination need to be put in the public domain.
I was fortunate to be around political struggle at the time of Rodney’s activism so these little details are not from research but memory. I detected among many PPP leaders a feeling of political angst with the way Rodney shaped his confrontation with Burnham.
Both Rodney and the WPA were involved in high middle class politics which broke from the tradition of the West Indies. Anti-colonial movements were led by the Creole middle class in every West Indian country with Grenada having more working class people in its leadership than the other islands and Guyana having a dynamic and charismatic non-Creole presence at its apex – Cheddi Jagan.
But however elitist they were, West Indian anti-colonial political parties did two indispensible things – sought partnership with the trade unions and preserved protracted organising within and among the masses. Rodney and the WPA had little time for such hard work which had tragic consequences.
Rodney cannot escape criticism that his party was highly elitist, highly middle class and was led by westernised, non Muslim, non Hindu, non Indian personnel from the Creole stratum. In other words, the WPA was an atavistic reversion to the League of Coloured People and its political wing, the National Democratic Party.
It is a massive contradiction in that a revolutionary group could seek to generate revolt by the masses for a dictator and use that national feeling to overthrow an authoritarian regime without years of organising the masses for that eventuality. In Trinidad that was tried by an organisation named NUFF (National Union of Freedom Fighters). Their leaders were killed.
One of the pitfalls of Rodney was that he never organised among the rural Indian peasantry. Many PPP leaders and independent Indian scholars believed that Rodney was motivated by Black nationalism, a point that needs researching.
Rodney left two WPA leaders to fill that gap – Rupert Roopnaraine and Moses Bhagwan – but they failed because they could not have countered the presence of Cheddi Jagan among the rural masses. One of the failings of Rodney was that he expected that the pervasive anti-Burnham feelings in Guyana with his penetrating charisma were sufficient to topple Burnham.
When in 1979, the officially proclaimed day of resistance failed, it was because of the long absence of organising among the masses. This was the beginning of the end for Rodney because Burnham knew that unlike Jagan, Rodney did not have a mass following and thus was vulnerable to assassination.
Biographies of Rodney have inadvertently distorted history by the assertion that Rodney was involved in armed self-defence. This is not factual. This is a lacuna in Guyana’s historiography which must be plugged. Rodney was involved in the violent attempt to overthrow President Burnham. Rodney loyalists, family members and relative may not be comfortable with that fact but that fact is reality and must be part of the historical record.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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