In 1965, Walter married Patricia Henry, his “sweetheart”, who was also in London studying nursing. While at SOAS, Rodney spent his summers honing his debating and oratorical skills at Hyde Park. He sharpened and defined his personal understanding of Marxist thought and influence under the mentorship of CLR James (a Trinidadian scholar, and historian) and his wife Selma James (a Jewish-American writer, feminist and activist). Walter was an active member of the CLR James Study Group, a passionate and committed band of young persons from the Caribbean. It included: Selma James; Margaret Carter, a Barbadian writer, and journalist; the late Stanley French, a St. Lucian playwright and engineer; the late Norman Girvan, a Jamaican economist, who also graduated from the Mona Campus; Wally Look Lai, Trinidadian journalist, critic and history lecturer; and two Jamaican lawyers, Richard Small and Adolf Edwards.

In July 1966, Rodney left London for his first teaching post at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, East Africa during the period of radical political and agrarian reform led by Julius Nyerere. Tanzania was the headquarters of the Organization of African Unity’s Liberation Committee (OUAC), and Dar es Salaam became the base for many exiled liberation movements of Southern Africa. Among these organizations were the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa, Frente da Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO) of Mozambique, and Movimento Popular da Libertação de Angola (MPLA). In this atmosphere, Rodney developed his Pan-African perspectives along Marxist lines and sided with Southern Africa’s left-wing activists.

Rodney combined his scholarship with activism and became a voice for the under-represented and disenfranchised – this distinguished him from his academic colleagues. Influenced by the Black Power Movement in the U.S., third world revolutionaries, and Marxist theory, Rodney began to actively challenge the status quo.

In the nearly ten months in 1968, while a professor at UWI, Jamaica, Walter Rodney not only taught but also spoke to groups in the depressed areas of Kingston and rural areas. He had an extraordinary ability to speak with and listen to working class people and unemployed youth. He explained the significance of Africa to Caribbean history, and the importance of the struggles against the racial and social legacies of slavery and colonialism (1969). He joined others to object to the socio-economic and political direction of the government. Unlike his counterparts, however, Rodney involved the working class, including the Rastafarians (one of Jamaica’s most marginalized groups) in this dialogue. His articles, speeches, and lectures to these groups were published as Groundings with My Brothers and became central to the Caribbean Black Power Movement. Rodney’s activities garnered the Jamaican government’s ire and after attending the 1968 Black Writers’ Conference in Montreal, Canada he was banned from re-entering the country. This decision was to have profound repercussions, sparking widespread student and civil unrest on the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona Campus, its surrounding communities, and in the capital, Kingston. The protests were referred to as the “Rodney Riots”.

The ban marked a watershed in Jamaica’s political development; the scale of mass action in support of Rodney surprised the regime. There were protests throughout the Caribbean, Tanzania, Canada, and London. Rodney’s reputation as a scholar-activist, with a relevant critique of the Jamaican and Caribbean post-colonial elites, was firmly established.

Upon being refused re-entry and being banned from Jamaica, Walter took a short sojourn in Cuba to reassess his role in the university. While there he penned a monograph entitled “Black Struggles” which was misplaced.

From 1969-1974 he returned to lecture at the University of Dar es Salaam. In 1972, he published his best-known work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. This work brings together historical scholarship and development theory to argue that the transatlantic slave trade and European and North American capitalist slavery did serious damage to Africa in depriving it of millions of its young people from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Rodney was also critical of the impact of colonialism in retarding the development of the continent. The book advances a revolutionary humanist view of development and decolonization at a time when many countries on the continent were achieving political independence; a process that was also underway in the English-speaking Caribbean where territories were populated largely by descendants of enslaved people from Africa.

In 1972, Oxford University published Rodney’s doctoral thesis A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800. In 1975, two chapters titled “The Guinea Coast” and “Africa in Europe and the Americas” were published in the Cambridge History of Africa. The latter essay was a pioneering study of the African Diaspora.

In 1974, Walter returned to Guyana to take up an appointment as Professor of African History at the University of Guyana, but the Forbes Burnham government rescinded the appointment. Burnham saw the young scholar-activist as a potential threat and tried to keep him out of Guyana. Rodney remained in Guyana and joined the newly formed political group, the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), a political organization that offered a nonracial approach to Guyanese politics in a country where party politics had been divided between Cheddi Jagan’s East Indian–based People’s Progressive Party (PPP) and Forbes Burnham’s African-based People’s National Congress (PNC).

Between 1974 -1979, Rodney emerged as the leading figure in the resistance movement against the increasingly authoritarian PNC government. He gave public and private talks all over the country that served to engender a new political consciousness in the country. He also continued his research and completed Volume 1: A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905, which was published posthumously in 1981. This work embodies his philosophy on the creative role of ordinary working class people in the making of history and introduces the contribution of enslaved Africans. It was the first book on the contributions of Guyanese working people written in the twentieth century. In 1982, the book won the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Award, which is given annually for the best book in English on the history of the United States, Latin America, or Canada from 1492 to the present. In 1983, the Association of Caribbean Historians also gave Rodney a posthumous award. Rodney’s reputation as a historian of the Caribbean was duly recognized. He harnessed history in the service of African and Caribbean decolonization with a view to giving his readers a sense of their creative capacity to build postcolonial societies. During this period, he developed his ideas on the self-emancipation of the working people, People’s Power, and multiracial democracy.

The Barbadian novelist George Lamming, in his foreword to A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905, described Rodney’s approach to history as “a way of ordering knowledge which could become an active part of the consciousness of an uncertified mass of ordinary people and which could be used by all as an instrument of social change. He taught from that assumption. He wrote out of that conviction.”

Rodney was also a gifted and compelling speaker whose arguments were backed up by a mastery of contemporary data. He possessed a capacity to communicate complex ideas to small study groups and large audiences with great clarity drawing on his solidly rooted knowledge of African and Caribbean history. Rodney’s voice was not confined to Africa and the Caribbean but was also heard in North America and Europe.

In the early-mid 1970s, to earn an income denied by the Burnham administration, he participated in discussions and lectures in Europe, Canada, and the U.S. In the U.S. he lectured at African Heritage Studies Association, Howard University, DC; the Institute of the Black World (IBW) in Atlanta, GA; the African Studies and Research Center, Cornell University; and the State University of New York, Binghamton.

As the WPA gained popularity and momentum, the PNC began a campaign of harassment including police raids, house searches, beatings, and state-sanctioned killings. On July 11, 1979, Walter, together with seven WPA members, were arrested following the destruction of two government offices. Rodney and four others (known as the “Referendum Five”) faced trumped-up charges of arson, but without proof and intense scrutiny from international supporters, the government was forced to drop these charges.

The persecution and violence against the opposition forces then intensified. Father Darke, a priest and photographer for the Catholic Standard Newspaper and supporter, was stabbed to death by members of the House of Israel led by American born Rabbi Washington. Two WPA members Ohene Kohama and Edward Dublin were killed by the police. The government denied Rodney and others permission to travel abroad. Despite this, Rodney continued his academic writings and political work; and he left Guyana clandestinely to attend Zimbabwe’s independence celebrations as a guest of President Robert Mugabe in May 1980.

Though Rodney lived with constant police harassment and frequent threats against his life, he nonetheless managed to complete four books in the last year of his life: An academic work: A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905; A political call to action: People’s Power, No Dictator; and two children’s books: Kofi Baadu Out of Africa and Lakshmi Out of India.

On Friday, June 13, 1980, while traveling in his car with his younger brother Donald, Walter Anthony Rodney was assassinated by a bomb in Georgetown, Guyana. He was 38 years old. Donald Rodney survived to become the only living witness of this state-sponsored assassination.

In the 40 years since his assassisnation, Walter Rodney’s wife Patrica and their children have pursued justice. Justice was served on June 10, 2021, when the Government of Guyana accepted the report of the Commission of Inquiry (COI) concluding that Dr. Walter Anthony Rodney was assassinated by the agents of the State with the full knowledge of then President of the Republic of Guyana, Linden Forbes Samson Burnham.

Walter Rodney Lives!

Through the dissemination of his academic thought, work, and life; and as an example of a scholar-activist, teacher, and seeker of truth for the working class people of the African diaspora.

Walter Rodney is survived by his wife Patricia Rodney and three children – Shaka Rodney, Kanini Z. Rodney-Phillips, and Asha T. Rodney. Walter and Patrica have four grandchildren – Asia Rodney Collins, Kai Walter Rodney Collins, Skye Bruce Rodney-Phillips, and Appeadua Krow-Rodney.