Horace Campbell
This week, the tenth annual Walter Rodney Symposium is taking place ten years after the United States launched the war against the peoples of Iraq. The peoples of Iraq are still suffering the consequences of this war where the United States fabricated the idea that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The propaganda and disinformation that had been put in place to wage that war is being redeployed today to mount another military incursion into Africa under the banner of fighting terrorism in Africa. The annual symposium on Walter Rodney has been spaces for presenting alternative ideas about the real meaning of imperial wars and exploitation. This tenth anniversary also marks the tenth time that the Walter Rodney Foundation has brought together those who want to carry forward the ideas and political practice of Walter Rodney.
The writings of Walter Rodney on wars and depressions are sprinkled throughout his writings but there was one clear theme that is, war speeded up the processes of transformation and or regression. In his scholarly writing, Walter Rodney spent considerable time to expand on the meaning of the capitalist depression for the world and how the costs of the crisis were transferred to Africa, especially by Britain and France. In the book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney pointed to the ways in which the practices of repression in Africa had been brought home to Europe, especially by the Nazis who had carried out a dress rehearsal of the genocide of the Herero in Namibia.
Today, in the midst of another depression, the writings of Walter Rodney provide us with some of the tools to grasp the dynamics of the contemporary political economy, especially the economic crisis that is variously a called recession. The policy makers in North America have been careful not to call the present crisis a depression, but it was the Governor of the bank of England, Sir Mervyn King who warned that “The world is facing the worst financial crisis since at least the 1930s “if not ever.”
In the spirit of the ideas and practices of Walter Rodney it is pertinent to query, if this depression is worse than 1930, are we to expect worse forms of bigotry, racism, competition and intensified wars? These questions bring us to how Walter Rodney penetrated the organized and spontaneous activities of the peoples of the oppressed world in the midst of the depression and war. Inside the United States, there have been some sections of the progressive forces who continue to speak about the capitalist system as if it were business as usual, but every day from the Fall of Lehman brothers to the Eurozone crisis to the present meltdown of the banks in Cyprus we are reminded that we living on the precipice of a catastrophic event of the world capitalist system.
The big difference between the crisis today and that of the 1930s is that, in this period of independent African states, European powers could no longer use extra economic coercion such as “Plant More Crops” or other forms of coerced labor. In a little known monograph, World War II and the Tanzanian Economy, Walter Rodney had written on how the Depression and war demanded austerity within Europe, the British colonial authorities within Africa were concerned with the need for “increased acreages of the conventional export crops and others which were deemed essential. It had already become standard practice to force Africans to grow more of the marketable crops at times of crisis in the global capitalist economy. This was a policy pursued in a somewhat disorganized form during the 1920s, and taken up very seriously when the Great Depression struck. The clearly stated objective of the colonial Administration was to ensure that Africans maintained the total value of colonial production in spite of falling prices. The only way that this could be done was to exhort and ultimately coerce them to ‘plant more crops’ and hence the campaign of this name.”
The point made by Rodney was the response by the people brought about new forms of struggle that ushered in the nationalist phase of African history. Today, the competition between the capitalist powers are just as intense as in the period of the last depression and war and the inspiration of Walter Rodney is for us to grasp the essential nature of the international balance of forces and to be clear on how to organize and mobilize to beat back the forces of darkness and exploitation. Walter Rodney studied war, imperialism and its impact on peoples in order to inspire resistance, greater organization and for peoples to learn to move from one form of organizing to the next. This is the essence of the politics of self-emancipation. Walter Rodney was a human who believed in the basic and simple dignity of all human beings.
There will be many tributes and meetings to commemorate his life and work. Unfortunately many younger members of the left have not heard of the life and work of Walter Rodney as a thinker and activist of the 20th century. One of our many challenges in this moment is to draw from the spirit of Walter Rodney to elevate the ideas of human emancipation and build on these ideas in the quest for revolutionary change
Horace G. Campbell is a noted international peace and justice scholar and Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. Born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, he has been involved in Africa's Liberation Struggles and in the struggles for peace and justice globally for more than four decades. From his years in Toronto, Canada, to his sojourns in Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, the United Kingdom and parts of the Caribbean, he has been an influential force offering alternatives to the hegemonic ideas of Eurocentrism. In an attempt to theorise new concepts of revolution in the 21st century he has been seeking to expand on the ideas of fractals and the importance of emancipatory ideas.