Swithin Wilmot
Greetings and Tributes from the 1st Annual Symposium of The Walter Rodney Foundation
He was among a small, but growing number of students and academics who would stress the importance and relevance of Caribbean and African history to our region in those early post-colonial days; a region that for many years continued to be dominated by curricula emphasizing European and imperial history, despite our political independence. Walter Rodney’s contribution was particularly significant in that he demonstrated the relevance of historical knowledge to the development process. He condemned the notion of reducing the study of our history to an intellectual exercise, and called upon historians of Africa and the African Diaspora to engage in a process of mobilization – to help rid our societies of the legacies of underdevelopment left by centuries of enslavement and colonization and to engage in the process of nation building and popular empowerment. This would require that historians not limit themselves to the halls of academia, but constructively engage themselves with the people of their respective societies; with the people who were in actuality the history-makers.
Swithin was the Head of the Department of History at the University of the West Indies, Mona.