Reading Walter Rodney in Occupied Azania

By Joseph Mullen in the Review of African Political Economy

The revolutionary work and activism of Walter Rodney was celebrated in Cape Town as workers and students gathered to read his work in the context of neocolonial capitalism in Azania. Joseph Mullen writes about a weeklong event in June which marked 50 years since the publication of Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

Two days of tragedy marked the beginning and end of a week of celebration in South Africa, entitled “Walter Rodney: Anti-Imperialist Politics Today”. We commemorated the 50th anniversary of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa on 13 June, the date of Walter Rodney’s assassination in 1980, when a neocolonial government silenced a revolutionary individual and 16 June, the beginning of the 1976 Soweto Uprising in South Africa, when a settler colonial regime began killing young people across the country.

In both events, revolution was suppressed with egregious violence, but over 40 years later, the revolutionary spirit represented by Walter Rodney and the youth of Soweto was resurrected in Cape Town as workers and students gathered to read Rodney in the context of neocolonial capitalism in Azania.