TODAY MARKS the 30th anniversary of the political assassination of the internationally famous Guyanese-born Caribbean historian and political activist, Dr. Walter Rodney.
He was killed in a bomb explosion while in his car on the night of June 13, 1980 at the young age of 38 in Georgetown.
The tragedy occurred at the height of national protests against controversial policies and programmes of the People’s National Congress (PNC) government of then President Forbes Burnham.
Today, a series of memorial activities are scheduled to take place in Guyana, some other Caribbean Community states, in the United Kingdom and in the United States of America.
Activities in Guyana — organised by the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), of which Rodney was a founder-leader — include a ceremony for the opening of the site where Rodney’s death occurred on Hadfield Street in Werk-en-Rust, Georgetown.
The iconic Caribbean novelist and commentator, George Lamming, who delivered the eulogy at Rodney’s funeral with an overflow of mourners at the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Georgetown, was to note:
“Sometimes it may take a death and a special kind of dying to quicken the truth that is not urgently alive in our own consciousness. Today, we meet in a dangerous land, and at the most dangerous of times.
“The danger may be that supreme authority, the supervising conscience of the nation, has ceased to be answerable to any moral law; has ceased to respect any minimum requirement of ordinary human decency…”
Walter Rodney’s death, declared Lamming, “like the manner of his dying, has quickened this truth and provoked within and beyond Guyana a rage and grief which official authority could never have anticipated.”
Lamming noted that “to turn murder into a mockery of the dead is the ultimate blasphemy against all forms of living…”
Eighteen years later, the Jamaican historian and writer, Rupert Lewis, a personal friend of Rodney’s, was to record in his book, ‘Walter Rodney’s Intellectual and Political Thought’:
“Rodney belonged to the generation of postcolonial historians of Africa and the Caribbean who embarked on the project of rewriting the history of the regions affected by the Atlantic slave trade, from the standpoint of those whose voices had been muted in the historical record…”
“It was,” said Lewis, “pioneering work, and it was, as well, a pioneering time, coming as it did at the end of European colonial rule in Africa and the birth of independent African regimes…”