TODAY marks the 43rd anniversary of the assassination of Walter Rodney ordered by someone who held a very high office at that time. The praxis of Walter Rodney needs iconoclastic reassessment. I think when you look back 43 years since his death, the canvas is revealing hidden images.
Hidden images have been found in the works of two great European artists recently –Michelangelo and Picasso. Highly sensitive scientific investigation has found invisible formations that were always there on the canvas but were not visible to the naked eyes. It is the same with Rodney.

His assassination has brought global sympathy for his life and work, but inquisitive minds and new evidence have put Rodney in a different light. If there wasn’t the five-month election rigging in 2020, the world would have gone on to see Sydney King aka Eusi Kwayana as a multi-racial advocate for liberty and justice.

But the invisible marks of racism were always there on Kwayana’s shirtsleeve. It took five months in 2020 for us to see what was obscured for over 50 years. The ignominious and comical levels Kwayana descended to in order to justify election rigging have destroyed his legacy.

Together with his side-kick, Moses Bhagwan, young patriots would hardly invoke any admiration for any of the two.
It has to be one of the most disgusting and repugnant political statement in Guyana’s history when Bhagwan wrote that Tacuma Ogunseye is a peaceful and honourable citizen. There was nothing peaceful and honourable about Ogunseye’s activities in Buxton between 2002 and 2006.

I have based my revisionist perspective on Rodney on two factors. One is Rodney’s activities in the 1970s were essentially clothed in a middle class ambiance without even superficial groundings among the working people. Rodney was not a working class revolutionary in the Guyanese context.

Instead, he chose to make revolution in Guyana through the activities of a highly elite middle class group that had no embedded networks in the world of the urban proletariat and the rural peasantry.
The Working People’s Alliance which the Mulatto/Creole middle class invented to topple Burnham, was a highly elitist outfit that was a culturally arrogant clique.

There was no question about it. Rodney’s popularity was ubiquitous, but that popularity was derived more out of the need to remove Burnham rather consolidated, concretised work among the masses. Looking back 43 years ago, Rodney felt he could have removed Burnham through revolutionary charisma rather than through revolutionary socialisation.
The second factor is the suspicion that Rodney had little use for the Indian masses and that Rodney may have been the quintessential Africanist comparable with any other internationally famous Africanist who saw the Africanist projection as a hierarchical scheme, with Afro people entitlement being at the apex.

Rodney’s embrace of Marxism was not antithetical with his Africanist ideology. Two vital and disturbing revelations in 2022 will lead to further questioning of the purity of Rodney’s legacy. One is the statement by PPP stalwart, Ralph Ramkarran.

Mr. Ramkarran asserted that on the day the WPA planned the national uprising against Burnham in 1979, the WPA deliberately chose to keep the PPP in the dark about logistics and strategies (my words) despite the fact that Jagan and Rodney and their lieutenants had been in frequent engagements in their joint pro-democracy activities.

Ramkarran said that when the PPP leadership asked the WPA for information on the day of uprising, Clive Thomas said that the WPA cannot reveal details because the WPA wants it to be a guessing game. That was what the WPA had reduced its political ally to.

Obviously, Rodney either had been the initiator of such an attitude or was part of the WPA’s decision-making when the guessing game policy was adopted.

From this angle, one can argue that Rodney through his middle class comrades, could make revolution without a huge mass-based party, and that the Indian masses were not necessary for the revolution to occur.

Rodney and the WPA hardly did work among the Indian masses. This could have been as a result of a Freudian mind that saw the WPA as a Mulatto/Creole middle class organisation, and that the revolution was for the rightful entitlement of that class after Burnham had degutted it.

In my ongoing series on the MCC, I will come to how the MCC reacted to Burnham’s devastation of it and the resort to Rodney. But I end with the second revealing and disturbing factor.

In his book, “The Walter Rodney story: A revolutionary of our time,” Leo Zeileg cited the situation where Rodney went against his Marxist colleagues at the University of Tanzania and took a purely racial position rather than a class perspective even referring to his Marxist comrades as White Europeans who in turn referred to Rodney as a racist (pp.169-171).