TODAY’S date in this calendar year is one of the saddest days in the world. I anticipate what you think I am going to write. But sorry to disappoint you. I am not going to write that it is the saddest day because Walter Rodney was assassinated. That was a global tragedy, of course.

It is because on Friday, June 13, 2025, Walter Rodney’s comrades and intimate friends and also family members have assassinated him for the second time. Not one of the close comrades of Rodney who live today adheres to his essential beliefs.

Without exception, all of them have gone in directions of either anti-Indian racism, pro-Western ideologies or have become mediocre drifters desperately trying to remain relevant and in seeking that goal, they come across as either comical or repugnant.

Rodney put the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) onto the world stage. He was the WPA, the WPA was him. Today, look at the former WPA militant he fought with in the trenches? Look at what they have become. This Guyanese hero has to be turning in his grave.

There isn’t a soul in the world today who shared the revolutionary porridge with Rodney as they sat in a government yard fighting Burnham’s oppressors  that says: “Stop, do not desecrate the name of Walter, do not desecrate the name of the WPA that he gave the world.”

I am psychologically floored that Rodney’s wife and son cannot muster the courage to urge that there be a stop to the concatenation of desecrating decibels.

If you go through the pantheon of heroic humans, the zealous custodians protect their legacies with phenomenal energy.

The list is too long to mention – Mahatma Gandhi, Che Chevara, Martin Luther King, Fidel Castro, Cheddi Jagan, Forbes Burnham, Maurice Bishop, Nelson Mandela, Karl Marx, Patrice Lumumba, Steve Biko, and Salavador Allende. I just randomly selected these names.

It is a sad day on June 13 in Guyana in 2025 that the comrades that Rodney walked with in the darkness of night when tall shadows threw light on the enemies waiting in cloistered crevices with daggers in their hands could become what they are today.

Where are these people? Why have they travelled so far from Rodney? Why do the psyches of people become fragile that the dreams of yesterday become poison in their vein?

I was there in the government yard sharing the porridge as we watch soldiers, the police and the thugs their guns. And the guns took lives; Walter Rodney was one.

We shared his porridge then, we shared his ideals then, we shared the hard fight he endured. Why in the passage of years we have thrown away the candle that he handed to us? I look around Guyana and the world where the comrades of Rodney are and I see how incomprehensible the human mind is.

How can the once revolutionary associates of Walter Rodney preach race hate against the Indian people in Guyana when a noticeable percentage of the Indian people in Guyana fall either within the categories of proletariat, lower or middle order peasantry, lower middle class. These are the social classes that Rodney fought for.

Was Rodney in a deep Freudian way an African supremacist and he kept it hidden because of the dialectics of the 1970s? And this would explain why so many of those who were part of his soul became rabid racist and are such today?

There may be research material out there that may sustain an iconoclastic essay on this topic? I am getting on in age and I want to look into this area. But I would reject any assertion that Rodney was an African supremacist.

For me, Rodney’s vulnerability lies in his embedded life with the Mulatto/Creole class (MCC). The difference with Rodney and that class was that Rodney’s experience world-wide diluted his MCC existence when he returned to Guyana. Although endowed with MCC characteristics, Rodney was far more conscious of class roles in Guyana than his MCC colleagues in the WPA’s leadership.

One of the complex factors that have not been written about as yet if whether the MCC class wanted to use violence to topple Burnham but it had no choice but to go along with Rodney because that was Rodney’s agenda.

And it was politically impossible to diverge with Rodney on the justified violent path Rodney had taken. Had they parted with Rodney, it would have taken away the phenomenal national popularity they enjoyed.

I will leave this subject for an academic paper but suffice to say deep, research may reveal logical explanations as to why the once revolutionary comrades of Rodney have transformed themselves into political reactionaries of the worst kind in a Caribbean context.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.