Is a shameful thing when yuh ignorant bout yuh own in front a people (outsiders) who know it well. I had to come here to the United States to learn of Walter Rodney's world-wide importance. Of course I knew of him at home in Guyana before I came here, but I didn't know of his significant contributions to the academic world, particularly in studies on the African Diaspora. Rodney's theory of the way the Atlantic slave trade operated is still a much discussed one in many classrooms and lecture halls around the world. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa should be a mandatory read for ALL Guyanese.
But that's not really how I think of Walter Rodney.
I was 13 years old when he was killed in 1980. As young as I was, I was very much aware of the excitement and promise of a new Guyana he and the Working People's Alliance (WPA) had embodied. Two moments stand out in my memory.
The first was a WPA rally in Better Hope where I lived. The days prior to the rally were rife with political arguments in my home, and in several other neighbouring homes where PNC supporters lived. Die-hard PNC supporters were struggling valiantly to keep the disenchanted from jumping ship to join the WPA. As the crowd for the rally gathered, I stood on the fringes and watched in amazement.
It was the first time (other than in my grandmother's living room where she and some of her neighbours of Indian descent communed regularly) that I saw Guyanese of Indian descent and Guyanese of African descent standing shoulder to shoulder laughing and talking, cheering for the same thing. The same man! The same party! (As if in an attempt to burst any bubble of hope, early the next morning I heard a neighbour telling her husband, "Yuh tink meh nah know ah dem black gyal yuh bina watch out deh last night, nah!")
The second way I remember Walter Rodney is through a classmate's bold act. We had read George Orwell's Animal Farm and had secretly and not-so-secretly drawn comparisons with the state we lived in in Guyana. Some of us whose fathers and mothers had lost their jobs or had been transferred elsewhere for un-Party like behavior were beginning to be incensed. But, most of us whose parents still held their Government jobs remained silent. Then the news spread that the WPA was organizing a rally and calling for students to attend. It was to be a students' protest. The day of the rally, sternly advised by our teachers and parents NOT TO ATTEND, some of us inquisitive ones stood outside the school compound and waited for the rally to pass by. Carmichael Street was one of the rally's routes. We watched the symbolic flags as they waved in the airless hot-sun of the day, and listened to the chants of the brave.
And then there she was.
Leading one of the segments of the marchers was one of the tallest girls in our year at BHS. She wore her BHS uniform and waved that flag at us in cheeky defiance of all the commands from our teachers. Some of us laughed. Most of us smiled at her and waved back. She was doing what so many of us dared not do. And she was doing it in fine style. She was probably suspended for participating in the rally, but we all knew it was well worth it. I'll never forget her and that moment and the soft-spoken, thin, bearded, scholarly man with the breezy afro who led us there.
****
On the calendar of many superstitious Guyanese it is a frightening combination should the thirteenth day of any month be a Friday. For them such a day is a "Black Friday". So it was on Friday, June 13, 1980, the day on which Historian and. Politician Dr. Walter Rodney lost his life in an explosion in a parked car on John and Hadfield Streets... Much more to be read here.
