My Encounter with Walter Rodney After His Death

I did not know Walter Rodney or even hear about him until after he died. I didn’t read his work as a secondary school student. This changed in August 1980 when I got into the School of Basic Studies (SBS) at Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) in Zaria.

As I moved around ABU, from the Main Gate to the Senate Building and the students’ hostels, I kept seeing posters of Rodney. His picture was on the posters along with his name, Walter Rodney. There were details about his birth and death dates. The posters had a bold quote that said, “This Act In Itself Will Not Delay Their Day of Judgment.”

These posters made me curious. Who was this Walter Rodney? What happened to him? Was he killed? What does the quote mean? Who are the “their” mentioned? What “Day of Judgment” is being referred to? Is there a “Day of Judgment” apart from the one known only to ALMIGHTY GOD? These questions ran through my mind during and after the registration for my SBS program.

I didn’t spend the night on campus. I went to Kaduna where my family lived. It was a Friday, and I could not sleep because Rodney was on my mind. I had no one to ask about him. Remember, there was no internet back then.

When school started, I chose history as a course. All our history and political science lecturers mentioned Rodney in their lectures. One Zimbabwean lecturer, whom we called Dzimbo, often talked about Rodney like the course was all about him.

Dzimbo and other lecturers introduced us to Rodney’s book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (HEUA). They said it was a must-read for anyone interested in Africa's history and underdevelopment. The book claims that Western Europeans and Arabs laid the groundwork for Africa’s problems.

They invaded Africa, took its resources, and enslaved its people to build Western Europe, the US, and Canada. This created a disconnect in African societies and imposed colonialism, unfair trade, and excluded Africans from their own history.

Rodney’s HEUA, according to Dzimbo and others, changed our understanding of African history. It challenged the “imperialist”, “neo-colonial”, and “bourgeois” narratives we learned in secondary school and from the media. They described HEUA as critical, thought-provoking, and revolutionary history.

I was captivated. I knew history could be “critical” and “radical” from my secondary school days. Books like JB. Webster’s and KBC Nwubiko’s made me curious about history.

But how could history be “scientific”? It’s not biology, chemistry, or physics. Why would the US Central Intelligence Agency bomb a historian just for writing a book?

These questions troubled me as I began my studies at SBS. I felt I needed to know more about Rodney. I bought HEUA from ABU Bookshop and read it with both pain and curiosity.

At ABU’s ‘Gossip Centre’, where male students would sit and watch female students, we discussed Rodney as a brilliant African-Caribbean historian, a dedicated Pan-Africanist, and a radical political activist.

In the Movement for a Progressive Nigeria (MPN) and the Youth Solidarity on Southern Africa (YUSSA), we learned that Rodney believed, like Karl Marx and others, that “philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.”

As a Pan-Africanist, Rodney helped national liberation struggles in Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, and South Africa while teaching in Tanzania. He educated and inspired Southern African liberation fighters.

In 1974, Rodney returned to Guyana to become a full-time revolutionary. He worked to educate and unite various groups to take political power for socialist change.

In the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences (FASS), we reviewed and critiqued HEUA in our first-year history course. Professor Okello Oculi made us create a fictional dialogue between Lord Lugard and Rodney.

We felt it was unfair to critique someone like Rodney. At an MPN meeting, I learned that to critique does not mean to criticize but to summarize the book and discuss its relevance to modern Africa.

By the time we submitted our essays on HEUA, many of us had come to understand Rodney. We discussed his ideas and agreed with him that “colonialism had only one hand, it was a one-armed bandit.”

Rodney believed there were “African accomplices inside the imperialist system” that helped underdevelop Africa. We agreed with him that Africa could only develop by breaking free from the imperialist system.

Rodney was murdered on 13 July 1980. He was born on 23 March 1942, living just 38 years. But in those years, he fought for the liberation of Africans in Africa and the Americas.

Rest in peace, Brother Walter Rodney.