African Revolutionary Writers, Part 10c
Walter Rodney
Walter Rodney was a revolutionary
intellectual born in Guyana who is also eternally associated with the
Dar-es-Salaam University school of African Revolutionary Writers, of which we
have already featured two others in this series, namely Issa Shivji and Mahmood
Mamdani.
Rodney was assassinated in his birthplace of Georgetown,
Guyana, on 13 June 1980, while running for office in Guyanese elections. There
is another biography of Walter Rodney here.
This downloadable text linked below is a much longer one
than usual in this Communist University African Revolutionary Writers Series. It
is the last item in the last part. It is the 44-page Chapter Six of Walter
Rodney’s “How
Europe Underdeveloped Africa”.
The entire book can be downloaded in PDF format by clicking here
(1069 KB).
More writings of Walter Rodney are available in the MIA Walter Rodney Archive .
In particular, the following five articles are recommended:
- Tanzanian
Ujamaa and Scientific Socialism, 1972
- The
African Revolution, 1972
- Marxism
and African Liberation, 1975
- Class
Contradictions in Tanzania, 1975
- International
Class Struggle in Africa, the Caribbean and America, 1975
“How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” made a huge impact when
it was first published. It still continues to have legendary status among the
African Revolutionary writings, and rightly so.
Rodney marshals the facts and the literature and he makes
the arguments. He takes on Imperialist theories of “underdevelopment” head-on,
and he overturns them.
Bourgeois theorists and academics, to the surprise of the
naïve among us, proceeded to ignore Rodney after his death, and to revert to
even more reactionary theories than before in their universities. Hence the
importance of maintaining the currency of this literature, and keeping the
dialogue around it fresh, in a virtual University, or Republic of Letters.
The late Walter Rodney was himself a scholar of the literature
that we have attempted to revisit, and sample, in this CU African Revolutionary
Writers Series. This is apparent from the essays that are in the Walter Rodney
Archive, linked above. Rodney is a very good example for us. Not only did he
have his own ideas, but he also knew where they fitted in relation to past
writers, and to contemporary writers.
Rodney gives his reflections on the historic place of many
of our chosen African Revolutionary Writers, including Kwame Nkrumah and Julius
Nyerere, as you will see if you read these essays.
Therefore all these works of Walter Rodney’s can serve well to
conclude our series, as a critical summing up by an eminent scholar as well as by
a leader and revolutionary martyr.
Viva, Walter Rodney, Viva!
Viva all the African Revolutionary Writers, Viva!
Please
download and read the text via this link:
Walter
Rodney, Colonialism, System for Underdeveloping Africa, C6, 1973, 1973
(34211 words)
Further reading:
Kwame
Nkrumah, Neo-colonialism, 1965, Compilation (10643 words)
Kwame Nkrumah, African
Socialism Revisited, 1967 (2587 words)
Julius Nyerere, Arusha
Declaration, 1967 (7170 words)
The End
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