WALTER RODNEY’S REMOVAL – 33 years later – by Eusi Kwayana

WALTER RODNEY’S REMOVAL – 33 YEARS LATER – by Eusi Kwayana

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa  to be translated into Mandarin Chinese.

Dr. Walter Rodney

Thirty -three years after his violent and uninvestigated removal from this planet and from the company of his family, friends, students, and compatriots, his comrades and the world community that embraced him, Walter Rodney continues to  make history. Apart from the fact that institutions of learning find his written  works and ideas highly relevant in the twenty -first century, and necessary to the understanding of the Global human experience,  the Walter Rodney Foundation inspired and created  by his  widow Dr Patricia Rodney,  has been tireless  in  making sure that his contribution to social thought  in a short life span of thirty-eight years is continually available  to the new generations that seek  a  distant dialogue with  human understanding. .

The Walter Rodney Foundation’s website has announced that last September  Dr Patricia , Chair and CEO  accepted an invitation to the People’s Republic of China  and  held conversations  with Ms Gao Mingxiu, Vice Director of the Global and Regional Issues Publications Center,  and Dr Li Anshan, the highly placed and erudite Chinese international academic, and discussed an existing agreement  to translate How Europe Underdeveloped Africa  into Mandarin Chinese, and to publish it in China.  

Dr Li who heads the School of Social Sciences of Peking University and has wide African and international experience  is charged with the translation. More information appears on the  popular website (www.walterrodney foundation.org) The site omits reference to Dr Patricia Rodney’s well received presentation in Beijing. These notes make some historic connections touching the exciting project.

Rodney comes in the trail of a few eminent African with non governmental status  from the Western Hemisphere  who have been warmly embraced by the Chinese at official, academic  and popular levels.  The celebrated Paul Robeson was a household  name in China especially as he  sang in Chinese and English the national  song of China ( Chi Lai! ), introducing it with the  explanation: “This is a song born in the struggle of the brave  Chinese people. It begins, “Chi Lai! Arise  you who refuse to be bond slaves, and ends ‘Chen Jing’-March on”

Closer to the forthcoming publication of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa in the most populated country on earth, and  Dr Patricia Rodney’s  warm reception in Beijing,  is the formal dinner held in Beijing  on February 21, 1959 in honor of  the venerable WEB Du Bois, to celebrate with WEB Du Bois, the scholars’ scholar, peace and liberation warrior,  brother of all the oppressed, acclaimed world figure  and victim of US oppression his 91st birthday.

During that same day Du Bois addressed in a speech to a thousand students and faculty at the University of Peking, his last message directed  to the peoples of China and Africa. The speech was reported in the New York Times.

Born in the United States of America and in Guyana respectively, a quarter of a century apart, Du Bois  and Rodney  were  different  persons of different  generations. One came out of the struggle against  Dr Modibo Kadalie’s  “classical” colonialism. The younger man came out of the struggle of the beguiling, cold war period after world war two. Kagalie styles this  “post- colonial imperialism” One  endured to become  a venerable veteran world figure and celebrity. The other, rising in stature and in works, had barely seen his 38th year when he was cut off.  Yet because  oppression and injustice  persisted their  missions  coincided in many areas though varying in others, showing that indeed for the majority of the world’s peoples, overcoming oppression and its effects has not been as rapid as sometimes supposed.

They were both  educators, teaching in institutions of higher  learning and also in social movements; both were activists  committed  to a redistribution of  political power in the world  and to revolutionary social change, as well as actors in its  painful and costly processes.  Neither ever held office in the State nor aspired to governmental  power.  They both encountered State repression in their countries. They both at timely junctures produced  path-breaking  historic theses helping to break the silence and dispel ignorance of  the history of Africa and how foreign penetration disrupted its overall development.  They both sparked new interest in the continent of Africa, thus breaking the all- round isolation  designed for  Africa  on account of the slave trade and the Berlin Conference. WEB Du Bois published in 1946 “The World  and Africa”  Walter Rodney  published in 1972  “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”  Each in its time shook the conscience of the world, dispelling prevailing ignorance.

Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk  (1903) and  Rodney’s Groundings with my Brothers(1968)  are works directed at different audiences, in the first place, but in the hearing of the world  The first  was directed at the  growing number  of literate African       Americans and the rest of concerned humanity. Groundings  was directed at the growing number of  literate and non literate but intelligent  Caribbean  people   and the rest of concerned humanity. Both served a high purpos, later  or sooner articulated by Martin Carter,  of revealing “the histories of men and the lives of the peoples”    – a purpose, a necessary  task  the teaching historian, like the  educated Griot of old cannot escape. Both  works were revisionary and visionary. Both dealt with a people’s psyche,  and led on to sweeping reorientations of social thought and attitudes.

There are other unintended  parallels,  but these will serve the present purpose.

One important difference comes to mind: Du Bois was***** impatient with Garvey. I suspect not for any trivial  reason, but because he knew the pain it cost him to break through the barriers to deep knowledge of the  community  that bred him  and knowledge of its complexities. He saw this rash newcomer  taking things head -on   with no opportunity for scholarly appreciation.like his. of the inner life. Rodney saw the virtues of Garvey, as curious enough to be self-educated, as not hesitant to undertake tasks presented on a world-wide scale  and undertaking them with the sense of continuing the struggles of a Jamaican plantation society; as ready to take on empires. and build  independent self -governing communities based on  self- made economy, as the ancients and the maroons had done.

They shared, at such a distance of time and location. strong views of the potential role of those who  by gift or effort, or both, had achieved a certain elevation  in relation to the generally deprived  majority community.  Du Bois wrote hopefully of the Talented Tenth. Rodney expressed this same hope in his own idiom suitable to the political economy of his environment. He called on  ed middle class academics to  realise  that their future  lay  with the working people  and their struggles.

Much more to the point, the spirit of the African-Asian Conference at Bandung (1955) seemed  to be part of the intellectual  concerns  of the two scholar -activists in their  separate missions to undo the effects of  what Kadalie insists  are two  regimes of colonialism, the classical, and the “post- colonial” Imperialisms.  During the celebration in his honor in Beijing in 1959, WEB Du Bois, in the spirit of Bandung  of 1955 declared  the Chinese  a colored people and appealed for their common political purpose  to be embraced and pursued to  the avoidance of European domination. Rodney’s “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa ”  rested on  the need for severance from the system designed and controlled by  imperialism.  If, as supposed by some,  in Guyana Rodney had been pursuing  some narrow African resurgence and was not concerned  with the creation of  an empowering polity of African and  Asian descendants with the indigenous people and other elements of the population,  he would not have been martyred.

The part of Dr Patricia Rodney, the Rodney family and the Walter Rodney Foundation members in  reaching agreement for the translation of  How Europe Underdeveloped Africa into Chinese and its imminent publication in China   and the interest and support  of  the Chinese academic  community to begin with are  leaps into the future.This decision of the Chinese academy, 41 years after its publication by Bogle L’Overture  must be at least new  vindication of the  author’s scholarship and global vision .

 eusi Kwayana