*Photo: Rodney*
By Omoniyi Ibietan
The Guyanese intellectual, historian and activist, Walter Anthony Rodney, whose magnum opus, HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA, continued to be a compass of historical and theoretical discourse about Africa’s underdevelopment status, was assassinated exactly 40 years ago today, in his birth place, Georgetown, Guyana. He was 38.
An uncommon intellectual and socially entrepreneurial thorn in the flesh of colonialists, neo-colonialists and imperialists, Rodney’s theory of development remains one of the most radical tendencies of the Dependency School. I ‘encountered’ Rodney for the first time at the School of Basic Studies, Kwara State College of Technology, Ilorin, where I studied History, Economics and English at Advanced Level. Since then,
I have read many of Rodney’s works, again and again but HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA is an eternal and unvarnished classic. Any human, who has a linkage with Africa by blood or any other circumstance, and who has the ability to read, should grab a copy of Rodney’s classic. It is a must, I humbly submit. It is a rare attempt at weaponisation of intellection for reclaiming the glory Africa – a melting pot of theory and practice.
Of course Rodney blamed Africans for the sad state of the Continent, he argued that Europe, slavery and the colonial phenomena are unpardonably guilty for Africa’s underdevelopment. If anyone desires a practical expression of Marx and Engels’ theory as it applies to Africa, please read Rodney. Rodney was unarguably a foremost representation of the intellectual-activist. He was a rare philosopher of the African political, social and economic condition.
He remains stellar in the pantheon of our ancestors who deployed intellection, sweat and blood to prosecute the liberation of Africans in Africa and in the diaspora.