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30 years after Rodney’s assassination…Desmond Trotman of the Walter Rodney Anniversary Commemoration Committee, during a recent press briefing said that the 30th anniversary of Walter Rodney’s assassination is taking place in a land that the great freedom-fighter could hardly have imagined.Trotman told media operatives that Rodney did warn of what he called the creeping “Haitianisation” of the society, “if we failed to excise the cancer of authoritarianism and man-worship that thrived on the racial division of the people and infected the entire body politic.”? Trotman said that Rodney, who was a keen student of social motion, saw with astonishing clarity the degradation that awaited a society that could not summon the energy and courage to root out the corruption that threatened to blight the lives of generations to come.“Thirty years after his cruel and violent removal from among us, the fundamental ills of which he spoke tirelessly and against, which he fought with all his might, continue to poison and deform our society: the rise of the new local master class that ensures the enrichment of the few in the midst of the poverty of the many, the corruption at the heart of the ruling group, the manipulation of the racial division of the people to serve the fatal obsession to win and hold on to power at all cost.”He said that even more than the general degradation that Rodney foresaw if the nation failed to create a radically new order, “and so far we have failed, it is the condition of the human spirit that would have most surprised and disappointed him.”Trotman said that Rodney believed that no amount of oppression could subdue the human impulse for liberation.As such, Rodney would wonder at the lack of vigorous response, the immobility and paralysis of the forces in society that seem to have accepted their relegation to the role of spectators to the unfolding tragedy.“Walter Rodney’s life and example stand as a rebuke to all those who have come to accept that the collapse of values, the sordidness of public life, the increasing pauperisation of the already poor,NFL Jerseys Outlet, and the squalour of everyday life are our lot as citizens of the republic.”Walter Rodney meets with Cheddi JaganTrotman said that in another dry season, in the course of his stirring speech in defence of Arnold Rampersaud, Walter summoned action by saying: “It is only direct action on the part of the people, your own perception of what is possible, that can produce fundamental change. People cannot retire into a belief that they have no power. That is totally incorrect. No single individual has much power,Authentic NFL Jerseys Wholesale China, but the majority of the people have unlimited power. The minority which oppresses will depend, as I said before, on the disunity of the working people. Therefore the political strategy of the working people must be to build a unity.”Walter Rodney was born in Georgetown, Guyana on March 23, 1942. His was a working class family-his father was a tailor and his mother a seamstress.After attending Primary School,NFL Jerseys Outlet From China, he won an open exhibition scholarship to attendQueens College as one of the early working-class beneficiaries of concessions made in the filed of education by the ruling class in Guyana to the new nationalism that gripped the country in the early 1950s.While at Queens College, young Rodney excelled academically, as well as in the fields of athletics and debating. In 1960, he won an open scholarship to further his studies at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. He graduated with a first-class honors degree in History in 1963 and he won an open scholarship to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. In 1966,jerseys nfl wholesale, at the age of 24, he was awarded a Ph.D. with honors in African History.He took up his first teaching appointment in Tanzania before returning to his alma mater, the University of the West Indies, in 1968. This was a period of great political activity in the Caribbean as the countries begun their post colonial journey. But it was the Black Power Movement that caught Walter’s imagination.By the summer of 1968, Rodney’s “groundings with the working poor of Jamaica had begun to attract the attention of the government. So, when he attended a Black Writers’ Conference in Montreal, Canada, in October 1968, the Hugh Shearer-led Jamaican Labour Party Government banned him from re-entering the country. This action sparked widespread riots and revolts in Kingston in which several people were killed and injured by the police and security forces, and millions of dollars worth of property destroyed. Rodney’s encounters with the Rastafarians were published in a pamphlet entitled “Grounding with My Brothers,” that became a bible for the Caribbean Black Power Movement.Having been expelled from Jamaica, Walter returned to Tanzania after a short stay in Cuba. There he lectured from 1968 to 1974 and continued his groundings in Tanzania and other parts of Africa. This was the period of the African liberation struggles,http://www.footlockershop.us.com/Climacool-revolution/, and Walter, who fervently believed that the intellectual should make his or her skills available for the struggles and emancipation of the people, became deeply involved. It was partly from these activities that his second major work, and his best known –How Europe Underdeveloped Africa – emerged. It was published by Bogle-L’Ouverture, in London, in conjunction with Tanzanian Publishing House in 1972.In 1974,http://www.footlockershop.us.com/Climachill-ride-boost-gfx/, Walter returned to Guyana to take up an appointment as Professor of History at the University of Guyana, but the government rescinded the appointment. But Rodney remained in Guyana and joined the newly formed political group, the Working People’s Alliance. Between 1974 and his assassination in 1980, he emerged as the leading figure in the resistance movement against the increasingly authoritarian PNC government. He gave public and private talks all over the country that served to engender a new political consciousness in the country. During this period he developed his ideas on the self-emancipation of the working people, People’s Power, and multiracial democracy.On July 11, 1979, Walter, together with seven others, was arrested following the burning down of two government offices. He, along with Drs Rupert Roopnarine and Omawale, was later charged with arson. From that period up to the time of his murder, he was constantly persecuted and harassed and at least on one occasion, an attempt was made to kill him. Finally, on the evening of June 13, 1980, he was assassinated by a bomb in the middle of Georgetown. |
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