Guyanese Marxist historian who demonstrated how Europe underdeveloped Africa, scholar-activist of the Pan-African revolution
"For the only great men among the unfree and the oppressed are those who struggle to destroy the oppressor." — How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972)
A Guyanese Marxist historian and Pan-African activist, Rodney reshaped Third World historiography with How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), arguing that the slave trade, colonialism, and the capitalist world system structurally produced Africa's underdevelopment. From the Dar es Salaam and West Indies campuses he helped build a decolonised social science, and in Guyana he pursued a socialist politics grounded in multiracial working-class solidarity.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1963BA History (first-class honours), University College of the West Indies
- 1966PhD African History, SOAS, University of London
- 1966–1974Lecturer then associate professor, University of Dar es Salaam & UWI Mona
- 1968Banned from Jamaica by Hugh Shearer government; Rodney Riots erupt
- 1972Publishes How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
- 1974–1980Returns to Guyana; active in the Working People's Alliance
- 1979Arrested on arson charges; dismissed for lack of evidence
- 1980Assassinated by car bomb in Georgetown
Jamaican Expulsion and the Working People’s Alliance in Guyana
In 1968, while teaching at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Rodney met with working-class communities, including Rastafarians, and criticized Jamaica’s middle-class elite and government for neglecting poor people. After he attended the Black Writers Conference in Canada that October, the Jamaican government declared him persona non grata on sedition grounds and barred his return. Students marched in protest on October 16; police action and the involvement of non-students turned the protest into a riot. Security forces confined students on the Mona campus for several days until they agreed to return to classes. The episode followed less than a year of Rodney’s teaching in Jamaica and linked his political work among students and disadvantaged communities to a wider public response. Three of his speeches from that period appeared in Groundings with My Brothers (1969).
Rodney returned to Guyana in 1974 after accepting a professorship in African history at the University of Guyana, but the Forbes Burnham government’s People’s National Congress rescinded the appointment. He remained in Guyana and became a leader of the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), formed in 1974 from several smaller organizations. The WPA sought to unite working people across racial and ethnic lines, including Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese, and to gain political power through elections. Rodney’s A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 presented the shared labor and economic conditions of those communities in historical terms. In June 1979 the WPA declared itself a political party; its organizing across those communities posed a new political challenge to the Burnham government.