Walter Rodney, born in Guyana on 22nd of march in 1942, Pan-African, Marxist intellectual who was assassinated by the Guyanese government in 1980 at 38 years old.
Rodney attended the University College of the West Indies in 1960 and was awarded a first class honors degree in History in 1963. He later earned a PhD in African History in 1966 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England, at the age of 24.
Rodney traveled extensively and became well-known as an activist, scholar, and formidable orator. He taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania from 1966-67 and 1969-1974, and in 1968 at his alma mater University of the West Indies.
On October 15th, 1968, the government of Jamaica declared Rodney a “persona non grata” and banned him from the country. Following his dismissal by the University of the West Indies, students and poor people in West Kingston protested, leading to the “Rodney Riots”, which caused six deaths and millions of dollars in damages.
In 1972, Rodney published “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”. Historian Melissa Turner describes the work this way: “A brutal critique of long-standing and persistent exploitation of Africa by Western powers, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a powerful, popular, and controversial work in which Rodney argued that the early period of African contact with Europe, including the slave trade, sowed the seeds for continued African economic underdevelopment and had dramatically negative social and political consequences as well. He argued that, while the roots of Africa’s ailments rested with intentional underdevelopment and exploitation under European capitalist and colonial systems, the only way for true liberation to take place was for Africans to become cognizant of their own complicity in this exploitation and to take back the power they gave up to the exploiters.”
On June 13th, 1980, Rodney was killed in Georgetown, Guyana via a bomb given to him by Gregory Smith, a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force, one month after returning Zimbabwe. In 2015, a “Commission of Inquiry” in Guyana that the country’s then president, Linden Forbes Burnham, was complicit in his murder.
“If there is to be any proving of our humanity it must be through revolutionary means.”
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Walter Rodney
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A lib on my timeline posted the poem “voting as fire extinguisher”
In response to a thread about how even if you hate the west, a collapse of the American empire will be very bad for everyone and it will disproportionately affect third worlders and the marginalized and so you should fight to stave off collapse… by voting for democrats.
And all I can think is that the joke there is that the fire extinguisher is empty. More than that, it was never filled in the first place. The company tasked with making them realized it’d be cheaper to make cans in the shape of extinguishers but without the fire removedant.
For one, it should be obvious that everyone in the political class is beholden to the corporate and military interests that actually govern the nation. Two, even if that weren’t true, and Joe Biden or name any other democrat here genuinely wanted to stop the far-right, they just clearly aren’t the men for the moment. They are not going to, by force of will, alter the historical epoch that is unfolding. They don’t believe in anything enough to even try.
Lastly, if America is collapsing, then the collapse began long ago. I might suggest the War in Afghanistan as the start, but I’m no historian. Even if Biden wanted to stop it, even if he was the man for the moment, the moment’s long past.
Maybe it’s just because the message completely fails to land for me, but it also just reads like a really awful poem.
Yeah it sucks. I can’t call myself a poetry connoisseur but I hate this style of writing normal ass sentences and using line breaks to inject melodramatic rhythm into them.
Like seriously just this “poem” as a short paragraph would be an improvement even if the idea it is getting across is infuriatingly infantile