What Would Walter Rodney Have Done?
In the latest episode of Politics 101 by David Hinds, Hinds raised a very interesting point about where the politics of Walter Rodney would have been had he been alive today. Nineteen minutes into the video, Hinds states that to understand where Rodney’s views would have been, we have to see where his comrades went.
Hinds gives several examples such as Tim Hector joining with the Birds, Trevor Munroe joining with the PNP in Jamaica, and the Black Power advocates in Trinidad joining with the PNP.
I think it’s very unscholarly to try to suggest what Rodney would have done based on the actions of those who are not Walter Rodney. The fact is that we do not know what Rodney would have done because he is not here to speak for himself, but what we do know is that Rodney expressed a great deal of admiration for the fact that C.L.R. James never compromised his political values. Rodney stated: “James has become a model of the possibilities of retaining one’s intellectual and ideological integrity over a protracted period of time… I’ve always said to myself that I hoped at his age, if I’m still around, I still have some credibility as a progressive, that people wouldn’t look at me and say, ‘This used to be a revolutionary.’”
Rodney praised Eusi Kwayana for a similar reason. He stated: “We take great pride in the presence in our ranks of Eusi Kwayana who is also fairly well known abroad, but who is not just an intellectual or a political figure, but who is as a human being a person of tremendous quality, an individual who has remained uncorrupted, uncorruptible within a context of corruption and squalor. He is a tremendous example to those of us who are younger than he is because if he could have moved through the various epochs of struggle, against first colonialism and then against one or another form of racist distortion in our history, and is still as young, as fresh as ever in his presentation of analysis on the contemporary situation and for the future…” Maintaining his credibility was obviously important to Rodney. He looked to James and Kwayan as examples of elders who demonstrated that it was possible to maintain that credibility as a progressive even in old age.
The problem is that many of Rodney’s comrades have lost their credibility as progressives because so many of them have sided with the very neo-colonial forces which they were once opposed to. The Mighty Chalkdust, a calypsonian whom I have a great deal of admiration for, was very critical of George Weekes for joining the NAR government and critical of Makandal Daaga for joining the PP government. Keep in mind that Chalkdust once sang in praise of NJAC, but he could not support NJAC’s decision to join the PP government. I mention Chalkdust to show that not all of the voices from the period accepted the notion that advocates for Black Power should align themselves with the very political forces which they fought against.
The same thing happened with the Black Power movement in America. We saw examples of this when Muhammad Ali campaigned for Ronald Reagan or when Bobby Rush joined the Democratic Party. I don’t think it follows logically then that we should conclude that Malcolm X would have campaigned for Reagan or that Huey Newton would have ran for office as a Democrat. I don’t think we should conclude on what Walter Rodney would have done based on what others from that era have done.
This topic is obviously an important one to David Hinds since the WPA faced allegations that it had betrayed Walter Rodney by joining the APNU+AFC coalition. I myself have been among those who criticized the WPA’s decision to remain in the coalition when it became obvious that the coalition’s politics were opposed to what the WPA is supposed to stand for. The WPA is supposed to be a party for the working people, so it was disappointing to see the WPA joined in a coalition which was very much against the interests of the working people of Guyana. I understand that Hinds is trying to justify the WPA’s decision to join the coalition — which it has since left after the coalition lost in 2020 — but I don’t agree with the point he is making simply because Rodney himself stated that his aspiration was not to lose his credibility. I would argue that the WPA lost much of its credibility in the five years that the coalition was in power in Guyana.
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Dwayne is the author of One Caribbean and Other Essays
