The author reports on the Walter Rodney conference, which took place in March 2019 at the London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and whose theme was “On Walter Rodney: Pan-Afrikanism, Marxism and the Next Generation”.

Thirty-eight years have passed since Walter Rodney was assassinated in Guyana on 13 June 1980 in Georgetown, Guyana’s capital city, but his legacy lives on beyond his home-country. 

From chattel slavery to the current period of neocolonial flag independence, the Caribbean labouring classes have yet to exercise substantive power over the political institutions that govern their lives. A system of popular assemblies with the capacity to challenge the authoritarian liberal capitalist democracies for power would be one of the best expressions of reparatory justice in the Caribbean.

While inequality has become a topic of increased popularity and politicization in recent years, most of the attention has focused on how 1% own an increasingly large share of the world’s wealth, rather than on inequalities between nations. In a global context in which national borders and citizenship pose few barriers to the mobility of capital, the reality is also a story of the world’s richest nations continuing to reap a disproportionate amount of the globe’s profits.

In his new book, South African academic Ndangwa Noyoo contends that Africans can longer continue to attribute their underdevelopment to the machinations of Europeans and other foreigners. Africans themselves are to blame for their own failings. An excerpt.

The renowned radical scholar-activist was murdered 36 years ago because he did not fit into the old political mold, where leaders accepted the colonial structure and wallowed in its fineries, especially the misuse of the machineries of state to silence dissent. His death reminds all progressive people of their responsibility to organize and resist the abuse of state power.

IS THERE NO JUSTICE FOR MURDER, EVEN AFTER 36 YEARS? COMMISSION REPORT ISSUED ON ASSASSINATION
OF DR. WALTER RODNEY. HOWEVER, THE GUYANA GOVERNMENT HAS REFUSED TO MAKE THE REPORT PUBLIC OR ACT ON THE COI RECOMMENDATIONS.