Walter Rodney, born in Guyana on this day 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.”
- Walter Rodney
I hope you nerds have a great March. 
Remember no crackers
If I can push back a little bit.
I think the cis-het/queer dichotomy is not really the same. For instance, the men of the resistance axis are “cis-het” and yet represent some of the greatest that humanity has to offer at this moment. The “cis-het” women of the region as well.
I am sure that many “queer” zio settlers have been sent to hell by these brave men of resistance.
I saw a tweet the other day that the men of the resistance are also reviving the possibility of positive masculinity. I have been making this point for a long time. I feel as if the paradigm that men/cis-het are enemies in the way that, for instance white supremacy & Jewish supremacy work, is not really analogous.
Not all men are complicit at least not the same way. Idk. It just feels weird to say that the sons and fathers in Gaza for instance are benefitting from patriarchy.
I definitely get what you’re saying. Me goofing with this analogy relates to a more generalized context in which a queer person is a victim of bigotry at the hands of cishet people specifically because of their queerness. However, I see how it is not necessarily the same, though, because, in such a case, a cishet Palestinian has no power over a lesbian settler. A mentality that queers can never oppress cishet people in any capacity or anything of the sort would be short-sighted.
I also definitely agree that people lose sight of how other aspects of one’s identity can factor into these kinds of things. For instance, discourse that flattens things down to a “man = oppressor” and “woman = oppressed” dichotomy have been able to overlook the fact that white women have notoriously weaponized their white womanhood to enact violence against Black men and are just as complicit as white men when it comes to committing racist atrocities.
Solid point to consider overall!
Yes its a common experience “be nice to your abusers”. I think we are in agreement Thank you for engaging my points 🫡
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