Revolutionary for Our Time: The Walter Rodney Story
This is an excerpt of Leo Zeilig’s book, A Revolutionary for Our Time: The Walter Rodney Story published by Haymarket Books in 2022. The book is the first full-length study of Rodney’s life. This excerpt, which looks at Rodney’s time as an undergraduate student at the University of the West Indies, Mona, is publish on this website with the permission from Leo Zeilig and Haymarket Books.
Walter’s passion was history. Stimulated by Moore’s encouragement and teaching, he became the president of the history society at the school, as well as vice president of the debating society and editor of the school magazine, The Lictor. In 1960, at the age of seventeen, Rodney left Guyana for the first time to start a degree at the University of the West Indies (UWI). Like many colonial universities at the time, it was set up in 1948 as a satellite of the University of London—the apparent font of all learning and culture. Regarded as an elite institution training students who would become civil servants, politicians, and minor intellectuals, it was envisaged that the UWI would provide the West Indies with the cadre needed to run ex-colonial states.
Initially, Walter thought of pursuing a career as a lawyer, and his father wanted him to be a diplomat. Finally, however, he decided to pursue his interest in history under the tutelage of Douglas Hall, Roy Augier, and Elsa Goveia—whose lectures he had used to prepare an improvised book at Queen’s. Though popular at university among both students and lecturers, Walter’s “spontaneity” and his radical opinions, in a conservative environment, occasionally worked against him. Rodney’s radicalism was clearly unpopular among some students who saw his increasing interest in the poor and marginalized in Jamaican society as a worrying sign, as seen in his 1962 loss in an election to join the student council.
Nevertheless, the university was changing, and Rodney absorbed the new mood. As he recalled in 1975, “[T]he university had begun the nationalist pilgrimage. University faculty and students in disciplines such as history and in other fields such as economics, politics and sociology had made the breakthrough against a purely externally oriented kind of syllabus. This was a process that Rodney labeled the “nationalist phenomenon”—in which the people of the Caribbean could start seeing themselves as a nation, a collective, with the task of overturning a rotten and racist history.
The faculty and program at UWI were helpful in this regard. They were at least raising the nationalist question and by raising the nationalist question it ultimately pointed me, for instance, in the direction of Africa. From Caribbean history, from looking at the slave trade, one decided that one needed to understand slavery and understand the cultural background of Africa.
These were early days, and the connection between the Caribbean and Africa, automatic and obvious as it seems today, was still felt mainly at the intuitive level for Rodney. However, he was moving toward a deep and connected understanding of the people, politics, and history of the two regions.
Rodney was not just a bookworm; he was also a young man who wanted to live fully. Arriving in Jamaica in 1960, he saw a society and people who were a “breed apart”—lively, dynamic, and energetic. He siphoned the spirit of the island into his work and life, and was changed by the island. His praise was high: “[F]or staying power, for sheer energy, Jamaican people seem to have us all beat.” He saw rebellion cut deeply into the people’s psychology. “Jamaicans can curse more proficiently than any other Caribbean people . . . and I think this is a testimony to their combativeness.” He would later credit this energy and mettle for their ability to nip British racism in the bud. “Jamaicans had a way of striking back that did not brook too much playing about ... [they] would behave in what I used to think was an amazingly bellicose and provocative manner . . . [and] would take on a whole railway station if necessary and would move forward to single out a white man, snatch him and hit him.” The Jamaicans had shown Rodney, as a university student, their cheeky, rebellious irreverence in the early 1960s, but he would see this again in the UK, and later in the 1960s when he returned to the island. In London, “the Jamaican brothers were out there in the street defending the whole race, as it were.” A people who could do this—survive and resist in a hostile land (and run the entire transport, health care, and welfare system)—were clearly “people who had almost unlimited capacity for change.”
Times were also changing, and it was not in Washington or London but in the countries of the global South where the new world would be made. Less than 250 miles away in Cuba, a revolution in 1959 had recently overturned the brutal US-backed puppet dictatorship led by President Fulgencio Batista. Walter watched these developments with keen interest. Declining an invitation to attend a meeting of the USSR-backed, Prague-based International Union of Students (IUS) in Moscow in June 1961, he instead undertook a tour of the Caribbean. Returning to Kingston, Walter was immediately on the radar of the Jamaican intelligence services—the Special Branch. Worried, they contacted their Guyanese counterparts to find out if they had a file on him in Georgetown.
On a trip to Cuba in January 1962, the Jamaican security apparatus, who were now keeping close tabs on Walter, wrote with exaggerated imaginings that there “is reason to believe that whilst in Cuba Rodney and his companions were visited in the Hotel by Castro himself.” When the group of three students returned to Kingston, they had with them, as the intelligence service recorded, a “considerable amount of Communist literature and subversive publications of the IUS, including Che Guevara’s ‘Guerrilla Warfare.’” The books were seized by customs and temporarily held. In a student newsletter, a defiant Rodney denounced the authorities for seizing what was a “quite innocuous” gift from the Cubans. In a tone of panic, a brief in Rodney’s intelligence file complained that he was consorting with students, “most notably Colin A. Moore, a Guyanese and Communist sympathizer,” to form the Students Democratic Party, “the aim of which was to spread Marxism throughout the West Indies.”
Interestingly, at about this time, in early 1962, Rodney—according to the intelligence files—“made his first contact with the Rastafarians.” Rodney’s political agitation on campus also continued, undeterred by state surveillance; as the global development scholar Michael O. West writes, “[T]he tireless agitator threw in his lot with the working people.” By May, Rodney was apparently attempting “to instigate a strike of the subordinate staff of the UWI.”
In August 1962, Walter traveled to Leningrad to attend the annual meeting of the IUS that he had not been able to attend the previous year—flying first to Havana. Traveling over such an enormous distance to the Soviet Union—likely on board Czechoslovak State Airlines (CSA), which directly linked the island to the Soviet bloc by commercial aviation in 1961—was no mean feat, for it required refueling at multiple stops on the way, possibly in Conakry, Guinea (a newly independent West African state aligned to the Soviet Union), or in Prague. Passenger air travel was still the technological avant-garde in the early 1960s, and it was not until 1963 that there was a regular “nonstop” service from Havana to Moscow—which was still considered “dangerous” and involved refueling in Murmansk. In fact, an entire CIA file in August 1963 was dedicated to the opening of this route.
Using these opportunities to travel far from the prying eyes of Ja- maican censors, he continued to read the abundance of literature on the history of revolutions and socialist politics. These expensive international trips were facilitated by success at the university; winning the “student of the year” prize in 1962, for example, had awarded Rodney the funds for his extended trip to various islands throughout the Caribbean.
Years later, Rodney would recall the impression that his visit to the Soviet Union had on him: “I was struck on arrival at the airport by the physical demeanor and the social aspect of the people in the airport. They were workers and peasants, as far as I could see, who were flying on those TU-104’s to Moscow, to Leningrad, etc., as though they were using a bus.”33 There is some exaggeration in Rodney’s account. By 1950, passenger air travel was only 1.4 percent of total passenger turnover, rising to almost 19 percent in 1987. But the country had pioneered one of first passenger jets in 1956, and the rate of expansion was rapid. By 1968, for example, air travel was possible to thirty-five hundred cities and towns, though the cost was still high and certainly out of reach for most workers and peasants.
When Rodney traveled to the Soviet Union on tours organized—or choreographed—by “friendship” organizations, he was amazed, he explained, “at the number of books they sell—in the streets, on the pave- ment, all over.” What is more, there did not seem to be such a sharp social division in cultural activities; Rodney was surprised to see “ordinary people” going to the Bolshoi Ballet. This was not the elite activity of the ruling class. Exaggerated though these observations might now appear, Rodney was also responding to the fact that the Soviet Union had emerged from semi-feudalism only a few decades before and now seemed to be at the vanguard of highly technical and complex development.
If Rodney reacted to the sights and sounds of the Soviet Union with awe and surprise, in Cuba, a neighboring island in the Caribbean, the effect was one of inspiration. “I got some insight at an early period into the tremendous excitement of the Cuban Revolution. This was 1960, just after the victory of the revolution. One has to live with a revolution to get its full impact, but the next best thing is to get there and see a people actually attempting to grapple with real problems of development.” The Soviet Union had appeared “settled” and “smooth” to the young traveler; the revolution had taken place years before. However, Cuba still moved and throbbed to the beat of the transformation that had just taken place. The Cubans, Rodney recalls, were “talking and bustling and running and jumping and really living the revolution in a way that was completely outside of anything that one could read anywhere or listen to or conceptualise in an island such as Jamaica, which is where I was still.”
Returning to the classroom in colonial-controlled Jamaica, Rodney confronted tutors and lecturers still steeped in the suffocating, self-obsessed tedium of academic privilege and superiority. Writing a term paper on Lenin and the Russian Revolution, Rodney observed that the founding Bolshevik was a man of “doing,” or practice, and, at the same time, “intellectualizing”—“a revolutionary intellectual” as Rodney labeled him. For academia, there could be no greater insult. Rodney’s tutor stated, “There is no such thing. One can be an intellectual or one can be revolutionary. You can’t combine the two . . . the moment he moves into practical activity he must abandon intellectualism.” To be chastised in the classroom, told or ordered onto the correct path, can work in exactly the opposite way it is intended; in this case, Rodney learned the lesson: “I felt that somehow being a revolutionary intellectual might be a goal to which one might aspire,” he recalls, “for surely there was no real reason why one should remain in the academic world . . . and at the same time not be a revolutionary.”
Rodney was exploring a world that was beginning to emerge from centuries of slavery and colonialism. Clive Yolande Thomas, a comrade and friend, describes the period in terms of the possibilities and the sense of hope: “We felt the world was really our oyster. . . . So many people of our generation were motivated to do something toward the development of a more prosperous society, and certainly to re-establish dignity and development of the West Indian people.” None of these extraordinary trips alone made Rodney a Marxist, but they did constitute one of the “little levers” that pushed him further along the path.
By mid-1963, Rodney was finishing his first degree—the first step toward an academic career. The intelligence report on Rodney recorded that from December 1962 to June 1963, “he seems to have been politically inactive, probably because he was preparing for his finals.” The file acknowledged Rodney’s seriousness, “a diligent and intelligent student,” who graduated with first-class honors. After pausing to complete his studies, he quickly returned to activism as a “sympathizer” of the Young Socialist League, a left-wing grouping within the opposition People’s National Party (PNP), whose objective, according to the intelligence file, “was social revolution in Jamaica. It was non-violent.”
The University of Guyana was ready to secure him a post, on condition that he continue his studies and obtain a higher degree; the Institute of Social and Economic Research at UWI offered him a short-term contract as an assistant researcher. However, Rodney decided to apply for a doctorate in the UK—at Cambridge, Oxford, and Edinburgh, and, in last place, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. In an entry dated June 1964, his “student record”—a document noting his academic progress from school to his completed bachelor’s in history at UWI—states:
Walter Rodney entered the University College in October 1960 on an Open Scholarship. He was nominated for the Faculty of Arts Prize at the end of his first year. Awarded the BWIA prize [a “student of the year” award sponsored by the British West Indian Airways] as the outstanding second year male student in the College.
Walter’s professor of history commented in the report: “Rodney is a first-class man. Intends to specialise in African History and has an excellent future before him in that field.”
Studying in the UK must have seemed an obvious choice for Rodney. Still, he had no illusions: he knew that the UK had been the violent center of the slave trade, and that Europe was a center of the modern world of which he was already an astute critic. Moreover, Rodney’s life in Kingston had not been solely about debate and academic study. While he was at the UWI, he had also started a relationship with Patricia Henry, who lived in Guyana and, quite soon after they met, left to study nursing in the UK in 1961. They kept in touch by letter, then resumed their relationship in London in 1963. Their life together soon began.