WPA statement on the 20th anniversary of Walter Rodney's Assassination

Traditional Interfaith Memorial Service held for late Walter Rodney

Posted August 29th. 2002

Guyana Chronicle
August 10, 2002
Related Links: Articles on Walter Rodney
Letters Menu Archival Menu
A section of the congregation at the Interfaith Memorial Service for Dr. Walter Rodney held last Wednesday at the Ursuline Sisters Chapel, Camp Street. Standing at the rostrum is Father Malcolm Rodrigues. (Picture by Quacy Sampson)
THE traditional Interfaith Memorial Service for the late Dr. Walter Rodney, distinguished historian and politician, was held at the Ursuline Sisters Chapel, Church and Camp Streets, Georgetown on Wednesday.
The service, which had as its theme "Justice and Peace", was opened with the hymn, "Lord, We Pray for Golden Peace".

The main speaker was Dr. Clive Y. Thomas of the Working People's Alliance (WPA), and he gave a 'Reflection' on the life of Dr. Rodney. Other contributors were Dr. David Hinds; Father Malcolm Rodrigues; Pandit Mohan of the Ocean View Mandir; Brother Kerry Arthur of the Muslim Peace Institute; and Brother Reuben Gilbert of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

There were poems recited by Ms. Karen De Souza of the Working People's Alliance, and Mr. Deon Abrams, while vocalist and guitarist Eric Walker performed a song.

As he reflected on Dr. Rodney's life, Professor Thomas, shared thoughts, which, he said, linger in his mind. The thoughts included the exchanges they had about the future development of Guyana, and Rodney's comments on the awesome resources that abound in Guyana. Dr. Thomas said he vividly remembers Dr. Rodney saying that Guyana was so rich - both in human and natural resources - that Guyanese would have to be "extraordinarily destructive" to be able to create poverty and economic recession.

And on the periods of crisis in Guyana, Thomas recalled Rodney often expressing the hope that there could be created a mechanism that would transform poverty into the "full blossoming" of the potential of Guyanese.
Noting that Dr. Rodney was always an optimist, Professor Thomas added: "He paid the ultimate supreme price a human being could pay...He gave up his life for his beliefs."

Said Mr. Eusi Kwayana in a message on Walter Rodney's political culture: "His interest in political power at all, or in political power for its own sake, has not yet become the standard among political leaders anywhere, and not in the post-colonial world...He taught us to be alert about social formations and class formations in particular, bowing to no dogma on the question of how a given society ought to develop, bowing to no prognosis of doom... He was committed to a society in which no class exploited or oppressed another on any explanation...He did not underestimate the power of race as a factor, but rejected purely racial explanations."
And Dr. David Hinds said that, perhaps Dr. Rodney's ideas were not being sufficiently utilised. He admonished, "As our country lingers on the brink of extinction, we must individually do something tangible as a reflection of his ideas. We must support the efforts to make his legacy real...participate in some effort to bring about justice and peace for Guyana."

Noting that "Walter, would ask nothing less from us", Hinds added: "So when we come back in another year, we should be able to celebrate in a more positive way."
Hinds expressed sadness over the situation that people can see injustice done and remain quiet. He said it was time to move beyond mere words.

In closing Hinds cautioned: "As we see terror and injustice stalk our land, we have got to ask ourselves...'Have we been true to the legacy of our brother, Walter?'"
Meanwhile, Gilbert, reflecting on the life and death of the distinguished Guyanese historian, husband, father, brother, political activist, and Executive Member of the Working People's Alliance said: "This country is now bereft of a great man, cut down by injustice."
Dr. Rodney was killed by an explosive device on a Georgetown street on Friday, June 13, 1980.
Those persons on whose lives he made an impression, do not think death, but affirm: "Walter Rodney lives!" (SHIRLEY THOMAS)

WPA statement on the 21st anniversary of Walter Rodney's Assassination

Posted August 29th. 2001

It is hard to think of a time when the ideas of a fighter, reformer and martyr, who was at the same time a student and explainer of sensitive areas of our history, have been so ignored and disrespected, as is the case of Walter Rodney.

It is natural and human that in the history of peoples the ideas of one social prophet of the nation will come to a point where they are not the main ones needed for the health or healing of the country. But this is usually after the ideas have been allowed to accomplish their mission, after the country has got the best out of them. The disrespect complained of on this twenty-first anniversary of the assassination of Walter Rodney is the tragedy that Rodney's ideas and his vision for Guyana have never been adopted, even for study or for re-examination, much less for instruction.

During the anti-dictatorial struggle, in which the PNC leadership finally played a vital part allowing a peaceful transition, it was agreed among all the parties for change that Rodney was a Guyanese figure and not a party figure. This placed on all of us, though on the WPA directly a
responsibility. This does not require that Rodney's way of thought be adopted, but it is surely a responsibility to ensure that society is helped to move away from the road of ethnic disaffection and competition and conflict, a road with dreadful disadvantages and dangers. Whereas Rodney revealed to us a history cluttered with problems but also loaded with hope and purpose, current events are so offensive that they threaten to leave more antagonism than hope.
This cannot be allowed to go unchallenged and social action must again take the stage and demonstrate that security for all is possible. Those political directorates and international advisers who have failed to study the ideas of Walter Rodney as relevant material for Guyana's future have had no adequate ideas, amounting to a dream, to put in their place. Instead, they have remained bound to the political system, which has failed Guyana for a century and a half and, since independence for thirty years. The contenders empowered by the electorate seem to prefer to court recurrent disaster, if not certain disaster, with an unsuitable political system; better that than to entertain the thought or even risk a national discussion on how to settle an issue created for our peoples by the so-called founders of the colony, which became the REPUBLIC of GUYANA. .

The pattern of events over the last eight years has forced Guyanese to be concerned only with two main issues, Race and Elections, Elections and Race. The burning issues such as the recognition of women, of workers, of the indigenous peoples, of citizens with disabilities, health problems like HIV-AIDS and suicide, domestic violence, rape, incest and abuse of children, the devaluing of human life experienced in the daily murder of our children by traffic, a permanent treatment of the disease of poverty,-- these are some of the day to day issues which do not get the attention they deserve if we are ever to improve our quality of life. Instead of the political process being a major means of improving the quality of life, it has now become the major
agent for of reducing the quality of life.

Thanks to political instability the need for new investment, including domestic investment, is even more acute than when it was proclaimed during the election campaigns of l997 and 2001. However, political instability is such an obstacle that capital flight is the order of the day. An important factor in the normalizing of race relations is the need to make investment a national all- party responsibility.

For some years now the WPA has regarded itself as a party building up experience and expertise in the study of multi-ethnic societies. We want Guyanese to know that at least one party (GAP-WPA) continues to believe that the multi ethnic political society is possible and has rich possibilities. WPA has never accepted and does not now accept, the self-defeating notion that the public affairs of Guyana cannot be organized on equal multi racial lines. We believe it is more than possible. What is lacking are good intentions.

Not for the first time in its history the WPA will send out these messages:

Seek justice. Let us stop doing injustice to others, especially through the use of force and violence. Let us practice justice in every home, in every school, in every place of worship, in every workplace, in every service ministry, in every commercial enterprise, in every organization.
Seek fairness. Let us be fair even to those we have a disagreement with, realizing that freedom and prosperity are for all or no one will enjoy them.

Citizens as a basic right must be able to go about their lawful business passing where they have to in peace and without weapons at all times. Our country can become prosperous when we begin to make it a place where everyone feels safe; when it becomes known as a place of peace and justice, where there is less and less violence and crime, less and less discrimination of any kind and less and less corruption; where benefits like contracts are fairly distributed and where public credit is not reserved for favorites and favorite groups; where the spirit of industry is alive because it is possible to operate cottage industries and be guaranteed the support of the government.

Above all, the party of Walter Rodney, while insisting on peaceful politics, will try to convince working people and all ethnic groups, especially Amerindians, Indian Guyanese and African Guyanese who have the numbers, that they place themselves in a box when in theory or practice they exclude others in our small, multi- racial country from executive and administrative government. or from group opportunities for education, recovery, loans and credit, business and self-employment.

During the constitutional reform process, the WPA made important recommendations for a change of the political system. Some were accepted, notably those reducing the powers of the Executive President and those increasing the effectiveness of the National Assembly. The most fundamental recommendations, those aimed at the construction of a national government, were rejected very early by the two contending major parties. Yet after the final rejection of the June 1999 Appeal for a Transitional National Government, the WPA was able to convince the special Select Committee and the Oversight Committee to adopt a measure, which even though watered down, can be used by any Guyanese group which feels threatened with marginalisation. However, it has to be applied along the lines of self-emancipation. This means the groups will have to organize themselves, define and document their grievances, develop their lines of argument, plan their way out of stagnation and then approach the authorities as a constitutional right after winning over public opinion. Here is that very Rodneyite measure to be written into the reform Constitution:

ARTICLE 38 A:

To make certain that Guyana is a democracy with a healthy economy, the

State shall-

a. ensure that the economy develops in such a way that increasingly persons are facilitated in becoming engaged in activities to achieve sustainable livelihoods;

b. progressively remove all barriers that limit the realization of the potential for self-sustaining activities in such fields as agriculture, processing, manufacturing, and artistic and information-based activities;

c. encourage and support the self-mobilization of persons under the law;

d. provide such sustenance as may be considered appropriate to any group claiming to be under the threat of marginilisation.

WPA

Rodney House

June 13, 2001

WPA statement on the 20th anniversary of Walter Rodney's Assassination

Dear Brothers and Sisters,
I've been asked to pass this message on to all of you on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the assassination of Walter.

Malaika Scott

RODNEY TWENTY YEARS LATER

Twenty years after the act of an assassin felled Walter Rodney and put an end to his physical existence, a wide range of thought and a wide age of interests in Guyana has come together to celebrate his life and his contribution to the health of Guyanese society and the cause of humanity.

Rodney would not like to be represented as a demigod, much of his live energies were spent in combat against demigods of various moulds. He inherited some of the ancient flaws of his gender, but was free from signs of modem degeneration - substance addiction, greed, personal competitiveness, racial chauvinism, class snobbery, professional conceit and self promotion.

His empathy with suffering and his inborn generosity were exemplary. As a student he remains a beacon to young people with his sense of purpose, his determination to use and not abuse his god-given talents and not to fritter away time when there was learning to acquire.

His view of study, like his definition of professional, included not only the area of academic pursuit, but as in Shakespearean language, included the so-called trades. It is refreshing forworking people to realise that he declared that every means of livelihood had its standards - all of which could contribute to the health of the society. Any mention of Walter Rodney's excellence is made in the context in which he grew and blossomed.

It was a context of intellectual ferment and achievement. He came from a Guyana and a Caribbean of many high achievers, many stars which loom larger and brighter when the small population of its human galaxy is taken into account. It is in that context that he was an outstanding figure of our times.

There is abundant proof that, though he could find absorbing interest in the field experiences of a canecutter, or the shop-floor knowledge of bauxite workers, in the business decisions of a market vendor or shopkeeper, in the concerns of business people and engineers, he was not a parish figure. His own desire or invitation took him to various countries in various continents. Because of how they saw him they are in this very season celebrating the twentieth anniversary of his officially ignored exit.

he WPA wishes to say to the High Excellencies of the Republic of France:- If you are really concerned about the possibility of a death penalty, you can take steps which will free you from the stain of accomplice of domestic terrorism. Hand over the suspect. Send an observer to the trial. Work out an agreement with the Guyana government and with the victim's family, if they are so disposed, that after the trial you will receive him back in your custody, whatever the outcome. When we celebrate his life, what are we celebrating? We are celebrating his parents, mother and father, who gave him his first values. We are celebrating his teachers from primary school to University and the numbers of people from whom he learned and from whom he elicited information vital to his mission, his informal teachers.

We are celebrating his bereft wife and their children, who generously shared his time with various communities, allowing him to pursue his missions. We are celebrating a teacher, who devoted himself, like the sages of every faith, to the receiving and dissemination of knowledge. We are celebrating one who as a scholar and social investigator did not stop at Marx's findings of the class struggle, but went on to discover the origins of class society in the continent of Africa, the home of those enslaved and transported to the Caribbean and North America.

For Guyana, we are celebrating one who painstakingly revealed that despite the work of the colonial slave mode of production in making us a population of many segmented races (a population segmented by race) we are by the same token in the majority, a race of working people.

We are celebrating one whose conversations on race and people's power in Europe could have alerted sensitive European scholars to the dangers of ethnic fragmentation now engulfing much of Europe. We are celebrating one who used his achievements and standing in Jamaica to support the articulation of the indigenous Rastafari of that country and deepen respect for Africa in the Caribbean. We are celebrating one who attempted a holistic theory of under-development in the continent of Africa, relative to its industrialised exploiter, Europe.

Even we are celebrating one who placed himself and his ideas at every stage on record, so that his ideological development is an open book for the enlightenment of all, as an aid to the realisation that A peoples and all individuals are at a given stage of development. We are celebrating one who, in noting and confronting the alienation and the actual or threatened disarmament of his own times and places, borrowed from revolutionary African-American (of North America) inspiration its most universal creation - "power to the people" and made it an essential part of every revolution and every reconstruction worthy of the name of democracy - Power to the People!

His slogan "People's Power, No Dictator!" is a summation of his democratic philosophy of people's power. No political philosopher, teacher or activist of modern times has been so insistent on people's power as Walter Rodney. He made it his litmus test for approval of governments. The developed and developing countries now being nudged by the United Nations into respecting their citizens through interactive and accountable governance owe it in large measure to the inspiration of the civil rights movement and Walter Rodney who showed its universal application as a constant of a healthy society.

And in honouring the prophet of self-eman6pation, we respectfully remind people everywhere that Bob Marley applied it to mental slavery, leaving those abiding on Earth to apply this Rodneyite principle of self-emancipation to all the debilitating circumstances, diseases, economic, gender, cultural and spiritual influences which limit the generations in growth and healthy development into a self-respecting, human family in which all parts accept and respect one another. Along with a whole galaxy of immortals, Walter Rodney lives.