Walter Rodney

Full economic and energy independence remains unfinished.

Walter Rodney died for Africa.

What has changed in Africa since then? Rodney was assassinated, assassinated in Guyana in 1980.

His book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, examines how coloniz- colonization and foreign economic control deprived African societies of their own wealth.

Um, um, They Came Before Columbus by, by Ivan Van Sertima.

Uh, another book, I mentioned, um, Walter Rodney's book already, um, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

And another book would be Robin Walker's When We Ruled.

Now, that's a big, fat book, but you don't have to read it all at one time.

And then after that, um, we will reflect on this week's episode and, uh, I'll present a call to action, and then we'll close things out for this week.

So what we're gonna do now then is take a quick break, and, uh, after we come back from the break, we'll get to the quote of the week with Walter Rodney.

[upbeat music] All right, welcome back.

And welcome to our quote of the week segment where, as I said, this week we're going to hear from Walter Rodney.

So, um, first of all, Walt- Walter Rodney was a Guyanese historian, uh, a Mar- a Marxist, a Pan-Africanist revolutionary, and he was murdered in 1980 at 38 years old because his ideas were that dangerous.

So again, in the intro that I talked about, America calls itself a democracy, but it kills, uh, people whose only crime was helping people like us.

And Walter Rodney is, is one of those.

So in his book- The groundings with my brothers, he drew the line between two different ways of thinking, and that is where our quote of the week comes from this week.

Uh, and the idea was to read broadly across the Black nationalist tradition, across the Black diaspora.

So we were reading Walter Rodney, we were reading Cheikh Anta Diop, we were reading-

Cheikh Anta Diop.

Oh, what's good?

It really is angering to me because he has no soul, no spirit, no nothing.

We went from Fanon, Walter Rodney to this idiot.

So that's how I feel about that.

Lebanon is fighting back, but they've been eaten up.

Um, I recently taught Necropolitics by Mbembe, and I was just, you know, um, floored again by the idea of sort of necropower and how it shifts the thinking from Foucault's biopower.

Read, um, Walter Rodney's, um, The Underdevelopment, which is, like, an oldie but a goodie, you know? I don't know if people know this, but the man was killed, assassinated before his 40th birthday, um, because he was an actual true radical who, you know, s- stood on business.

And he wrote this book where underdevelopment, he argues, is a verb and not a noun.

Um, it's something that was done to the colonized countries.

We lack that.

But the biggest thing not mentioned in this article, where, of course, Rodney discusses that in how Europe underdeveloped Africa and decolonial Marxism, the book that was published posthumously, which is very good.

It has some, I hope they've corrected some.

Yes, they've actually corrected some errors in, what's it called, in how Europe underdeveloped Africa.

So the U.S. put billions of dollars in South Korea, access to U.S. markets for all their manufacturers, and that's how they came.

And if that's what he's implying for Africa, Absolutely not.

And then finally, Walter Rodney will not be able to teach today in the University of Diocese that he made renowned in the 1970s.

Why? Because the World Bank, as Sister said, and IMF are the ones who fund those chairs.

And you see the very same thing happening there.

Of course, that is the home of Walter Rodney, who they killed in 1980 with help of the United States government.

Your tax dollars, who was the president in 1980? It was James Earl

Carter.