I met Walter Rodney just after his death, By Ahmed Aminu-Ramatu Yusuf

Continue to rest in power, Brother Walter Rodney.

Who is this man, Walter Rodney? What happened to him to warrant his posters being placed all over the campus? Was he killed? Which “Act”, by the way, “will not delay their Day of Judgment”? Who are the “their”? Which “Day of Judgment”? Is there any “Day of Judgment” besides that of ALMIGHTY GOD? That “Day” is only known to HIM. So what “Day of Judgment” is the quotation referring to?

I did not know or ever meet Walter Rodney until after his demise. I never even heard of him, nor did I ever read any of his writings as a secondary school student, until in August 1980 when I was admitted into the School of Basic Studies (SBS), Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria.

From ABU Main Gate to the Senate Building, SBS Administrative Building, students’ hostels, cafeterias, faculty and departmental buildings, and even on tree trunks of the campus, I kept seeing and meeting Rodney. I mean his posters.

On top in the poster was his picture. Then his name – Walter Rodney. Plus the days, months and years of his birth and death. After that was a bold quotation, which read: “This Act In Itself Will Not Delay Their Day of Judgment.”

All these aroused my curiosity. Who is this man, Walter Rodney? What happened to him to warrant his posters being placed all over the campus? Was he killed? Which “Act”, by the way, “will not delay their Day of Judgment”? Who are the “their”? Which “Day of Judgment”? Is there any “Day of Judgment” besides that of ALMIGHTY GOD? That “Day” is only known to HIM. So what “Day of Judgment” is the quotation referring to?

These questions kept reoccurring in me during and after the registration for my SBS programme. I didn’t sleep on the campus that day. I proceeded to Kaduna, where my family lived. It was a Friday. I couldn’t sleep as Rodney was on my mind. No one to ask about Rodney? Mark you, there was no internet then.

When school began, I took History as a course. All our History and Political Science lecturers made reference to Rodney in their lectures. One Zimbabwean lecturer, who we fondly called Dzimbo, and whose country had just attained independence through armed struggle at the time, constantly referred to Rodney as if his course was on Rodney.

Dzimbo and other lecturers in SBS introduced us to Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (HEUA). The book, they said, was a must read for any student interested in knowing the history of Africa, and its underdevelopment. Basically, that Western Europeans, and before them the Arabs, laid the concrete foundation for the underdevelopment of Africa.

This, they did, by their invasion of Africa; the plundering and looting of it’s agricultural and natural resources; and the kidnapping, enslavement, exportation and utilisation of African slave labour to develop Western Europe, US, and Canada. The implications of all these were the disarticulation of African societies; the imposition of colonialism, the unequal and unfair trade relations, and the expulsion of Africans from the making of their own history.

As a Pan-Africanist, Rodney was said to have contributed immensely to national liberation struggles in Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe and South Africa, when he was teaching in Tanzania – the headquarters of the national liberation movements. This, he did through the teaching of history, revolutionary discourses, and political education of Southern African liberation fighters.

Rodney’s HEUA, Dzimbo and the other lecturers added, is a condensation of African History, which shattered and demystified the “imperialist”, “neo-colonial” and “bourgeois” history of Africa that we were taught in secondary schools and through the mass media. They said HEUA is a critical, thought-provoking, scientific, and revolutionary historical narrative.

I was indeed mesmerised. Yes, I knew history could be “critical” and “radical” as a secondary school student. JB Webster and AA Bohen with HO Idowu’s The Growth of African Civilization: The Revolutionary Years – West Africa since 1800 and particularly KBC Nwubiko’s School Certificate History of West Africa, AD 1000-1800 turned me into an “infantile radical”.

But, how can history be “scientific” when it is not biology, chemistry, physics or mathematics? Why would an Historian, without arms and an army, be gruesomely bombed by the United States (US) Central Intelligence Agency in alliance with the Guyanese government for writing an ordinary book?

These questions agitated my mind when first resumed in my SBS days. I told myself I could only have inner peace when I personally get known to Rodney. So I bought HEUA in ABU Bookshop. I read it with pain, but also with inquisitiveness.

In ABU ‘Gossip Centre’, where lots of male students seat to watch female students walk to their faculties, and gossip about happenings on Campus, Rodney was unwrapped as an extremely intelligent African-Caribbean historian, unrepentant Pan-Africanist, a thoroughbred “comrade”, and uncompromising radical political activist.

In the Movement for a Progressive Nigeria (MPN) and the Youth Solidarity on Southern Africa (YUSSA), which I joined, Rodney was, in addition, portrayed as a scholar who passionately believed, like Karl Marx, Fredrick Engels, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Tse Tung, that: “philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.”

As a Pan-Africanist, Rodney was said to have contributed immensely to national liberation struggles in Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe and South Africa, when he was teaching in Tanzania – the headquarters of the national liberation movements. This, he did through the teaching of history, revolutionary discourses, and political education of Southern African liberation fighters.

As a Marxist-Leninist, Rodney was said to be a “professional socialist revolutionary”, who believed and preached Lenin’s dictum that: “without a revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement”; and “In the struggle for power, the proletariat has no other weapon but organisation.”

By the time we submitted our essays on HEUA, many of us had come to know Rodney. How would we not when we had dialogued on a one-on-one basis with him, and concurred with him on virtually everything, including that “colonialism had only one hand, it was a one-armed bandit”?

In 1974, Rodney left Tanzania for Guyana to become a fully “professional revolutionary.” There, he focused on politically educating, uniting, organising, and leading various socialist and radical forces, under the Working People’s Alliance, to takeover state-power for the socialist transformation of Guyana.

In the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) – where we saw ourselves as students of the “Science of Humanity and Society” – we were made to review and critique HEUA in our first year History course. Professor Okello Oculi of the Political Science Department even made us to create an imaginary dialogue between Lord Lugard and Rodney.

But how can we, ordinary undergraduates, critique a whole Rodney? Indeed, we felt it was unfair, unjust, and even wicked to have asked us to critique HEUA. It was in one of the MPN Alex-Ribadu cell meetings that I got to know that to “critique” does not necessary means to “criticise” and “debunk.”

Rather, it means, first, to summarise the book; secondly, highlight its relevance to understanding contemporary Africa; thirdly, identify “what is to be done” to arrest, reverse, and transcend African underdevelopment; and fourthly, which social forces are to do “what is to be done”?

By the time we submitted our essays on HEUA, many of us had come to know Rodney. How would we not when we had dialogued on a one-on-one basis with him, and concurred with him on virtually everything, including that “colonialism had only one hand, it was a one-armed bandit”?

Rodney’s position that there were “African accomplices inside the imperialist system” that underdeveloped Africa, led us to agree with him that Africa’s development is only possible through a radical break with the exploitative imperialist system.

Rodney, who was murdered on 13 July, 1980, was born on 23 March, 1942. Yes, he lived for only 38 years. But those were years of theoretical, ideological and political struggles for the liberation of Africans in Africa and in the Americas.

Continue to rest in power, Brother Walter Rodney.

Ahmed Aminu-Ramatu Yusuf worked as deputy director, Cabinet Affairs Office, The Presidency, and retired as General Manager (Administration), Nigerian Meteorological Agency, (NiMet). Email: aaramatuyusuf@yahoo.com