by DAVID HINDS
Guyanese political activist & historian Walter Rodney (1942 – 1980) PHOTO/Tumblr
Like other comrades of Walter Rodney, I welcome the findings of the Commission of Inquiry. Although I had misgivings about the motives of the PPP for setting up the commission, once it started I fully supported it. Whatever its shortcomings, it was the furthest we had gone on this matter in three decades. For us his comrades, these findings are not surprising. But to hear and see it officially makes a difference. We have been vindicated. Walter Rodney lives anew. And Guyana gets a chance to re-examine its politics
They had killed Walter Rodney at 8 pm on June 13, 1980 on a Friday night. As Guyana cooled down at the bars and in the clubs after a long week of work, the State struck to physically remove one of the fiercest critics of the government of the day. Now almost four decades later, a Commission of Inquiry has found that the Government, the State and their top leaderships conspired to carry out that brutal act. Rodney was not the first victim of the vicious State—his comrades Ohene Koama and Edward Dublin and the Catholic priest, Fr Bernard Darke, had met a similar fate in the preceding year– but he was the best known. Murder by the state had become part of our political veins.
There are some lessons to be learned from the findings of the Commission. First, these findings are an indictment of our State. Our post-colonial or independence state, replete with all the characteristics of colonial domination, has been the antithesis of independence. We have failed miserably in the area of human rights for our weak, our powerless, our sufferers and those who dared to stand with them. We in Guyana and the rest of Caribbean never learned how to deal with dissent in our politics. As a society we are products of resistance, but we have used the State to assassinate resistance at every twist and turn. The State in such circumstances became a tool of repression of dissent. It is a flaw that begs to be corrected.
We stood with our African brethren against racial apartheid while we practiced a vicious political and social apartheid at home. Our reach for education as liberation produced some of the best minds in the world like Walter Rodney, but we marginalized and killed those very minds in the name of the party and the State. We marched with workers in 1962 and 1966 but turned the guns of the State on them in 1963 and 1967. From the “Bring the Rastas in dead or alive” in 1963 to “Our steel is sharper” in 1979 to “Shoot them off the bridge” in 2012, we have used the State against our own.
Second, the governments since 1980, all of them, have assassinated Rodney even after his death by carrying out what Elder Eusi Kwayana calls “assassination of the evidence.” Some government officials have trivialized the act and in the process diminished Rodney in the eyes of many Guyanese. Some justify the murder by saying he was trying to overthrow the government, he was causing trouble. It pains to hear ordinary Guyanese parrot that narrative—these very Guyanese, 200,000 of them who overthrew a government on May 11, 2015. Should we all be murdered as Rodney was? Should those who conspired to overthrow colonial rule be murdered?
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