by BAINDU KALLON & CHINEDU CHUKWUDINMA
To mark the 84th anniversary of the birth of Afro-Guyanese Marxist historian and revolutionary Walter Rodney (23 March 1942), we share an article from ROAPE’s special issue 186 on Frantz Fanon that examines the shifting imprint of The Wretched of the Earth on Rodney’s evolving anti-imperialist politics. Drawing on material from the Walter Rodney Papers and beyond, Chinedu Chukwudinma and Baindu Kallon argue that Rodney’s changing engagement with Fanon reveals key patterns and nuances about his political development on questions of class as the strategy and tactics of liberation. They contend that while Rodney initially embraced Fanon’s ideas, he gradually refined, challenged and at times rejected them as he grappled with the failed promises of post-independence Jamaica and Tanzania.
Introduction
In June 1974, a severe bout of malaria confined Afro-Guyanese historian Walter Rodney to a bed at Muhimbili National Hospital in Dar es Salaam. As he lay ill in his mid-thirties, Rodney was perhaps haunted by the memory of Frantz Fanon’s premature death from cancer at the age of 36. That fate loomed large in the imagination of the comrades who stood by his bedside. Horace Campbell later recalled that when a European doctor proposed transferring him to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC – where Fanon had died 13 years earlier – Rodney’s comrades protested. They eventually secured his release into the care of a fellow activist, under whom he recovered (Campbell 1974, 178–179).
The spectre of Fanon in Rodney’s life extended far beyond mortality. Though born 17 years apart, both men traced remarkably similar paths: descendants of enslaved Africans from the Caribbean who saw Africa’s liberation as essential to their own. Each moved from intellectual critique to revolutionary organisation: Fanon as an activist in Algeria’s National Liberation Front, and Rodney as a Marxist leader of Guyana’s Working People’s Alliance (Lewis 1998; Boukari-Yabara 2018; Zeilig 2021, 2022).
This article examines how Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), though written on the eve of African independence, inspired Rodney to reflect on questions of strategy and class in the anti-imperialist struggles of postcolonial Africa and the Caribbean from 1968 to 1978. Drawing on material from the Walter Rodney Papers (WRP) and beyond, it argues that Rodney’s shifting engagement with Fanon’s work illuminates important patterns and subtleties in his political development. While Rodney initially embraced many of Fanon’s ideas, he gradually refined, challenged and at times rejected them. Recognising their limits amid the pitfalls of anti-imperialist struggles, he turned to Marxist theory as a more powerful guide to revolution.
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