Chapter 1The Boy from Wortmanville

Foreword

I made my career on American ground. Black writers, Black intellectuals, the long postwar argument about what the pen owed the crowd — that was my beat, and Chicago was my vantage. My first book was about Ralph Ellison, a man who answered the question of the writer's obligation by insisting that the novel itself was the obligation, that craft was citizenship, that the desk was a public place. I spent years defending that answer. I believed it, and in most weathers I still do. So when I told people I was writing a book about Walter Rodney — a Guyanese historian, a Marxist, a man who never wrote a novel and never lived in the United States — more than one of them asked me, with varying degrees of politeness, what I thought I was doing so far from home.

The honest answer is that Rodney was never far from home. He was the other end of the argument I had been covering my whole working life.

Every subject I have written about wrestled with the same question: what does the intellectual owe the community that produced him? The American answers I knew ran from Ellison's desk to the picket line and back, and the quarrel between them filled the magazines of my youth. Rodney gave an answer none of my subjects gave. He took a doctorate earned in the London archives and carried it to a street corner in downtown Kingston, sat down on a rusty oil drum among people the university had been built to ignore, and talked about the empires of West Africa with men and women who had been taught they had no history at all. He did not call it outreach. He called it grounding, and he insisted that he learned as much as he taught. Then a government banned him for it, a city rose up over it, and twelve years later another government answered his arguments with a bomb. I wanted to understand a man for whom the question of my whole beat was not a symposium topic but the shape of a life, and the cause of a death.

I expected, going in, to write a martyr's story — a political saga from a small country, moving but distant from my usual ground. That is not what I found. I worked from the public record: Rodney's own books, which are still in print and still in argument; the published recollections of the people who knew him; the press archives of Georgetown and Kingston and Dar es Salaam; and the record of a Commission of Inquiry that took thirty-four years to state plainly what the mourners at his funeral already knew. What that record kept showing me was not distance but proximity. A school system designed to produce servants that produced a critic instead. Poverty presented as nature when it was manufacture. Race deployed as a tool to keep working people from discovering their common interest. I had spent decades tracing those patterns through American lives. Rodney had written their grammar. The boy from Wortmanville turned out to be an analyst of the same machinery I had been circling from Chicago, and he had seen it whole because he had seen it from the bottom of more than one country.

He also unsettled me, which is rarer and worth more. Ellison held that the writer serves the crowd best by perfecting the work. Rodney held that knowledge hoarded inside the university was a kind of theft. I do not think either man refutes the other. But I had lived comfortably inside the first answer for a long time, and Rodney's life is a standing cross-examination of that comfort. A biographer should not choose a subject who confirms him. He should choose one who interrogates him.

This book follows Rodney from a tailor's shop in Georgetown to the lecture halls of two continents, down into the yards of west Kingston, and back to the country that could not answer him and so decided to kill him. He was thirty-eight when the bomb went off. The ideas did not die with him; the last chapter of this book is an accounting of how thoroughly they refused to. What follows is my attempt to show the life those ideas came from — not the martyr the movement needed nor the menace the state invented, but the working man's son who believed the world could be explained, and that an explanation, spoken plainly enough, was a public act.

— Solomon Treadway, Chicago

Chapter 1 · The Boy from Wortmanville

Part I: British Guiana

Georgetown, the capital of British Guiana, occupies a peculiar geography. The city sits on the Atlantic coast of South America, below sea level, protected from flooding by a system of Dutch-engineered seawalls and drainage canals dating to the eighteenth century. The colonial Dutch had drained the swampland to plant sugar. The British, who took the colony in 1814, maintained the drainage infrastructure because the sugar economy demanded it. By the time Walter Anthony Rodney was born there on March 23, 1942, Georgetown was a city whose physical existence depended on engineering built by one set of colonizers, maintained by another, and worked by the descendants of enslaved Africans and indentured Indians who had been brought to the colony to serve the sugar industry that justified the drainage in the first place. The city was, in its very topography, a lesson in the economics of empire.

Wortmanville, the neighborhood where the Rodneys lived, occupied the southeastern quadrant of Georgetown. It was a working-class district of wooden houses raised on stilts, a practical necessity in a city that flooded regularly, with zinc roofing and small yards. The houses were close together. The streets were unpaved. The district had the character common to working-class Caribbean neighborhoods of the era: densely populated, racially mixed though predominantly Afro-Guyanese, oriented around churches, schools, rum shops, and the market at Stabroek.

Edward Rodney, Walter's father, was a tailor. He cut and sewed clothes in Georgetown, a skilled trade that placed the family in the lower reaches of the colonial working class, above the cane cutters and dock laborers, below the civil servants and schoolteachers who constituted the thin Black middle class. Pauline Rodney, Walter's mother, managed the household. They were a large family. Walter had several siblings, and the household expanded further with extended relatives, as was common in Guyanese families of the period. The house was crowded. Money was tight. Education was the only ladder the family could see.

British Guiana in the 1940s was a colony in the full sense of the word. The governor was appointed by London. The colonial legislature had limited powers. The sugar estates, Booker Brothers, McConnell and Company, and the other firms collectively known as "Booker's Guiana", controlled the economy with a completeness that would have impressed the East India Company. Bookers owned the sugar plantations, the rum distilleries, the shipping lines, the retail stores, the insurance companies, and a significant portion of the arable land. The company's reach was so extensive that the colony's nickname among its own residents was "Booker's Guiana", a sardonic acknowledgment that the constitutional governor in Georgetown mattered less than the corporate directors in London.

The racial structure of the colony was layered and deliberate. The British sat at the apex, controlling the governorship, the judiciary, the military, and the commanding heights of the sugar industry. Below them sat the Portuguese and Chinese merchants who dominated retail trade in Georgetown. Below them, the mixed-race population occupied a buffer zone of clerical and administrative positions. And at the base, the two largest populations, Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese, competed for the scraps of an economy designed to extract wealth and send it to London.

This competition was not natural. It was engineered. The British had brought enslaved Africans to work the sugar plantations. When emancipation came in 1838, the formerly enslaved workers refused to continue laboring on the estates at the wages the planters offered. The planters' solution was to import indentured laborers from India, between 1838 and 1917, approximately 239,000 Indians arrived in British Guiana under contracts that bound them to the estates for years. The system created a structural rivalry between Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese workers that the colonial authorities cultivated because it prevented the formation of a unified labor movement. Divide and rule was not a metaphor in British Guiana. It was an employment policy.

Walter Rodney grew up inside this structure. He did not yet have the vocabulary to analyze it, that would come later, at the University of the West Indies and at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, but the structure was visible to any child growing up in Wortmanville. The white men in the big houses on Main Street controlled everything. The brown men in the shops on Regent Street controlled the retail economy. And the Black and Indian families in neighborhoods like Wortmanville and Kitty and Albouystown controlled nothing except their own labor, which they sold cheaply because the system gave them no alternative.

Edward Rodney was a political man. He was a member of the People's Progressive Party, the PPP, which Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham had founded in 1950 as a multiracial anticolonial movement. The PPP was, in its early years, a genuine coalition: Jagan, an Indo-Guyanese dentist educated in the United States who was radicalized by Marxist theory, and Burnham, an Afro-Guyanese lawyer educated in London who possessed enormous charisma and equally enormous ambition, joined forces to demand self-government from Britain. Edward Rodney's involvement in the PPP meant that political conversation was a feature of the household. Walter grew up hearing the language of anticolonialism before he could read it.

The young Walter was, by all accounts, an exceptional student. British Guiana's colonial education system was modeled on the British grammar school tradition, with standardized examinations that determined access to secondary education and, for the most gifted students, scholarships abroad. The system was designed to produce a small cadre of colonial administrators and clerks, literate, numerate, fluent in English, and schooled in a version of history that presented the British Empire as a civilizing force. The system was not designed to produce intellectuals who would challenge the empire's legitimacy. It produced Walter Rodney anyway.

At Queen's College, Georgetown's most prestigious secondary school, Rodney distinguished himself immediately. Queen's College was the institution through which the colony's brightest students passed on their way to professional careers, and occasionally to universities abroad. The school's alumni included Cheddi Jagan himself, along with numerous doctors, lawyers, and civil servants who constituted the colony's educated elite. The curriculum was British: English literature, Latin, European history, mathematics, the natural sciences. Caribbean history, African history, Guyanese history, these were not taught. The students learned about the Tudors and Stuarts, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution. They did not learn about the Berbice slave revolt of 1763, when Cuffy led an uprising of enslaved Africans against the Dutch colonizers. They did not learn about the Demerara rebellion of 1823, when ten thousand enslaved people rose up and were crushed with a violence that shocked even some abolitionists in London.

Rodney excelled within this system while simultaneously beginning to see beyond it. He was not the only politically aware student at Queen's College, the anticolonial movement was reaching its crescendo in the 1950s, and political consciousness was widespread among educated young Guyanese. But Rodney combined academic brilliance with a seriousness of purpose that his contemporaries noticed. He read voraciously. He argued constantly. He was not content to absorb the curriculum passively. He wanted to know why the curriculum contained what it contained, and what it left out, and who benefited from the omissions.

The political environment of his adolescence was turbulent. In 1953, when Rodney was eleven, the PPP won British Guiana's first election under universal adult suffrage. Cheddi Jagan became Chief Minister. The government lasted 133 days. The British, alarmed by the PPP's leftist program and convinced, with encouragement from the United States, that Jagan was leading the colony toward communism, suspended the constitution and sent in troops. The governor dissolved the legislature and ruled by decree. It was Walter Rodney's first lesson in what happened when colonized people attempted to exercise power through democratic means: the colonizer cancelled the democracy.

The crisis of 1953 split the PPP. Burnham, who had served as the party's chairman, broke away in 1955; his faction became the People's National Congress, the PNC, in 1957. The split followed racial lines with devastating precision. Jagan's PPP became the party of Indo-Guyanese workers and rice farmers. Burnham's PNC became the party of Afro-Guyanese workers and the urban population. The multiracial anticolonial coalition that had briefly united the colony's two largest ethnic groups was destroyed, and it was destroyed in significant part by the intervention of the colonial power and by Burnham's personal ambition. This fragmentation, the weaponization of race to prevent class solidarity, became one of the central themes of Rodney's intellectual life and political career.

As Rodney progressed through Queen's College, his academic gifts became impossible to ignore. He had a memory that astonished his teachers and classmates. He could recall entire passages from texts he had read once. He could synthesize arguments across multiple sources with a facility that seemed effortless. He was articulate in debate, precise in his written work, and relentless in his curiosity. His teachers recognized that they were dealing with an intellect of unusual power.

In 1960, Rodney won an open scholarship to the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. He was eighteen. He was leaving Georgetown for the first time, leaving British Guiana for the first time, entering a wider Caribbean world where his ideas would take shape and his reputation would begin to form. The scholarship was a triumph for the family. Edward the tailor's son had won the prize that the colonial education system offered to its most exceptional products. What the colonial system did not anticipate was that its most exceptional products would use the education it provided to dismantle the intellectual foundations on which it rested.

Rodney left Georgetown in 1960 carrying with him the formative experiences of a childhood in Wortmanville: the knowledge that his family worked hard and remained poor; the understanding that the colony's wealth flowed outward to London while its people scrambled for subsistence; the memory of a democratically elected government overthrown by the colonizer it had attempted to replace; and the awareness, still inchoate but deepening, that the racial division between Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese was not natural but manufactured, a tool of control wielded by those who benefited from the colony's subjugation.

He was eighteen. He had never been outside British Guiana. He was about to enter a university system that would give him the analytical tools to understand what he had witnessed as a child, and a Caribbean intellectual community that would sharpen those tools into weapons. He was about to become Walter Rodney.

The Georgetown he left behind was a city suspended between two futures. One future was the promise of independence, the transfer of political power from London to Georgetown, the creation of a sovereign nation, the possibility of a society organized around the interests of its own people rather than the interests of a distant metropole. The other future was the continuation, under different management, of the same extractive structures that colonialism had created, the sugar economy, the racial division, the concentration of power in the hands of a small elite. The first future required exactly the kind of multiracial, class-based solidarity that the colonial system was designed to prevent. The second future required only that the departing British hand the keys to someone willing to run the machinery of extraction on behalf of a new set of beneficiaries.

Both futures were possible in 1960. British Guiana had the human resources, the natural resources, and the political energy to build a genuinely democratic and egalitarian society. It also had the structural conditions, the racial division, the economic dependency, the weakness of independent civil institutions, that made authoritarian neocolonialism the more likely outcome. Which future materialized would depend, in significant part, on the political choices made by the men and women who led the independence movement and governed the new state. Forbes Burnham made his choices. Cheddi Jagan made his. Walter Rodney, the boy from Wortmanville who was leaving for Jamaica with a scholarship and a suitcase, would spend the rest of his life fighting for the future that Burnham's choices foreclosed.

The colony's landscape imprinted itself on Rodney in ways that shaped his subsequent work. The physical infrastructure of British Guiana, the roads that ran from the sugar estates to the docks at Georgetown, the river barges that carried bauxite down the Demerara from the interior to the coast for export, the drainage systems that made the coastal plantations viable, was infrastructure designed for extraction, not for the welfare of the population. The same pattern, Rodney would later discover, characterized the infrastructure of colonial Africa: railways that ran from mines to ports, roads that connected plantations to export terminals, harbors designed to load ships bound for Europe. The colony he grew up in was a small-scale model of the continental system he would spend his career analyzing. The boy who walked the streets of Wortmanville was accumulating, without knowing it, the empirical foundation for the argument of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

The labor struggles of the 1940s and 1950s also left their mark. The waterfront strikes of 1948, which paralyzed Georgetown's port and demonstrated the power of organized labor, were part of the political atmosphere in which Rodney grew up. The Enmore sugar estate workers' strike of 1948, in which five Indian sugar workers were shot dead by colonial police, was a defining event in the colony's political history, the kind of event that families discussed and that children absorbed. The violence of the colonial state against workers who demanded a living wage was not abstract for the Rodney family. It was part of the fabric of daily life in a colony where the machinery of extraction relied on cheap labor and where any challenge to the cheapness of that labor was met with force.

Edward Rodney's tailoring shop was a site of political conversation. Customers came and went, and with them came the news and opinions of Georgetown's working-class districts. The shop was, in its modest way, a political salon, a place where the events of the day were discussed and where the boy Walter listened to adults analyzing the colonial system with a sophistication that the colonial authorities would not have credited to working-class Guyanese. The adults did not have university degrees. They did not have access to Marx or Fanon or the dependency theorists. But they understood, from the evidence of their own lives, that the system was rigged against them. They understood that the wealth their labor produced left the colony. They understood that the racial division between Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese was exploited by those in power. Walter Rodney's intellectual project, the systematic analysis of exploitation, underdevelopment, and racial manipulation, had its origins not in the libraries of SOAS or the seminar rooms of Dar es Salaam but in his father's tailoring shop in Wortmanville.

British Guiana would become Guyana in 1966, independent at last, governed by Forbes Burnham. The independence that the colony's people had fought for would curdle, within a decade, into an authoritarian state. And the boy from Wortmanville would return to challenge that state, armed with the most dangerous weapon a dictatorship can face: a coherent explanation of why the dictator's power was illegitimate.

That confrontation was twenty years away. In 1960, Walter Rodney boarded a plane for Jamaica, and the intellectual history of the twentieth century shifted, imperceptibly, on its axis.

The Queen's College examination system that Rodney mastered was not designed to produce critics of the colonial order. It was designed to produce its most effective servants. The Cambridge School Certificate, which Queen's College students sat for at the end of their secondary education, was set and marked in England. The curriculum it assessed was the curriculum of the British grammar school tradition: English literature, mathematics, Latin, the natural sciences, and a version of history that centered the British experience. A Guyanese student who excelled in this system — who could parse a passage from Shakespeare, solve a differential equation, and write a coherent essay on the causes of the English Civil War — had demonstrated his fitness for inclusion in the thin stratum of the colonial educated class. The system rewarded the ability to think within its framework. It did not reward the ability to think against it.

Rodney was exceptional at both. He could do what the system demanded — and he could see what the system was doing. This double awareness, the capacity to master a framework and simultaneously to analyze it from the outside, is unusual at any age. At sixteen or seventeen, in a working-class household in Wortmanville, it was remarkable. His teachers recognized it. The students who knew him in those years described him as someone who asked questions that the curriculum was not designed to answer: Why does the history textbook begin with the arrival of the Europeans? What happened in Guyana before the Europeans came? What did the people who were enslaved think about being enslaved? These were not questions that the Cambridge School Certificate required students to consider. They were questions that a boy from a political household, in a neighborhood that bore the marks of colonial extraction in its very infrastructure, could not help asking.

Edward Rodney's tailoring business occupied a particular position in Georgetown's economy. Tailoring was a skilled trade, and the tailor who served a clientele that could afford custom-made clothing occupied a position of relative dignity in the colonial working class. The shop was a site where the social hierarchies of Georgetown were made visible: customers came from different racial backgrounds and different class positions, and the tailoring relationship required a kind of sustained social engagement that cut across some of the divisions that the colonial system had created. Edward's political involvement in the PPP meant that the shop was also a place where the political analysis of the colonial situation was conducted regularly. His son absorbed these conversations alongside the academic lessons that Queen's College provided.

The PPP's founding in 1950, when Rodney was eight years old, occurred at a moment of extraordinary political energy in British Guiana. The trade union movement, which had been growing since the waterfront strikes of 1948, had demonstrated that organized labor could challenge the colonial economy's assumption that workers had no power. The Enmore estate massacre of 1948, in which five Indo-Guyanese sugar workers were shot dead by colonial police during a strike, had produced the kind of outrage that hardened political convictions across the colony. These were not abstract historical events for the Rodney family. They were part of the political atmosphere of Georgetown, discussed in the tailoring shop, reported in the newspapers that Edward read, analyzed in the conversations between adults that the young Walter overheard.

The 1953 election and the subsequent British intervention — the 133 days of the Jagan government, the suspension of the constitution, the return of the governor's direct rule — occurred when Rodney was eleven. The crisis was formative in a way that no classroom lesson could have been. Here was democracy, exercised by the people of British Guiana through a free election, producing a government that London found unacceptable, and London simply canceling the democracy. The lesson was clear: the colonial system would not allow the colonized people to exercise power in ways that threatened colonial interests. Political independence required more than winning elections. It required dismantling the structures that gave the colonial power the ability to cancel the results.