Rev Left Radio - Walter Rodney: Marxist Radical, Guerrilla Intellectual, & Pan-African Martyr

Episode Date: March 9, 2020

Devyn Springer joins Breht to discuss the life and legacy of Walter Rodney: the renowned Guyanese historian, Caribbean revolutionary, Pan-Africanist thinker, and Marxist martyr. Find Devyn and his work: https://devynspringer.journoportfolio.com/ Support his work: https://www.patreon.com/Halfatlanta Check out his podcast: https://groundings.simplecast.com/ Find and Support the Walter Rodney Foundation: http://www.walterrodneyfoundation.org/ Here are the Essays Devyn mentioned in the episode: https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/index.htm   Outro music 'Hussle & Motivate' by Nipsey Hussle ------- LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com SUPPORT REV LEFT RADIO: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective: @Barbaradical Intro music by DJ Captain Planet. --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, FORGE, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, I have on Devin Springer to talk about the life and legacy of the one-and-only Walter Rodney. I really, you know, have been a fan of Devin and his work for a very long time, and, you know, this conversation was well overdue, but I'm glad we finally made it happen. I just enjoy learning from Devin. Devin's an amazing speaker, amazing things. and a really important sort of Marxist thinker specifically. So we really appreciate having Devon on. And if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, you can go to Revolutionary LeftRadio.com.

You can become a member of our Patreon in exchange for bonus monthly content. You can find our sister podcast, Red Menace, our YouTube channel, and a lot more. So yeah, if you like the show, you want to support it in any way, that's awesome. If you don't have money, we totally understand. We make our content free for that reason. Another way you could help the show, though, is to share the show with your friends. friends or even leave us a nice review on iTunes. We do get waves sometimes of reactionaries, kind of shitting on us in the review sections

of iTunes. So every good review helps balance that out and sort of, you know, counterbalance to those shitty, half-assed reactionary reviews we get. So, yeah, but without further ado, let's get into this wonderful conversation with Devin Springer on the life and legacy of the revolutionary and black liberationist, Walt Roger Rodney. Enjoy. My name is Devin Springer. I'm a writer, cultural worker, who wades in the field of photography. Most recently, journalism and investigative journalism. Also, a historian who studies the African

diaspora, host of the Groundings podcast, which is named after Walter Rodney, who will be discussing today. I'm really happy to be on this podcast. as a fan of it, but also just excited to talk about Walter Rodney today. Yeah, well, thank you so much. We're beyond excited to have you on. I absolutely, I think I discovered you through Twitter. Your presence on Twitter was always wonderful, and then I discovered your podcast through that, and I've just been a big fan ever since then, so I'm glad that we can finally do this together.

And Walter Rodney is one of those very important revolutionary figures that I think doesn't get enough attention. He belongs in those upper echelons with the Fred Hamptons of the world, but doesn't get that as much recognition, I think, and maybe the North American left as he deserved. So I hope we can rectify that to some extent today. The first question I would toss out there, which I like to just use as an orientation question, is how did you first come to be interested in Walter Rodney and how big of a role has he played in your sort of intellectual and political life? I think that Walter Rodney has played a huge role in my own political development.

I first came across Walter Rodney several years ago. I actually read, his short book Groundings with my brothers when I was in high school. And it's written. It's actually transcriptions from some speeches of his. So it's very easy to read. So I think I was about a senior in high school and my dad gave me a copy of that book. And at such a young age, it was written in a way that I could understand it and it really spoke to me. And then when I went to university there, in Atlanta, there's an organization called the Walter Rodney Foundation and a professor of mine who would later sort of become a mentor, Dr. Jesse Benjamin. He taught, a class that was a hybrid class of sorts, really trying to break down sort of bourgeois academic

structures where for half of the class, you would leave the university campus and go to events based on the Walter Rodney Foundation and Walter Rodney. They were educational events, political events, activism, and organizing events. So he really was merging sort of the university and what's outside of the university through this Walter Rodney Foundation. And just me being involved in taking his class freshman year of university, I learned so much about Walter Rodney. And the organization, the Walter Rodney Foundation, is actually ran by the Rodney family. So his wife and his children are the ones who run the foundation first and foremost, too. So I got like this really interesting firsthand look into learning about Rodney and his legacy in ways that some people aren't afforded to learn

if you're not, I guess, close to the family. And I think that in my own intellectual and political life, Rodney has been instrumental for me understanding things on a global perspective. And having, I mean, honestly, my anti-imperialist politic was largely built through Rodney and his sort of underdevelopment theory that he helped to create. And I think that in reading Rodney, I find a lot of issues illuminated that he seemed to have had the answers for decades ago. So I think that Rodney has influenced my intellectual and political life in the same way that someone like Malcolm X, Franz Fanon, or Angela Davis have in very sort of material but also theoretical ways too. Yeah. That's fascinating. Really quick before we move on, do you know if there's

a connection between Walter Rodney and Franz Fanon, was one an influence to the other? Did they have any like real life interaction? So I can't answer if they had any real life interactions or not because I just genuinely don't know, but I know I know that they were both aware of each other. Walter Rodney in how Europe underdeveloped Africa, he paraphrases Fanon, he mentions Fanon in the footnotes in some of his books. So he was definitely aware of his, but they were also working in two somewhat different fields. Fanon was a very psychoanalytical theorist and writer, and Walter Rodney was more of a robust historian. So I know that they knew each other and knew of each other. They also both attended a lot of Pan-African congresses and conferences around the world. So it wouldn't surprise me

if they cross-pass at some point. But yeah, that's all I know for sure. That's really interesting. I definitely see, yeah, lots of parallels in the sort of stuff they're critiquing and yeah, their politics and their, yeah, their black liberation politics, their internationalism, et cetera. For those who may not be as familiar with Walter Rodney. Can you basically give sort of a bird's eye view or an overview of just who he was as a human being and as a historical figure just to help people orient themselves to the rest of the discussion? Sure.

And I should just say this is like a non-conclusive biography because there's so much to say about his incredible life. But Walter Rodney was from formerly British Guyana or just known Guyana today. He was born in 1942, I believe, in Guyana to a working class family. family. He actually comes from a family who dabbled themselves in a lot of community organizing, fighting for labor issues, and these kind of things as well as fighting against racial segregation in Guyana. And so Walter Ronnie, he was a very gifted debater and academic from a young age. And when he was actually on his high school debate team, they were defeating universities in the area

and their debate teams, and through that in his studies, he actually got a scholarship to study at the University of West Indies in Jamaica. And that becomes sort of significant because later in his life, he becomes a professor at the University of the West Indies. And eventually, he becomes a professor of history there where he makes a huge influence in Jamaica because he creates sort of a pedagogy or educational model that seeks to take the bourgeois knowledge, production. process of the university and expropriated or export it, you know, to the working class of Jamaica. This becomes so popular that when he is deported essentially from Jamaica, what happens is essentially becomes known as the Rodney riots in 1968, where all across Jamaica there

was uprisings and riots taking place because of his deportation, because he was so loved and revered there. From there, he traveled around Africa doing various teaching positions as well as organizing. He was in revolutionary Tanzania, Ghana. He was a Marxist at heart. He was also a pan-Africanist, what I like to call this sort of materialist, pan-Africanist, which we can get into that a little bit later. So Rodney really embodied this sort of middle ground between Marxist-Leninist and Pan-Africanist and his life, not just sort of his writings in theory, but his actual life was a testament to that. He was involved in deep political organizing in Guyana, his own country, but also in London, in the UK, where he studied for several years in Jamaica, in Tanzania.

He was assassinated in 1980 by the then-president of Guyana, Forbes Burnham. So that's a quick biography, and in the span of that rushed biography I just gave, he published several books, published several essays, including how Europe underdeveloped Africa, which is essentially known as like his magnum opus. This is his greatest, you know, accomplishment because it was a genre defining book that was really cutting edge at the time. And even today, it's still, it picks up very hefty check. challenges and takes them head on in ways that scholars, I don't think, had really done yet. And, yeah, so because Rodney has lived this very international life, his legacy is one that is known in Marxist circles, but it's also known in Pan-Africanist circles. Rastafari and the Rastafarian people in Jamaica and the Caribbean are very, very fond of Rodney, too, because he bridged a lot of the gaps between the academic class and the Rastafare. So he was definitely, I guess if I had to summarize him in one word, he's like a

Marxist, Pan-African giant. Absolutely. Yeah, well done. So let's go ahead now that we have a bird's-eye view of his life and sort of drill down on the details. Can you just talk a little bit about what life was like for Rodney growing up, sort of where he grew up, the conditions he grew up in, and then just how he eventually came to get involved in politics? Yeah, definitely. So as I said before Walter Rodney, he grew up to a working class family. So it's actually interesting. In one of his books, Walter Rodney speaks, he speaks a lot about sort of the family dynamic with him growing up and especially the class dynamics of his family. They by no means were anything other than working class when there was a lot of, I guess, tension in Guyana in the 30s and 40s, really leading into the 50s and 60s as

well, but especially in the 30s and 40s, his parents were heavily involved in political organizing. And as a child, I mean, I think this was very influential to him, not just having the sort of working class background, but seeing his parents, he's working class black guy and these people involving themselves in political organizing, right? And so from there, he says that at a young age, he might not have had the language to describe himself as a Marxist, but he developed a class consciousness from that at a young age. And what I think is fascinating about Walter Rodney in the way that he sort of explains class consciousness for the Caribbean situation, which he was situated within, is that it's almost

like being born with a class consciousness of sorts because of the colonial situation or even the post or neo-colonial situation. So Walter Rodney, like many from the Caribbean. He got a scholar to study in the UK. And this is very foundational for really everything, because this is also where he meets C.L.R. James and several Marxist heavyweight giants. And I think when talking about Walter Rodney in the beginning of his life, it's almost like a setting stage, right? Like where his ideals and where his passions come from. So he he has this working class upbringing and this attention and this focus to the working class globally never leaves him even when he doesn't have the language to describe himself as a Marxist

he quite clearly has like a focus right on on the specific working class and its needs there's actually a quote from him from his book walter rodney speaks that i can read where he says my father was a tailor and he worked for himself as an end of independent artisan for most of the years of his active working life and some very academic way you might say, therefore, he was not a member of the working class. Rather, he was a member of the independent artisan class. But that would seem to be a statement that doesn't take into account all kinds of realities in the Caribbean situation. The very term working class, of course, in my opinion, has to be liberally or creatively interpreted in our own situation. We have very few workers directly in production and the kind of way that is applied by the Marxian model. I just love that quote because I think it shows that at a very early age, what he's interested in is like sort of the contextual specificities, right, of the Caribbean and of black people in the Caribbean. So he's saying in the most orthodox and traditional Marxist terms, my dad might not have been considered quote unquote working class, but in the Caribbean situation, he didn't own the means of reduction. whatsoever he was poor working class right you see what I'm saying so um so so that's a little bit about Walter Roddy just like I guess as a youth and his upbringing and what I like to call the sort

of ideological foundations of of where he began yeah and you know there there's an echo right there of France Fanon who in wretched of the earth I think begins in one of the opening chapters by saying something like you know in the colonial context we have to stretch Marxism a bit to make it fit. Like the orthodox Marxism doesn't plug in, you know, right away to the colonial context. There's some nuances and complexities there that we're going to have to, you know, sort of, as he put it, stretch the Marxist analysis to make sense of. And I see Walter Rodney sort of gesturing to that same reality in what you just said there. Exactly. And throughout his career, I think that's really what he's interested in doing is he's interested in responding to

this question of Marxism from the perspective of the Third World or of the Caribbean or or of the colonized, right? And I think reading his work with that in mind really is a profound way to read his, not just his work, but the work of Third World Revolutionaries in general, I think. We can, I mean, we can relate that to Fido Castro, right? Fido Castro would later come to describe himself as a Marxist, but I think that he also was just interested in taking these tools and applying them to the situation in a very non-rigid manner.

Absolutely. And it seems like the best revolutionaries, the best thinkers, you know, they reject dogmatism and they do sort of take up the methodology of Marxism without having to sort of fall into the air of being too doctrinaire or too rigidly dogmatic. And that allows for them to not only just stretch Marxism, but really to develop it, to take it to new levels and to make the analysis appropriate in different contexts. You're really expanding the Marxist tradition. Exactly. So I was wondering, and this leads well into the next question, because, you know, he does exist in a very special. specific context. And I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the conditions for working and poor people in Guyana at the time. And importantly, also the racial divisions that dominated

like the sort of entire region of the Caribbean and the colonial context in which it was sort of embedded at that time. Sure. So I'm not, I'm by no means a historian of Guyana, the country, but I can give my best. So Guyana is technically located in South America, but it's considered part of the Caribbean because it has a large influx of Caribbean culture and it's located it's coastal right so it's on the north of South America right next to Venezuela right right next to Venezuela exactly and so Guyana is a former British colony or British Guyana at least and the racial politics of Guyana are very specific to the Caribbean and if you have ventured into Caribbean studies at all then it's very easy to understand but if not it might

seem complex. You have, there are essentially two types of Guyanese people. There's Afro-Gyanese or Guyanese who are the descendants of slaves and African descendants. And then there are Indo-Gaiyanese or Indian-Gyanese people who the British colonizers essentially brought in from India and South Asia. And so this racial tension that exists in Guyana and especially exists during the time of Walter Rodney, was largely stoked by British colonizers, essentially to pit workers against each other. So you had parties, for example, that were exclusively Indo-Gaiyanese and parties that were exclusively African Guyanese. You had forms of discrimination and segregation even in some places, but it was essentially the, this is the pattern of

British colonialism, is to use racial divisions to keep workers put it against each other to maximize profits and exploitation. So Walter Rodney, with a very excellent sort of racial analysis, sees that both African and Indian descendant Guyanese people have a common enemy, if you will, right? And it's not each other. And so this really forms the beginning of Rodney's racial analysis that's merged and mixed in with class analysis. And that's another thing that makes Walter Rodney, like so many others, very important, right? It's that mixture of the race and class analysis in, at the time, what was a cutting, a cutting edge way. But the state of affairs that Rodney existed in was that this racial tension exists, and Rodney and

the party, the WPA, the Working People's Alliance, were essentially on the verge of the precipice of finding a sort of common ground in unity between Afro-Gyanese and Indian Guyanese, and the president at the time or Prime Minister Forbes Burnham was, of course, very against that for obvious reasons. He was what many would describe as a dictator. He used the veneer and sort of public imaging of pan-Africanism and socialist sloganeering while not upholding any of the ideals in practice. He had a total crackdown essentially on any liberatory politics in the country that were outside of his own and that were outside of his own party. And so Walter Rodney is operating in times where this is very layered and complex tension that's taking place,

where on one hand, you do have a president of the country essentially that is, that is claiming a liberatory political ideology. I should just say it like that. And on the other hand, is not actually that at all. So this is the context for which Walter Rodney arises. And as his party begins to bridge that gap, things actually get dangerous for Walter Rodney. He faces political repression.

He finds it hard to even find jobs in Guyana, even though he had a Ph.D. and was like this awarded writer and historian. And it's not just Walter Rodney. It's the working and, you know, working people of Guyana actually are sort of living within this racial tension that is stoked by the government. So this tension almost sets like a backdrop for Rodney's development in that this is his introduction and eventually his final taste of organizing was trying to combat this repressive regime if you want to use sort of that language or this repressive dictator while also trying to deal with the more horizontal sort of problems of racial division within the working class. Was the dictatorship, I mean, was it explicitly and directly propped up by the British Empire? So Forbes Burnham, and I said president, but I believe it's actually prime minister. I get the two mixed up all the time. But they essentially had an interesting relationship with Ford's Burnham.

But what we now know is actually the U.S. was a large supporter of Forbes Burnham. who his language right he spoke out against imperialism he he spoke out against racism and spoke out against all these things forbs burnham however he was making alliances with the u.s and we can even get into what those alliances meant for walter rodney's own life and assassination later if you want and there were even you know revolutionary leaders in africa who who made him an ally or were friendly towards him because Ford's Burnham essentially existed in this

wave of independence movements that took place across the African continent. So for a Forbes Burnham figure, he was sort of a strong man figure with a liberatory language. For him to come to power in Guyana meant a very strong potential pan-African connection between

Guyana and the continent. So you had people like Krami and Krumah who were friendly towards him, who would make official alliances with him. And so Walter Rodney was really, in some ways, and not just Walter Rodney, but all the organizers of the time, were really in many ways walking a very difficult line, if that makes sense. And I don't, I can't, I wasn't there and say the 19, in 1980 to know if they were aware that the U.S. was supporting Forbes, burn them behind closed doors, but I'm sure they were probably very, you know, suspect of it.

Yeah. So really, yeah, really interesting, incredibly complex. You're trying to fight this, this dictator, but the international reputation that that dictator has is sort of pan-Africanist, which adds a layer of complexity to the entire situation. Yeah, exactly. Incredible interesting. So we all know that Walter Rodney, you know, was a revolutionary intellectual and political organizer his entire life. We've gestured towards, like, his works and, you know, his upbringing and all of that can you just sort of drill down a little bit more on the specificities of his activism his organizing and the political stuff that he did throughout his life sure and i think i'll start in jamaica because this i mean i have a personal connection to jamaica but i also

think that a lot of his growth and developments had placed there so in jamaica like i said he went there as a student in undergrad and he returns after getting his phdd and he teaches at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, as a historian and professor of history. And to talk about his activism, you have to talk about his life. So what was common at the time was when professors came to UWI, they were given a house that was literally on a hill in a gated community with all the other professors. So they were above, both metaphorically and geographically, the working class, their students, and everyone else essentially in the country aside from government workers. So Walter Rodney, upon arrival, he rejects that housing

and instead chooses essentially to get a tiny apartment down in the neighborhood with all the rest of the working class people. And he says he doesn't see that as a productive or fruitful way of living. Then he begins to develop what would be called groundings. These are essentially anything from history lessons on African history to political discussions on current politics in Jamaica at the time and he would go into he would go to people's workplaces he would go to laundromats basketball courts or soccer fields he would go to the Rastafarii the factory workers

he would go to the gully where like homeless people live And he would essentially gauge their interests and see what they were interested in learning about and how he could connect whatever they were interested in, right? So whether it was current politics or past history or anything in between, and he would connect that to this very, I guess, activistic, you know, rhetoric, right? And he formed a pedagogy model around this called groundings, where everyone kind of came together in a circle wherever he was and he would do these open-air teachings. And through this, this method begins to be very popular. It gets called groundings. He didn't make up the term groundings, but he definitely sort of gave it new life and put a pedagogy around it, I guess. But, and so through this, people also begin to get agitated and organized because they're learning about themselves. They're learning about their history. They're learning about colonialism. They're learning about black power. And one of the things he was, very, very interested in teaching about was what the black power movement in the U.S. meant for the Caribbean, right? And so through this, as I mentioned earlier, the Rodney riots, through this, he becomes sort of a dangerous man. And as a historian, he made teaching his activism. And he did it

in a very impressive way to the point where, as I said earlier, he was deported. He was essentially not allowed to enter back into the country. He went to Montreal for a conference in 1968, and Hugh Scherer, the prime minister of Jamaica at the time, wouldn't allow him reentry into Jamaica. It was essentially a deportation. And riots broke out all across the country. And largely students and working class people came together and said, we won't stand for this. It was some of the largest uprisings Jamaica has seen since independent risings, really. Independence risings. There was a few deaths that took place, millions of dollars of damage. They specifically targeted things like banks, bus stations, government buildings. So there was an

organization to it. And Patricia Rodney, the widow of Walter Rodney, she talks about how she was pregnant with their child at the time. And she went and she joined in these upwards. risings. There was tear gas. She feared for her child's life. And so this, to me, is very emblematic of Walter Rodney's activism. He was finding ways to merge his abilities as a professor, as an educator, right? And merge that with the sort of political climate of where he was. This also took place in Tanzania. He essentially went to revolutionary Tanzania. After being deported from Jamaica, he goes to Tanzania, where he takes up a teaching position. Tanzania at this time had just undergone a revolution of sorts,

and it was what would be known as revolutionary Tanzania or a socialist Tanzania, or at least they were building some kind of socialist project. And so he involves himself with this project. He finds ways that he can help, ways that he as an educator can lend himself to it, and this is really the sort of trajectory of his life's work and what he left behind was was groundings this wonderful pedagogy model that a lot of people around the world are inspired by and use in their own localities and then finally upon his sort of last years he returns to Guyana he can't get a job because Forbes Burnham is blocking him and his wife Patricia Rodney from working in in a university from working, Patricia Rodney was a nurse. She was a well-studied, well-trained, degree-up nurse who couldn't get a job in anything, not public health relations, not a hospital, a clinic, anything. He couldn't, he was offered a teaching position, actually, at the university

in Guyana, and then they revoked it from him. So his last, I think, year was really spent political organizing for revolution in Guyana with the WPA and comrades like his good friend Yucie Kwan Dani. So this is Walter Rodney's praxis, right? It's about sort of figuring out how he, as a historian, as someone who writes and who teaches, can implement that in revolutionary ways. And he even develops this coinage that I love, this term of a guerrilla intellectual, where it's someone whose sole existence is just to subvert this capitalist education structure, whether it's in the elementary school level or at the university level, someone whose sole purpose is finding combative, revolutionary, creative ways to subvert the systems of knowledge production and knowledge distribution.

and through and so i i think of him as a as a gorilla intellectual and i think that's the best way to describe his practice yeah i love that absolutely there's there's echoes of like france fanon's combat literature approach um there's echoes of sort of you know taking the the mass line or the serve the people approach to political education and resulting in this pedological approach called groundings which i mean i don't i think i mean i don't know what the connections between um him and sancarra were But in, like, lots of Sankara documentaries, I see him doing this thing where he would be out with the people in the middle of the street, a huge crowd around him as he's talking and trying to explain things to people, taking questions from the crowd, just regular people, right? So no air of elitism, no separation from these radicals and the people who, you know, they support and who support them. It's beautiful.

Yeah, definitely. And what I meant to mention earlier when talking about Tanzania was Julius Nierre, who was the revolutionary mastermind, really. He was a brilliant person who he at the time was interested in creating what he deemed sort of Ujama or African socialism, which is a communalism form of socialism that was specific for the African context. So Walter Rodney was deeply interested in the Ujama and this African socialist sort of idea and what African socialism, quote unquote, could be or couldn't be. He had a lot of critiques of it. And actually, after living in Tanzania, he even developed, I think, a lot of critiques of Nieri himself, but he did it in such a principled way.

And this was his sort of close comrade who he respected. And so one of the other things I meant to mention about his practice or just Walter Rodney in general was he had a way of critiquing people and things in a principled way so that in that he could remain comrades with the very people he was critiquing. And I think that today we don't have that. Right, right. You know what I mean? Like that definitely doesn't exist today. But we're also not, we don't have a Walter Rodney today either to teach us how to. I just wanted to add that in there.

Yeah, that's incredibly important. And absolutely, we could stand to learn a lot from that approach on the left today. But you know, you described Rodney earlier as a Marxist, pan-Africanist giant, and that was really sort of summing up his ideology. Can you talk a little bit more about who his political influences were inside or outside of the Marxist tradition? And then whether or not there's still a debate over his ideological legacy today, maybe in academia, for example? So this is a pretty deep question,

and especially when you talk about debating over his legacy, it's almost like a, it's almost a question of who gets to claim him, which is kind of weird to me that we can even think of people like that. But he was, Rodney was definitely deeply inspired by people like Lennon and Mao and Cabral. These are people who he referenced and mentioned often. And he was really inspired by them because they were people who, to put it in his words, that were interested not just in thinking, but in doing as well, right?

So he was all about action. And so he was very inspired by Lennon, and he praises Lennon a lot. He also talks a lot about Fido Castro because Rodney traveled to Cuba, really when the Cuban Revolution was so. was still young and newly minted. And so when we talk about Rodney, there's almost three Rodney's. There's probably more. I just only know of three. But there's the Marxist or Marxist Leninist Rodney.

There's the Pan-African Rodney. And there's even the Rastafari Rodney in Jamaica. And to say who is correct or who is wrong is a little bit difficult because I think Rodney was all three, and I think he walked all three lines. So he speaks in clearly scientific socialism and Marxist terms. I think that he, and he even describes himself as a Marxist. But as his career grows and as his sort of political trajectory ages, he becomes more and more fond of this idea of Pan-Africanism, but not just in symbolic reference, but in

a very materialist way, where from his own position as someone from the Caribbean, someone within the diaspora, who is not continental African, but as from the diaspora, he sees the very material ways that there can be some sort of communication and reciprocity. I can never say this way. Reciprocity? I hope all the listeners know exactly what word I was trying to say and can tweet at me and tell me how to pronounce it correctly. But he sees where there can be this back and forth dialogue and material solidarity between the continent and the rest of the diaspora. But he also sees that the African diaspora needs Pan-Africanism to have any sense of identity. And he understands that without a cohesive sense of cultural political identity, you can't have a cohesive revolutionary movement.

So when he speaks of terms of black liberation, he understands. stands that we have to have a sense of African identity to connect our own culture and struggles and politics and social developments to that of the continent and the colonial situation or at his time what was being birthed was the neo-colonial situation, right? So this is where Rodney is situated. He has his Marxist-Leninist tendency or ideology, but as we started this discussion talking about bending and contouring and texturing Marxism to fit his specific needs, he realized that Pan-Afghanism was not in opposition to Marxism or Marxism Leninism, right? And so this is where he starts to develop his sort of theory of African history

for the liberation of black people. And he develops theories of black power as it relates to Marxism and the Caribbean. And he starts to get into these very, I mean, wonderful. wonderful theories and historical writings. And so that's sort of where I situate Rodney is I think he is both Marxists and Pan-African, but it is very common to find people in the university. I mean, I've read actually outright capitalists who cite Walter Rodney and how Europe underdeveloped Africa and who divorced him completely from his political ideologies, but they use historical and material analysis because it's so spot on. But there's also liberals

who want to say, no, Rodney didn't care at all about Marxism or class. He only cared about culture and identity, and these things are not connected. Or I have heard Marxists apply Rodney in a very dogmatic way and say, no, he was not a Pan-Africanist. He was a Marxist. The truth of the matter is Rodney, like most third world revolutionaries, he was both pan-Africanist and Marxists. And so there definitely is a battle. And the Walter Rodney Foundation recently published Walter Rodney's book on the Russian Revolution. And it's Walter Rodney writing a history of the Russian Revolution from the view of the third world. It's an incredible history of the Russian Revolution. And it's been interesting seeing the responses to that book because

people will say this is a Rodney that I am not familiar with because he's writing in very Marxist terms. He's speaking explicitly and openly in these terms. He's calling out bourgeois sources and he's speaking in a language which may be familiar if you only know the Pan-African or Rastafar Rodney. And I think that it really speaks largely to how we memorialize people and how we give people a legacy that we just really want to flatten these individuals and this person, you know, to one thing or one ideology. But the truth of the matter is, merging and mixing ideologies for the revolutionary good was what Rodney was all about. Yeah. Yeah, that's incredibly fascinating. You know, I keep going back to Fanon because I recently read Wretched and got

deep into it. But, you know, there's that similar sort of dichotomy and academia today over Fanon's legacy where there is a sort of liberal co-option of him as primarily or exclusively a theorist of identity and sort of stripped of that Marxist and class analysis that was so you know central to his analysis overall or you know psychoanalytic thinkers that just want to take out the psychoanalysis of Fanon and not the Marxism etc so it's interesting that these struggles continue and I think it's important to have people fighting for what you're fighting for which is seeing a three-dimensional human being and not trying to flatten somebody because of one's own ideological you know goals at the time right and i think that i mean it's interesting

because these people also if if you are the kind of person who you want to and have to know what someone's ideology is before reading them right which is understandable for some uh these people often tell you it's not a secret right yeah rodney in various writings has said that he is a marxist or Marxist, and he's also said he's very interested in Pan-Afghanism. Phenone said he was a Marxist. He's also a psychoanalyst, right? These people tell you, it's almost an arrogance of hindsight to try and rewrite their own ideologies. There's a battle right now over Phenome as it relates to Afro-pessimism, which I won't get into because I got in a lot of trouble last time I talked about that topic.

But Phenone very clearly tells you what he's doing. doing and why he's doing it and who he is when he's doing it. And I think Walter Rodney, much like many other people, is the same way. There's also this question of quote-unquote, black nationalism versus Marxism or what black nationalism can sort of mean for Marxism, I think, is an interesting way of putting it. But Walter Rodney was, and this is like a current debate that happens in black studies and organizing and across the black world, really. But Walter Rodney was talking about this all the way back into the 60s. He was writing about sort of black nationalism and African nationalism.

And he also talks about the differences between a nationalism placed in the third world versus nationalism and the Imperial Corps, for example. And so when a lot of people come to these questions and want to claim Rodney or anyone else for their own ideology, which often I think it is for selfish games, it feels like. like. But the truth of the matter is, all you have to do is read what Rodney wrote. He has an essay, I think it was in 1972, called Tanzania and Ujama and Scientific Socialism. There's also Marxism and African liberation and class contradictions in Tanzania. These are all essays that can be found online where he pretty much answers questions. And if you want a good explainer on what scientific socialism is and how it relates to Africa, Tanzanian, Ujama, and Scientific Socialism, the essay I just mentioned,

is such a great place to start. So I'll just say that. Yeah, I'm putting that on my list and that new release on Russian Revolution. Both those things sound absolutely fascinating. Oh, yeah, you got to get those. I'll send you a link to some of the essays I just mentioned, too. Wonderful, thank you. And I'll put those in the show notes for listeners as well.

I know we've talked about the major works of Walter Rodney. You mentioned, obviously, I think, you know, his big one that a lot of people know is how Europe underdeveloped Africa. Can you maybe talk about those major works and maybe just talk about the main themes and focuses of them so people have some idea of the content of those works? Sure. Yeah. And I'll even, I think I might could name them all off of the top of my head. Let's see.

Well, I think that I mentioned the grounding with my brother a little bit. And what that book is only around 100 pages. But what that book was was essentially as he was having these groundings sessions across Jim. Jamaica, some of them were transcribed and those speeches and lectures were put into this book, Groundings with my brothers. And so what we have is this very conversational look into a racial analysis of the Caribbean that still is incredibly, really the African diaspora in general, and it's incredibly relevant. He's speaking in language that I have used to teach a lot. I think whenever I've taught on Walter Rodney, this book is always the first one I go to.

There's also a history of the Upper Guinea Coast and Guyanese sugar plantations in the 19th century. So these are two of his straight history books where there's less political analysis and more history. But these two books would become incredibly important to the field of studying colonialism and slavery because he did history and history writing in a way that, that up until then was almost unheard of he found well i'm almost embarrassed to say this walter ronnie pretty much taught himself new languages um new to him not like he didn't invent language but that'd be awesome he taught himself uh portuguese and italian at least like functioning you know functioning levels i guess of in spanish in order to look and get new source material on

slavery so that he can go into archives and didn't have to rely, in his words, on bourgeois translations. And so in these books, he's really publishing direct source material about slavery and the plantation lifestyle or sugar workers. He has sugar plantation workers in Jamaica, I mean, Guyana. So these two books, honestly, as a historian, they like taught me how to do history, I should say. How Europe and underdeveloped Africa, of course, his most popular book, as I said earlier. It's a thick and hefty book, but I challenge anyone listening to read it because it's very, it starts off intimidating, but it's really easy to get through. And it can honestly shape how you think about history. Like I think that he essentially describes a relationship between Europe and the U.S. and Africa where the wealth of Europe, quite literally depended on the underdevelopment or unwealthing or stealing and robbing and exploiting of Africa. And he uses underdevelopment as a verb. It's something that's actively done to the third world into these countries, these mineral-rich countries or resource-rich countries. And it's

interesting to note how much that term underdeveloped has been co-opted, where it's no longer like some active verb that can be used in revolutionary language all the time. Now, CNN describes countries as underdeveloped countries, this underdeveloped country or developing country, right? But in reality, that's a bourgeois distortion of what Rodney meant. He meant that it was his active relationship of parasitic capitalism or really imperialism.

And then there's only a few more. There's Walter Rodney Speaks, which is more of his his sort of lectures and speeches and oration written into book form. To me, it's my favorite Walter Rodney book of all time because it's all about sort of what it means to be an intellectual and a revolutionary intellectual and to balance those two things. When at the time of his assassination, he wanted to work on a series of children's books

that dealt with race relations in Guyana and the Caribbean, especially between sort of African children and Indian children. in those locations. And then we have the Russian Revolution, which was just published a year or two ago by Verso Books through the Walter Rodney Foundation. This was a book

that he never got to finish before his assassination. It's called The Russian Revolution of You from the Third World and Robin D.G. Kelly, along with Dr. Jesse Benjamin, helped to edit it and put sort of a working, finished, functional,

final book project together on that, even though it never got to be published in his lifetime. And then, of course, he has essays all over the internet that you can find just by searching Walter Rodney. Yeah. Well, absolutely. You know, this is definitely an introduction to Walter Rodney for our listenership, but, you know, I would love to have you back on in the future, maybe to drill down on just one of those works and really, you know, do a deep dive on those texts because I really do think that they're absolutely essential and I don't want to just, you know,

glaze over them in one question. I will return. And a lot of the ideas we have on the show is we'll do a first flyover of a historical figure to help people orient themselves. And then months or even a year later, we'll come back and we'll do a deeper dive into that person or their works. And so I absolutely want to do that with Walter Rodney going forward. Definitely. And you know, I'm always down. Absolutely. We've talked about Walter Rodney's connection to the international movement.

You talked about his connection to Castro and the Cuban Revolution, for example. Were there any other major political figures or movements of the time that he had a personal? relationship. I'm thinking perhaps the Black Panther Party in the U.S., but anything even beyond that? Well, you know, it's fascinating because we're just now in recent years really learning about a lot of these connections. For example, last year, there was, we do a Walter Rodney symposium every spring in Atlanta. It's a big conference where a lot of speakers connected to Walter Rodney come. And Dr. Patricia Rodney, his wife, she very casually says, oh yeah, by the way, Stokely Carmichael and Merriam McKeever actually met at our house in Dara Salam, Tanzania, one evening when Walter Rodney introduced them to each other.

You know, and it's so interesting that she just very casually dropped that. For those of you who don't know, Stokely Carbichael or Kwame Tore was a revolutionary, and Marya McKeba was a very famous African singer. So his connections run deep, and Atlanta is actually a very key place. and learning about the connections that Walter Rodney had. So there was a place called the Institute of the Black World, which was a kind of a think take before we had the word think tank, I think. And activists like Vincent Harding or C.L.R. James, Sylvia Winter, Robert A. Hill, C.T. Vivian, all of these very big, prominent activists.

were running the Institute of the Black World. And whenever revolutionaries from across the African diaspora were in town or in the U.S., they would arrange for them to come and stay at the IBW for a few days or weeks, or however long they really wanted and engaged in intellectual work, whether it was writing, holding public discussions and forums. So it was here at the Institute of the Black World that he met a lot of people. Like I just mentioned, Vincent Harding is sort of an unsung revolutionary. one of the ones actually he wrote most of MLK's more radical speeches towards the end

and a lot of people aren't familiar with that so here at the Institute of the Black World Walter Rodney meets these kind of people along with many Black Panthers, civil rights icons and he meets a lot of people who we know in the U.S. but to the international world you know they I don't know their familiarity with these people and beyond that in the African continent when he's in Tanzania, because what people have to understand is during the African liberation struggles for independence across the continent, they were opening up their borders to revolutionaries across the diaspora. For example, Walter Rodi meets Angela Davis while in

Guinea-Pasal had a conference with Cabral. Yeah. So when you think of these connections, it's almost mind-blowing that's these, and that's actually why on the new edition of how you're underdeveloped Africa, Angela Davis writes the introduction for it, and it was just published last year. So they met there, but with Cabral. And so Walter Rodney knew a lot of these people. He also, he spent time in Cuba,

and he was asked by Fidel Castro personally to write a book, a very short book, sort of on the history of black people in Cuba. And so to answer your question, he was very connected, and he knew a lot of these people, but not only did he know them, but you can find sort of his work cited in their work, and you can see his influence on them in the way they would speak about Africa or African countries

and the rest of the world, or the way they would speak about race and class, you can draw direct connections. Someone like Sylvia Winter, who might be one of the most famous cultural theorist of all time, she very often is citing Walter Rodney. And C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney was a student of C.L.R. James, the C. James became a mentor of his, and then they became sort of peers and colleagues, and they challenged each other. And C.L.R. James has writing discussing that and talking about how they would challenge each other, and Walter Rodney does as well. So, and C.L.R. James, who was also a Caribbean Marxist. So, you know, I think that there's, the connections are very deep, because

like he tried to exemplify, he was someone who didn't just talk, but he also did, and he had a very actionable reputation that a lot of a lot of these heavyweights were attracted to yeah well that's fascinating i knew he had some connections i did not know the extent of it um yeah that's just incredibly sort of sort of beautiful you know like all those people in one time um fighting you know and they're on their own fronts but in the same direction i don't know it's just it's just inspiring yeah i mean you know it's it's interesting walter rodney was being taught by revolutionaries and Guinea Basal, how to shoot a gun, and Angela Davis was there. You know, in hindsight, that seems like a moment that a movie could be made out of, right?

Right. But in reality, these people were planning for a revolution. So when you find out, oh, you're planning for a revolution, oh, you're, you want black liberation, you know what I mean? Like, these people are grabbing on to other visible icons who share the same goals with them regardless of where they're from and i think that's just like to me as a marxist that's incredibly inspiring from a praxis point of view yeah absolutely could not agree more well said um i ask this question because we know when i come across somebody that has such a passion for

a topic but you know specifically a historical figure i like to to have this question in there so what do you personally find particularly interesting or maybe underappreciated about Walter Rodney's character and personality, like what values or character traits do you think made him such a powerful and well-loved figure? I mean, I think the most obvious one is that he was just a very great speaker. And we take that for granted because in the age of social media, it feels like anyone can record a podcast or a video or a YouTube series or whatever. But back in the day, to get up and speak about a bunch of people about some stuff that

could potentially get you deported and did eventually. is a gift. So he was a very amazing speaker. There's some, you can find audio of a few of his speeches online, but I think that it's appropriate to use this question to actually spread light on Patricia Rodney, who was his wife at the time,

who has done an incredible job of carrying on his work and his legacy. I think she might be the most underappreciated thing about Walter Rodney. They have several children together, And while he was sort of running around trying to change the world, she was often, you know, at home raising them while also getting a master's degree while also getting a PhD, while also becoming head of several public health initiatives in Guyana in Montreal, in the UK, and elsewhere, right? Wow. She talks a lot about the repression that she faced in everywhere that they lived because of being connected to such a sort of dynamite man. And I think that she often, maybe because of gender, she's very overlooked in the sense that her own political work is not valued and appreciated as much. She works on public health initiatives and she started the women's center at Spelman College.

college in Atlanta. She founded that herself. So, you know, I think that the most underappreciated part of Rodney's legacy may be her and the people around them. She was, she had a small child who I think was three years old while also pregnant with another child and was out in the Rodney riots getting hit with tear gas. You know what I mean? An absolute hero. Exactly, exactly. And she, when he was assassinated in 1980, the government of Guyana listed the cause of death as mishap. Because of that, she was able to receive no insurance money. So here she is in her home country. She can't get any work because of the political repression. Her husband has just been assassinated. She has three children. She has to flee the country for her safety. And she can't even get insurance money for

her husband's death, right? And from that, she has carried on his legacy through tons of different initiatives. And she has, she's fought for justice, not just for Walter Rodney and his assassination, but for others who face political oppression and assassination in Guyana at the same time. So, you know, I just want to, I think that when we talk about underappreciating Walter Rodney, there's always more Walter Rodney to go around, but Patricia Rodney is alive now and people can look her up and get involved and, you know, appreciate her. Absolutely. Yeah, I could not have imagined a better answer to that.

Incredibly well said. Huge shout out to Patricia Rodney. I mean, just an absolutely heroic, fascinating person. And you're right, like, that deserves so much credit. And that shit often does get overlooked. So I really appreciate that answer from you. Now, you did mention, and we've mentioned throughout this episode, that Walter Rodney was assassinated.

Can you talk about exactly the details of how his life ended, how. old he was and importantly what the reaction was to his death from the people yeah so and and i think the best way to know about walter rodney's assassinations to hear from his daughter ayesha rodney uh i interviewed her on my podcast the groundings podcast i'm not just trying to promo my my show i really it's a great show i really think it's the best way to learn about his assassination because not only is she his daughter but she's also a lawyer so she can break sort of not only the assassin's but the legal aftermath down in a very, very, very precise way. But Walter Rodney was killed by an explosive device hidden in a walkie-talkie, and that's the short version, the slightly

longer version, because I'm not going to go into the super long version, but Walter Rodney was involved in some very, very high-level political organization that was continuing to be escalated, because, again, this is a man who wanted to create revolution in a principled and organized way. And there was a man, I believe, named Joseph Smith, who befriended Walter Rodney and the WPA, the party that Walter Rodney was involved with, and gave them eventually after several weeks of getting to know him and getting their trust, gave him a walkie-talkie. At the time, Forrest Burnham had had banned walkie-talkies and communities. devices from Guyana for precisely the purpose that he knew people were plotting against him. So the question one is how did he get the walkie-talkie device into Guyana in the first place?

Some people, like CLR James actually, have faulted Walter Rodney and the WPA for maybe not, maybe overlooking some of the details too much in their excitement. But nonetheless, he gives this explosive device. He's supposed to hold it to his face while they're, in the car driving, and then it explodes killing him. Walter Rodney's brother, Donald Rodney, was in the passenger seat as well. And so this explosive device goes off while it's in Walter Rodney's lap, and he is killed. The brother, Donald Rodney, survives. Now, the newspaper in Guyana at the time was a state-run newspaper, and it printed every morning at the same time,

or it printed the night before. Sorry. So every issue that came out, was printed the night before. However, the morning of Walter Rodney's assassination, there was a newspaper printed that said unidentified man was killed in a car explosion, and they were referring to Walter Rodney. However, they would have had to have known that several hours before it actually happened early in the morning to have printed that the night before. So essentially, the plan was that he would be the explosion device would go off while he had it to his face talking and it would render his face unrecognizable. And they ran that story. Of course, that was almost a prediction that did not come true entirely because his face was identifiable. And despite Patricia

Rodney going up there and identifying him in his body, the state claims he was unidentifiable. And they maintained that line. The next morning, they mailed the bloody clothes to Patricia Rodney while still claiming the body was unidentified. Oh, my God. And I tell it in this bloody detail because these were bloody times and this was bloody action. Later, find out that Joseph Smith, the one who gave the walkie-talkie to Walter Rodney, was former Guyanese military

who also may or may not there's more evidence suggesting he was trained at the School of the Americas in the U.S. If you know anything about the School of the Americas is essentially where individuals or counter-revolutionaries from the third world are trained by the U.S. military and CIA

to do regime change and overthrow their governments. So not only is there a connection to the state of Guyana there's also a connection to the U.S. and U.S. imperialist interest. We also know now, through WikiLeaks of all things, surprisingly, it's useful for something, I guess, that the U.S., the CIA was keeping very, very close tabs on Walter Rodney during this time, and they admitted in their cables that they had embedded someone in the party. So this is Walter Rodney's assassination in 1980. Like I said before, Patricia Rodney was unable to receive insurance money because they listed his death as mishap instead of murder or explosion. So she couldn't receive any insurance money. The government of Guyana refuses to do a official commission of inquiry into his death.

That would be a full investigation by the top, you know, all the top judges, lawyers, investigators and the entire country, and really some of the surrounding countries, and two, for such a high-profile killing, would be involved. They refused to do this. And it wasn't until, I believe, 2013 or 2014, they finally said, okay, we'll investigate this death. It might have been 2012, actually. So they finally investigate his death of the commission of inquiry. It takes about two years, and just as they're about to release the official findings. And in any National Commission of Inquiry, the official findings are essentially endorsed by the government, because these are the top, usually Supreme Court

justices and members of government are involved, right? So it's essentially endorsed by the government. The same party who is responsible for the death of Walter Rodney was re-elected months before the official findings released, and they instantly halted the Commission of Inquiries results to be released. So here you have almost a taste of justice coming close, and then this happens, and they say we're not releasing these findings. They do a smear campaign to undermine it, and they say that it was not done correctly, and that the best people were not on the job.

Mind you, these are the top people in the country, so they're dissing themselves. but the commission of inquiry pieces of it leak before the full thing leaks online and it's completely damning of the Guyanese government and the party in place there were hundreds of people from Guyana and all around the world who came and testified in the Guyanese and Guyana's top court about the assassination and other assassinations around that time right so what we have is this huge document of people people's confessions, people saying what they witnessed, you know, and it's people like Patricia Rodney, people who were in his political party like EUC Quayana, who come and they testify and say everything

they know. And the conclusion is essentially, well, everyone already knew that Ford's Burnham had ordered his assassination. And Joseph Smith, who gave him the Wakutaki, was the tool of that assassination. So today with the Walter Rodney Foundation and with the Rodney family, Asha and Patricia Rodney especially, one of their big things is they want the commission of inquiry to be officially released and endorsed by the guy in his government and to receive some kind of reconciliation for that. Because without that, they still feel like there's no justice. And even that isn't justice, right? That's sort of like a capitalist or parliamentary conception of justice, but, you know, that's at least what they're asking for in light of

all that's happened. Right. Wow. I mean, and how old was he when he died? He was assassinated? I believe he was 38. Yeah, so before his 40th birthday. Wow.

Yeah. And, you know, if you were to do like an average of the lifespan of revolutionaries, I feel like it'd be somewhere between 27 and 40 because they often get assassinated in that. Black revolutionaries specifically. you know yeah exactly i mean i was thinking how sancarra died in burkino faso how fred hampton died in chicago the same exact pattern plays out the same general forces tend to be behind it brutal god damn i mean you and you can even look at people who who weren't assassinated but who probably uh there were attempts to right i mean you can look at angela davis when she was in her

20s and 30s, I believe they wanted her dead or alive in this country. And there was a smear campaign against her and they were trying to undermine her. CLR. James became explosive and controversial in his 30s and early 40s. So this is, you know, this is not new or unique to Walter Rodney. And that's something that I think a lot of people need to understand is we're talking about Walter Rodney right now, but the same applies to black revolutionaries in many different countries, either those who were assassinated or the multiple attempts to assassinate them. Yeah, absolutely. And that's why we tell these stories so people can see these patterns, pick up on how this shit actually works and the forces behind these assassinations and why they're

assassinated. I mean, these patterns aren't coincidences, you know, this happens for a reason and it happens over and over and over again until we displace the very system that makes this pattern and continue to unfold in this way, you know? Exactly. And this is also an issue of, I mean, you can think of the multitude of apparatuses that had to be involved in such an assassination. You have police, you have members of the media, you have the military training, right? These sort of capitalist and imperialist institutions and apparatuses, they don't operate in silos.

They don't operate independently. They're colluding together for the demise of, of revolutionary energy, especially black revolutionaries. Yeah, absolutely. So a way to end this conversation and to wrap it up, knowing that we will come back and do deeper dives into Rodney's work, what do you think is Walter Rodney's ultimate legacy or perhaps a better way to put it,

is what do you think revolutionaries and Marxists today should take away from him in his life? To answer that question, I want to read a quote, actually. I think I have a good quote that I can pull up to read, that answers that, because there's a lot to be said about Walter Rodney, but I like allowing him to say it in his own words. I think he knows how he wants to be remembered. I alluded to this earlier, but I'm just going to read this quote in full. Finally, there were confrontations in the university classroom with the same tutors who were essentially nationalists, progressive progressives,

but who, as I found subsequently, hadn't made the break with class consciousness. There was one individual who was very anti-Cuban and that bothered me. There is another individual who made a statement which has constantly remained with me. I was doing some paper on the Russian revolution and it struck me that this Lenin was a person who had a tremendous capacity for intellectualizing and at the same time doing. In my own naive way, I called this phenomenon a revolutionary intellectual. But the professor was very hard on the statement. He said there's no such thing. One can be an intellectual or one can be a revolutionary. You can't combine the two. Lennon may at one time had been a revolutionary, had another time an intellectual, but the moment he moves into

practical activity, he must abandon intellectualism. This was the most curious argument. Even at the time, I thought it was most curious, but with my own naivety, I couldn't really confront the argument. I just sensed that somehow he was wrong about it, and I felt that somehow being a revolutionary intellectual might be a goal to which one might aspire for. Surely there is no reason why one should remain in the academic world, that is, remain an intellectual, and at the same time not be revolutionary. So I abhor that in mind, and the fact that I do recall it very clearly does indicate how much I abhor it. To me, that quote is very prescient how I think Walter Ryan should be remembered. He says he wanted to be a revolutionary intellectual, much like

linen. He would later develop this idea of a guerrilla intellectual based off of the revolutionary intellectual linen, and I think that that's the legacy. He was someone who could intellectualize and historicize and theorize, but he could also pick up a gun and knew how to aim it, and he could know why he was aiming it in the context for which he was shooting it. So that's how I think Walter Rodney would be remembered and should be remembered, at least, in my opinion. Absolutely. Beautifully said by you and by Rodney. So, Devin, thank you so much. Like I said, this has been long overdue. Absolute pleasure to talk and learn from you.

So I really will have you back on and we'll do deeper dives. We could do anything together. I just love talking with you. Before I let you go, though, can you please let listeners know where they can find you, your podcast, and your other work online? Oh, sure. You can find me on Twitter at Half Atlanta, H-A-L-F-A-T-L-A-N-T-A. I kind of forgot how to spell Atlanta halfway through there.

you can find my podcast the groundings podcast pretty much anywhere you listen to podcast except Spotify i don't like Spotify um you can find my work online there's a link to my portfolio of all my writing and all kinds of stuff as well as my patron on my twitter so yeah well we will link to as much of that as we possibly can in the show notes of this episode so listeners can go find it there thank you again devon absolute pleasure we'll definitely be in touch and do this again sometime appreciate it Pull up in motorcats I got a show today

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