Walter Rodney

Walter Rodney was born into a working-class family in Georgetown, British Guiana, and his academic gifts carried him to Queen's College, the country's top secondary school, and then to the University of the West Indies and SOAS, University of London, where he completed his doctorate in African history at just 24 years old.

Rodney taught in Tanzania and Jamaica, where his public lectures on Black history and consciousness beyond the university campus made him a target of the Jamaican government; his deportation in 1968 triggered the Rodney Riots, one of the most significant civil disturbances in twentieth-century Jamaican history. In 1972, he published his most influential work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, which argued that African poverty and European wealth were interconnected products of slavery, colonial extraction, and unequal exchange — a thesis that became foundational to a generation of scholarship on colonialism and remains widely read and taught today.

Returning to Guyana in 1974, Rodney found his university appointment blocked by the government and instead helped found the multiracial Working People's Alliance, organising against the increasingly authoritarian government of Forbes Burnham. On June 13, 1980, Rodney was killed by a bomb in Georgetown at age 38; a Guyanese commission of inquiry concluded in 2016 that his assassination was likely organised with state involvement, and Guyana's National Assembly formally recognised his death as an assassination in 2021.