Walter Rodney remembered

Yesterday was the 64th anniversary of the birth of Walter Rodney. The third annual Rodney Symposium was held, at the Catholic Centre across the road from the AUC Library. Today, there's going to be a panel on Rodney at the National Conference of Black Political Scientists meeting. I'll be presenting a paper on the Groundings. The idiot who put the programme together decided to change my name to 'Srigano' (ugh!), change 'Groundings' to 'Grounding' and insert an unecessary apostrophe in '1960s'. I'm tempted to call for the jackass (or jennyass) to be decapitated. But, today is a day for academic seriousness. I present below the introduction to the paper, which is about the setting of the Groundings.

Walter Rodney became a public figure – as distinguished from someone well known in academic or radical circles – as a result of his being made persona non grata by the government of Jamaica in 1968. To understand that exclusion, we have to look at Rodney in the context of the Jamaica of the 1960s. This means we have to reexamine The Groundings with my Brothers, which contains Rodney’s lectures to slum-dwellers that so alarmed the government of prime minister Hugh Shearer. We also have to consider what kind of country Jamaica was at the time, and what the attitude of Jamaica’s government was to academic freedom.

Jamaica became independent on 6 August, 1962. That did not mean that it instantly shed its colonial past. “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living,” wrote Marx.[1] This is even more the case when those generations are not in fact dead.

No impassable barrier separates colonial Jamaica from post-colonial Jamaica. Indeed, Jamaica became independent with a state structure that combined authoritarian and democratic elements;[2] the former the result of long colonial rule, the latter the result of processes of decolonization that began in the 1940s.

Early independent Jamaica was a continuation of what it had been under late colonial rule with one substantial difference – apart from the fact that the governor no longer exercised a power of veto over the elected government – that until independence the local authorities were subject to the British and after independence paid close attention to the wishes of the United States.[3] A two-party system, the conservative Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) facing the social-democratic People’s National Party (PNP), had been established over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, and local politicians had, in stages, taken over responsibility for local affairs from the Colonial Office between 1944, when universal adult suffrage was introduced, and independence in 1962.

The JLP government, which came to office shortly before independence and was to remain in power for the first decade of independent Jamaica, was sensitive both to the concerns of the United States government and to social pressures which manifested themselves in the emergence of the Rastafari movement and in such events as the anti-Chinese riots of 1965.[4] Foreign investment (particularly in bauxite and sugar), tourism, and the continued existence of ethno-racial minorities (particularly since some of them controlled much of the wealth of the island), were central concerns to the JLP prime ministers, Sir Alexander Bustamante, Sir Donald Sangster, and Hugh Shearer, as they presided over the government. They had been central concerns of the pre-independence PNP administration of Norman Manley.[5]

The island’s social structure, in the years following the achievement of independence, showed little change from the years preceding. The upper class continued to be dominated by whites, with a few Chinese and brown (mixed race) Jamaicans on its fringes, the middle class was made up mostly, but by no means entirely, of brown Jamaicans, and the lower classes, urban and rural, were overwhelmingly black. Habits of deference, and habits of dominance, developed over the three centuries of British rule, and the long period of plantation slavery during that rule, were still ingrained in parts of the population.[6]

Others, however, had developed and refined forms of resistance to racial and class oppression, of which the most significant was Rastafarianism[7]. And that drew, in its turn, from the black nationalism of Marcus Garvey, perhaps the most important political figure to emerge in late colonial Jamaica, given the impact of Garveyism on Africans and peoples of African origin outside that continent. That resistance constituted a counternarrative to the official account of Jamaica’s movement from colonial rule to independence.

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[1] In the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. URL: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm

[2] Obika Gray, Radicalism and Social Change in Jamaica, 1960-1972; Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991, 1.

[3] Gray also notes that colonial laws continued to be used after independence against ‘groups and individuals thought to be subversive’ (Gray, 47).

[4] American concerns were driven by the exigencies of the US role in the Cold War. In the case of Jamaica, this meant fear of possible Cuban or other Communist influences.

[5] Gray, 38.

[6] John Charles Gannon “The Origins and Development of Jamaica’s Two-Party System, 1930-1975”; Ph.D. Dissertation, Washington University, St Louis, 1975, 257 fn 2.

[7] Rastafarianism is a much-studied religious and cultural phenomenon. Some of the most significant works on the subject are The Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica, by M.G. Smith, F.R. Augier, and R.M. Nettleford (Mona, Jamaica: Institute for Social and Economic Studies, 1960), Dread: The Rastafarians of Jamaica, by Joseph Owens (Kingston: Sangster’s Bookstores, 1976), The Rastafarians: The Dreadlocks of Jamaica, by Leonard Barrett (Kingston: Sangster’s Bookstores, 1977), Race, Class and Political Symbols: Rastafari and Reggae in Jamaican Politics, by Anita M. Waters (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1984), and Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney, by Horace Campbell (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1987)