October 2020 will mark 52 years since the expulsion of Walter Rodney from Jamaica. Rodney took his activism to the streets of Jamrock to empower the black populace. He inspired what is know in Jamaican history as the “Rodney Rebellion”.

The rebellion came as a result of his expulsion and ban from the country. One website, explains that the protest were also about “the general exploitation of the African-Jamaican masses by the neocolonial regime.”

He was integral in Afro Caribbean socialist and Pan Africanist movements and taught people like me that we can be proud of who we are and what we look like regardless of the atrocities we faced.

To this day he is a part of Jamacian history and it’s curriculum but he was deliberately excluded from the Guyanese curriculum due to solely political tensions.

I am a lover of soulful reggae, so of course Chronixx is one of my favorite artists. It was his song “Black is Beautiful” that made me realize how popular Rodney was as he mentioned him. It was this song that got me researching why it was that Jamaicans knew who he was.

Direct lyrics read “I've never seen a doctor in black nor seen a black pill fi cure no black people
But I've seen bush doctors like Tosh and Marley resurrect like a real black beatle
Malcom, Marcus, Martin
When you see Walter Rodney ask him”

To be in the category or Bob Marley, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Marcus Garvey meant that he is one of the leading voices in the black empowerment movement not just in the region but in this hemisphere. It just baffles me why we in Guyana do not see this and celebrated Him

Recently (tho not so recent) the Walter Rodney Archives was renamed the National Archives of Guyana. In an effort to erase the only public legacy of the assassinated political& social activist, scholar and Pan Africanist. We need to demand more and do better locally.