Walter Rodney Quotes

For the only great men among the unfree and the oppressed are those who struggle to destroy the oppressor.

After all, if there is no class stratification in a society, it follows that there is no state, because the state arose as an instrument to be used by a particular class to control the rest of society in its own interests.

A culture is a total way of life. It embraces what people ate and what they wore; the way they walked and the way they talked; the manner in which they treated death and greeted the newborn.

We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists? Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.

There was a period when the capitalist system increased the well-being of significant numbers of people as a by-product of seeking out profits for a few, but today the quests for profits comes into sharp conflict with people’s demands that their material and social needs should be fulfilled.

The white world defines who is white and who is black.

The peasants and workers of Europe (and eventually the inhabitants of the whole world) paid a huge price so that the capitalists could make their profits from the human labor that always lies behind the machines. That contradicts other facets of development, especially viewed from the standpoint of those who suffered and still suffer to make capitalist achievements possible. This latter group are the majority of mankind. To advance, they must overthrow capitalism; and that is why at the moment capitalism stands in the path of further human social development. To put it another way, the social (class) relations of capitalism are now outmoded, just as slave and feudal relations became outmoded in their time.

Sometimes, the word “stateless” is carelessly or even abusively used; but it does describe those peoples who had no machinery of government coercion and no concept of a political unit wider than the family or the village. After all, if there is no class stratification in a society, it follows that there is no state, because the state arose as an instrument to be used by a particular class to control the rest of society in its own interests.

Many guilty consciences have been created by the slave trade. Europeans know that they carried on the slave trade, and Africans are aware that the trade would have been impossible if certain Africans did not cooperate with slave ships. To ease their guilty consciences, Europeans try to throw the major responsibility for the slave trade on to the Africans. One major author on the slave trade (appropriately titled Sins of Our Fathers) explained how many white people urged him to state that the trade was the responsibility of African chiefs, and that Europeans merely turned up to buy captives- as though without European demand there would have been captives sitting on the beach by the millions! Issues such as those are not the principal concern of this study, but they can be correctly approached only after understanding that Europe became the center of a world-wide system and that it was European capitalism which set slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in motion.

[The] association of wealth with whites and poverty with blacks is not accidental. It is the nature of the imperialist relationship that enriches the metropolis at the expense of the colony i.e. it makes the whites richer and the blacks poorer.

It is as though no black man can see another black man except by looking through a white person. It is time we started seeing through our own eyes.

The moment that the topic of the pre-European African past is raised, many individuals are concerned for various reasons to know about the existence of African “civilizations.” Mainly, this stems from a desire to make comparisons with European “civilizations.” This is not the context in which to evaluate the so-called civilizations of Europe. It is enough to note the behavior of European capitalists from the epoch of slavery through colonialism, fascism, and genocidal wars in Asia and Africa. Such barbarism causes suspicion to attach to the use of the word “civilization” to describe Western Europe and North America.

Malcolm X, our martyred brother, became the greatest threat to white power in the USA because he began to seek a broader basis for his efforts in Africa and Asia, and he was probably the first individual who was prepared to bring the race question in the US up before the UN as an issue of international importance.

In a way, underdevelopment is a paradox. Many parts of the world that are naturally rich are actually poor and parts that are not so well off in wealth of soil and sun-soil are enjoying the highest standards of living. When the capitalists from the developed parts of the world try to explain this paradox, they often make it sound as though there is something “God-given” about the situation. One bourgeois economist, in a book on development, accepted that the comparative statistics of the world today show a gap that is much larger than it was before. By his own admission, the gap between the developed and underdeveloped countries has increased by at least 15 to 20 times over the last 150 years. However, the bourgeois economist in question does not give a historical explanation, nor does he consider that there is a relationship of exploitation which allowed capitalist parasites to grow fat and impoverished the dependencies. Instead he puts forward a biblical explanation!

From the beginning, Europe assumed the power to make decisions within the international trading system. An excellent illustration of that is the fact that the so-called international law which governed the conduct of nations on the high seas was nothing else but European law. Africans did not participate in its making, and in many instances, African people were simply the victims, for the law recognized them only as transportable merchandise. If the African slave was thrown overboard at sea, the only legal problem that arose was whether or not the slave ship could claim compensation from the insurers! Above all, European decision-making power was exercised in selecting what Africa should export – in accordance with European needs.

One of the major dilemmas inherent in the attempt by black people to break through the cultural aspects of white imperialism is that posed by the use of historical knowledge as a weapon in our struggle. We are virtually forced into the invidious position of proving our humanity by citing historical antecedents; and yet the evidence is too often submitted to the white racists for sanction. The white man has already implanted numerous historical myths in the minds of black peoples; and those have to be uprooted . . . It is necessary to direct our historical activity in the light of two basic principles[:] Firstly, the effort must be directed solely towards freeing and mobilising black minds. There must be no performances to impress whites, for those whites who find themselves beside us in the firing line will be there for reasons far more profound than their exposure to African history. Secondly, the acquired knowledge of African history must be seen as directly relevant but secondary to the concrete tactics and strategy which are necessary for our liberation. There must be no false distinctions between reflection and action . . . If there is to be any proving of our humanity it must be by revolutionary means.

Actually, if “underdevelopment” were related to anything other than comparing economies, then the most underdeveloped country in the world would be the United States, which practices external oppression on a massive scale, while internally there is a blend of exploitation, brutality, and psychiatric disorder.

Capitalism has proved incapable of transcending fundamental weaknesses such as underutilization of productive capacity, the persistence of a permanent sector of unemployed, and periodic economic crises related to the concept of "market"—which is concerned with people's ability to pay rather than their need for commodities. (11)

There were a few farsighted Europeans who all along saw that the colonial educational system would serve them if and when political independence was regained in Africa. For instance, Pierre Foncin, a founder of the Alliance Francaise, stated at the beginning of this century that "it is necessary to attach the colonies to the metropolis by a very solid psychological bond, against the day when their progressive emancipation ends in a federation as is probable that they be and they remain French in language, thought and spirit.

The presence of a group of African sell-outs is part of the definition of underdevelopment. Any

If there is to be any proving of our humanity it must be through revolutionary means.

Beauty is in the very existence of black people.

Christ was a member of the Essene group of Jews from Egypt. Were he alive today, he would suffer from racial discrimination.

I'm putting it to my black brothers and sisters that the colour of our skins is the most fundamental thing about us.

Trotsky once wrote that revolution is the carnival of the masses. When we have that carnival in the West Indies, are people like us here at the university going to join the bacchanal?

Black Power is not racially intolerant. It is the hope of the black man that he should have power over his own destinies. This is not incompatible with a multiracial society where each individual counts equally. Because the moment that power is equitably distributed among several ethnic groups, the very relevance of making the distinction between groups will be lost.

A culture is a total way of life. It embraces what people ate and what they wore; the way they walked and the way they talked; the manner in which they treated death and greeted the newborn. Obviously,

It was economics that Europe should invest in Africa and control the continent's raw materials and labour. It was racism which confirmed the decision that form of control should be direct colonial rule.

In pursuing the goal of development, one must start with the producers and move on from there to see whether the products of their labor are being rationally utilized to bring greater independence and well-being to the nation. (23)

There is nothing with which poverty coincides so absolutely as the colour black - small or large population, hot or cold climates, rich or poor in natural resources - poverty cuts across all of these factors in order to find black people.

If economic power is centered outside national African boundaries, then political and military power in any real sense is also centered outside until, and unless, the masses of peasants and workers are mobilized to offer an alternative to the system of sham political independence. All

Development means a capacity for self-sustaining growth. It means that an economy must register advances which in turn will promote further progress. The loss of industry and skill in Africa was extremely small, if we measure it from the viewpoint of modern scientific achievements or even by the standards of England in the late eighteenth century. However, it must be borne in mind that to be held back at one stage means that it is impossible to go on to a further stage. When a person is forced to leave school after only two years of primary school education, it is no reflection on him that he is academically and intellectually less developed than someone who had the opportunity to be schooled right through to university level. What Africa experienced in the early centuries of trade was precisely a loss of development opportunity, and this is of greatest importance.

There is the mistaken belief that black people achieved power with independence (e.g., Malaya, Jamaica, Kenya), but a black man ruling a dependent state within the imperialist system has now power. He is simply an agent of the whites in the metropolis, with an army and a police force designed to maintain the imperialist way of things in that particular colonial area.

Obviously, underdevelopment is not absence of development, because every people have developed in one way or another and to a greater or lesser extent. Underdevelopment makes sense only as a means of comparing levels of development. It is very much tied to the fact that human social development has been uneven and from a strictly economic viewpoint some human groups have advanced further by producing more and becoming more wealthy. (15)

On any basic figure of the Africans landed alive in the Americas, one would have to make several extensions- starting with a calculation to cover mortality in transshipment. The Atlantic crossing, or “Middle Passage,” as it was called by European slavers, was notorious for the number of deaths incurred, averaging in the vicinity of 15-20 per cent. There were also numerous deaths in Africa between time of capture and time of embarkation, especially in cases where captives had to travel hundreds of miles to the coast. Most important of all (given that warfare was the principal means of obtaining captives) it is necessary to make some estimate of the number of people killed and injured so as to extract the millions who were taken alive and sound. The resultant figure would be many times the millions landed alive outside of Africa, and it is that figure which represents the number of Africans directly removed from the population and labor force of Africa because of the establishment of slave production by Europeans.

A visitor from Timbuctu about 450 years ago wrote as follows: 'In Timbuctu there are numerous judges, doctors and clerics all receiving good salaries from the king. He pays great respect to men of learning. There is a great demand for books in manuscript, imported from Barbary. More profit is made from the book trade than from any other line of business.' In a city which was renowned for its trade in gold, there was more profit to be made from books than from any other line of business! In other words, learning was valued more highly than gold!

So long as the population density was low, then human beings viewed as units of labor were far more important than other factors of production such as land. From one end of the continent to the other, it is easy to find examples that African people were conscious that population was in their circumstances the most important factor of production. Among the Bemba, for instance, numbers of subjects were held to be more important than land. Among the Shambala of Tanzania, the same feeling was expressed in the saying, "A king is people.

In Hasan’s voice, I could hear the echoes of Walter Rodney, the Guyanese historian and political activist who wrote, in his 1972 book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, “[E]very African has a responsibility to understand the system and work for its overthrow.

The pressure of this agitation, carried on by manual workers, was sufficient to gain advantages even for the Water Street clerks, though it was not surprising that these white-collar workers never showed real loyalty to the workers’ movement.

With the help of J. Sydney McArthur, a Georgetown barrister, and Nelson Cannon, a member of the Court of Policy, they prepared a petition to the government. When this failed, militant strike action gained the workers their demands.

Co-existing with the emphasis on racial identity was a powerful upsurge of class consciousness.

The truth is that any figure of Africans imported into the Americas which is narrowly based on the surviving records is bound to be low, because there were so many people at the time who had a vested interest in smuggling slaves (and withholding data. Nevertheless, if the low figure of ten million was accepted as basis for evaluating the impact of slaving on Africa as a whole, the conclusions that could legitimately be drawn would confound those who attempt to make light of the experience of the rape of Africans from 1445 to 1870.

It is the element of commitment which sets Cabral apart from the common run of intellectuals who boast of being ‘neutral’ and ‘un-biased’, thereby passively accepting the perpetuation of the colonial status quo.

For those of us who aspire towards a deeper appreciation of historical dialectics, Cabral’s analyses are models for study; one doubts whether even the sceptic can remain unimpressed by the strength and flexibility of his arguments concerning the role of respective strata and classes within the Guinean revolution.

Cabral was in effect renewing the battle against the concept of revolutionary spontaneity and restating the case for painstaking mobilization by the most conscious elements. Then, and only then, would the peasantry become a revolutionary force.

This new US offensive was a further stage in the decline of European influence in the southern Americas, a process which started with the Haitian revolution.

In Amilcar Cabral, Africa had a giant who bridged the gap between theory and practice, and hence represented the embodiment of revolutionary praxis.

As it turned out, the North American financiers and industrialists had the field to themselves.

The Argosy gave prominence to a discourse by an Argentine intellectual on the dangers that were imminent because of US imperialism

While claiming a grand civilizing mission to end poverty and promote development, rich countries have in fact underdeveloped the rest of the world in order to enrich themselves. In his book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney argues forcefully that the wealth of the rich economies comes through the exploitation of poor ones, through 'trade, colonial domination, and capitalist investment.;' The exploitation of the Global South is a cornerstone of production in the Global North, a relationship that yields great profit for corporations headquartered in countries that used to colonize much of the planet.

He did so through perceiving the difference between a political outlook limited to nationalism and one which encompassed a revolutionary transformation of the people’s lives along Socialist lines.

He supervised a People’s War of Liberation with great distinction – but only because of the soundness of his scientific worldview and his capacity to apply it penetratingly to the social relations of Guinea-Bissau.

The black intellectual, the black academic, must attach himself to the activity of the black masses.

All white people are enemies until proved otherwise, and this applies to black intellectuals, all of us are enemies to the people until we prove otherwise.

Violence in the American situation is inescapable. White society is violent, white American society is particularly violent, and white American society is especially violent towards blacks.

European workers were perpetuating their own enslavement to the capitalists. They ceased to seek political power and contented themselves with small wage increases, which were usually counterbalanced by increased costs of living. They ceased to be creative and allowed bourgeois cultural decadence to overtake them all. They failed to exercise any independent judgement on the great on the great issues of war and peace, and therefore not only ended up slaughtering not only colonial peoples but themselves.

In brutally suppressing the Maji Maji War in Tanganyika and in attempting genocide against the Herero people in Namibia the German ruling classes were getting the experience which they later applied against the Jews and German workers and progressives.

Cecil Rhodes could afford to leave a legacy of lavish scholarships to white students for study at Oxford University, having made a fortune exploiting African and Africans.

This is a source of their strength and a potential weakness within the capitalist/imperialist system, since the peasants and workers of the dependencies are awakening to a realization that it is possible to cut the tentacles which imperialism has extended into their countries.

The American imperialists go so far as to take the folk music, jazz, and soul music of oppressed black people and transform this into American propaganda over the Voice of America beamed at Africa.

The true explanation lies in seeking out the relationship between Africa and certain developed countries and in recognizing that it is a relationship of exploitation.

Political instability is manifesting itself in Africa as a chronic symptom of the underdevelopment of political life within the imperialist context. Military coups have followed one after the other, usually meaning nothing to the mass of the people, and sometimes representing a reactionary reversal of the efforts at national liberation.

The whole import-export relationship between Africa and its trading partners is one of unequal exchange and of exploitation.

When citizens of Europe own the land and the mines of Africa, this is the most direct way of sucking the African continent. Under colonialism, the ownership was complete and backed by military domination.

So long as foreigners own land, mines, factories, banks, insurance companies, means of transportation, newspapers, power stations, then for so long will the wealth of Africa flow outwards into the hands of those elements

It would be an act of the most brazen fraud to weigh the paltry social amenities provided during the colonial epoch against the exploitation, and to arrive at the conclusion that the good outweighed the bad.

In pursuing the goal of development, one must start with the producers and move on from there to see whether the products of their labor are being rationally utilized to bring greater independence and well-being to the nation.

That is why development cannot be seen purely as an economic affair, but rather as an overall social process which is dependent upon the outcome of man’s efforts to deal with his natural environment.

Like the preceding phase of feudalism, capitalism was characterized by the concentration in a few hands of ownership of the means of producing wealth and by unequal distribution of the products of human labor. The few who dominated were the bourgeoisie who had originated in the merchants and craftsmen of the feudal epoch, and who rose to be industrialists and financiers.

Thereby, a new set of social relations—that of landlord and serf—replaced the old relations of slavemaster and slave.

The interpretation that underdevelopment is somehow ordained by God is emphasized because of the racist trend in European scholarship.

It is in line with racist prejudice to say openly or to imply that their countries are more developed because their people are innately superior, and that the responsibility for the economic backwardness of Africa lies in the generic backwardness of the race of black Africans.

The fact of the matter is that the most profound reasons for the economic backwardness of a given African nation are not to be found inside that nation.

If economic power is centered outside national African boundaries, then political and military power in any real sense is also centered outside until, and unless, the masses of peasants and workers are mobilized to offer an alternative to the system of sham political independence.

One of the things which they do to confuse the issue is to place all underdeveloped countries in one camp and all developed countries in another camp irrespective of different social systems; so that the terms capitalist and socialist never enter the discussion, Instead, one is faced with a simple division between the industrialized nations and those that are not industrialized.

The United States has a small proportion of the world’s population and exploitable natural wealth but it enjoys a huge percentage of the wealth which comes from exploiting, the labor and natural resources of the whole world.

However, it is very essential at this stage to draw a clear distinction between the capitalist countries and the socialist ones, because socialist countries have never at any time owned any part of the African continent nor do they invest in African economies in such a way as to expatriate profits from Africa.

This is typical, trying to treat history as though it is the property of the ruling class, which will dispense however much of it they want to dispense at any given point in time.

In response to the demand for more black culture and history, the national bourgeoisie of the U.S.A. has adopted a technique different from that of their neo-colonialist puppets in the West Indies. Having that security which comes from the possession of capital, they feel confident in making certain concessions to black culture in their educational institutions and media of public communications. As always, they concede the lesser demand to maintain the total structure of white capitalist domination, hoping to siphon off young blacks into a preoccupation with African history and culture divorced from the raw reality of the American system as it operates on both the domestic and international fronts. That gambit must not work. Imagine the juicy contradictions — Rockefeller finances chair on African history from the profits of exploiting South African blacks and upholding apartheid! Black revolutionaries study African culture alongside of researchers into germ warfare against the Vietnamese people! We blacks in the Americas have missed the opportunity when a more leisurely appraisal of our past might have been possible.

Governor Cameroon of Tanganyika in the 1920s was known as a "progressive" governor. But when he was attacked for trying to preserve the African personality in the educational system, he denied the charge and declared that his intention was that the African should cease to think as an African and instead should become "a fair minded Englishman".

Certain issues are not yet clear about the final shape of society in America. Some form of co-existence with whites is the desired goal of virtually all black leaders, but it must be a society which blacks have a hand in shaping, and blacks should have power commensurate with their numbers and contribution to US development. To get that, they have to fight.

Black people must now take the offensive - if it is anyone who should suffer embarrassment, it is the whites. Did black people roast six million Jews? Who exterminated millions of indigenous inhabitants in the Americas and Australia? Who enslaved countless millions of Africans? The white capitalist cannibal has always fed on the world's black peoples. White capitalist imperialist society is profoundly and unmistakably racist.

In reconstructing African civilisations, the concern is to indicate that African social life had meaning and value, and that the African past is one with which the black man in the Americas can identify with pride.

Numerous reports attest to the hospitality of African communities. Within any village or chiefdom, the codes of hospitality and a spirit of charity prevented the extremes of poverty and abandonment which one finds in richer and supposedly more mature societies.

White slave masters used to conduct a discussion. They said, look, we have some blacks, what to do with them? Is it better to let him grow old and work for us for an extended period of time, or should we let him work for a specified period of time, work him so hard and let him die, and buy a fresh slave? And the consensus of opinion was this; take a prime African black, work him to death in five years, and you make a profit. So the system aimed at killing us out!

Ancient Africa was int he mainstream of human history.

The whites have merely selected a facet of their own culture which is outstanding - namely, the ability to bring together millions in a single political unit - and they have then used this as a universal yardstick for measuring the inherent worth of cultures and races. (The classic example of this cultural egocentricity is the statement that 'the black man never invented the wheel'.)

The West Indies and the American South share the dubious distinction of being the breeding ground for world racialism.

Black people are here in these institutions as part of the development of black struggle, but only as a concession designed to incorporate us within the structure. [Besides the institution, he says] I am thinking also of the books, the references, the theoretical assumptions, and the entire ideological underpinnings of what we have to learn in every single discipline.

Apart from their inability to raise the living standards of the black masses, they have failed to make provision for the increased water consumption and for drought, they have failed to modernise telephone communications, and they have failed to make allowance for the increased need for electrical power. Consequently, in recent months, the ramshackle nature of the neo-colonial structure has been cruelly exposed, and it was the very middle class who have benefitted from '1938' who recently complained most bitterly when they suffered simultaneously from water rationing, extensive electricity power cuts, a limping telephone service, and no police protection for their property.

It must be noted that once a person is said to be black by the white world, then that is usually the most important thing about him; fat or thin, intelligent or stupid, criminal or sportsman - these things pale into insignificance. Actually I've found out that a lot of whites literally cannot tell one black from another.

The essence of white power is that it is exercised over black peoples - whether or not [black peoples] are minority of majority, whether it was a country belonging originally to whites or to blacks. It is exercised in such a way that black people have no share in that power and are, therefore, denied any say in their own destinies.

By being made into colonials, black people lost the power which we previously had of governing our own affairs, and the aim of the white imperialist world is to see that we never regain this power. The Congo provides an example of this situation. There was a large and well-developed Congolese empire before the white man reached Africa. The large Congolese empire of the fifteenth century was torn apart by Portuguese slave traders, and what remained of the Congo came to be regarded as one of the darkest spots in dark Africa. After regaining political independence the Congolese people settled down to their lives, and murdered both Lumumba and the aspirations of the Congolese people. Since then, paid white mercenaries have harassed the Congo. Late last year, 130 of these hired white killers were chased out of the Congo and cornered in the neighbouring African state of Burundi. The white world intervened and they have all been set free. These are men who for months were murdering, raping, pillaging, disrupting economic production, and making a mockery of black life and black society. Yet white power said not a hair on their heads was to be touched. They did not even have to stand trial or reveal their names.

White Americans would certainly argue the moral and practical necessity of their participation in the First and, particularly, the Second World War. What is curious is that thousands of black people fought and died in these wars entirely in the interest of the white man. Colonialism is the opposite of freedom and democracy, and yet black colonials fought for this against the Fascism of Hitler - it was purely in the interests of the white 'Mother Countries'. Slaves fought for American Independence and for the North in the American Civil War. Black oppressed Americans went in thousands to fight for justice in the world wars, in Korea and in Vietnam. We have fought heroically in the white men's cause. It is time to fight in our own. Violence in the American situation is inescapable. White society is violent, white American society is particularly violent, and white American society is especially violent towards blacks.

We have nothing to lose, for they are the capitalists. Black people could not hope to, nor do they want to, dominate the whites, but large sections of the black youth realise that they cannot shrink from fighting to demonstrate the hard way that a 10 per cent minority of 22 million cannot be treated as though they do not exist.

When we look at the British Empire in the nineteenth century, we see a clear difference between white colonies and black colonies. In the white colonies like Canada and Australia, the British were giving white people their freedom and self-rule. In the black colonies of the West Indies, Africa and Asia, the British were busy taking away the political freedom of the inhabitants.

Als ich an diesem Akwasidae teilnahm, war die höchste Sicher-heitstufe ausgerufen, weil außerdem zwei besonders prominente Gäste dabei waren: Der damalige Prinz Charles und seine Frau Camilla, Herzogin von Cornwall, saßen in einem Zelt, in dem elektrische Ventilatoren und Klimageräte gegen die brennende Sonne Ghanas ankämpften. Das Akwasidae ist eine der bekann-testen, regelmäßigsten und extravagantesten Erscheinungsformen afrikanischer Königstradition, ein kostbares Beispiel für eine uralte, erhabene afrikanische Institution, die sich dem Druck von jahrhundertelangem sozialem Wandel und den Verwüstungen des Kolonialismus widersetzt hat.

At a certain point, a movement becomes irreversible, and all the efforts of the enemy smack of desperation and insanity.

Wester Modernity is rooted in the looting of a continent,