Walter Rodney Speaks: The Making Of An African Intellectual

The following is excepted from a Review by Rupert Lewis

This is not a collection of speeches. It is a narrative based on interviews with Rodney done on April 30 and May 1, 1975 at a round-table discussion held at the University of Massachusetts with African-American scholars Vincent Harding, William Strickland, Howard Dodson and the Jamaican scholar Robert Hill who were active in the Atlanta-based Institute of the Black World.

It is a sustained piece of reflection by Rodney about his early life in Guyana, his University education in Jamaica and at the School for Oriental and African Studies in London where he gained his Ph.d. at 24, his important years in Tanzania, his assessment of the situation in Africa, the Caribbean and the United States, his dissecting of the dynamic interaction of race and class, his incisive and clear exposition of the role of the black intellectual and academic and his exploration of his formation as a Marxist.

When Rodney did these interviews he had just turned thirty-three and had five more years to live. So this text is of necessity five important years short. However his reflections on this latter period are scattered in a number of archives on cassettes, videotapes and in published speeches but it is unlikely that the quality of enquiry into Rodney’s intellectual life which marks this book exists in any of these sources.