The Nation They Could Not Afford to Let Him Build
THE 592 GUARDIAN
COMMEMORATIVE EDITORIAL ♦13 June 2026 • 46th Anniversary
The Nation They Could Not Afford to Let Him Build
Remembering Dr. Walter Anthony Rodney — Historian, Revolutionary, and the Conscience Guyana Silenced 23 March 1942 — 13 June 1980
46 years ago June 13, on a Georgetown street near the prison walls of a dictatorship, a walkie-talkie exploded on the lap of a 38-year-old man sitting in his brother’s car. The bomb was precision-built. The crime was premeditated. The state was responsible. And Guyana has never recovered.
Dr. Walter Anthony Rodney — Georgetown-born, Queen’s College-formed, London-trained, Dar es Salaam-tested, and Pan-African in soul — was not merely one of Guyana’s greatest sons.
He was, by any serious reckoning, one of the twentieth century’s most consequential political intellectuals. That a country now swimming in oil wealth cannot find the collective will to commemorate, in any meaningful public fashion, the anniversary of his murder is itself a verdict on what we have become.
“We unhesitatingly conclude that Gregory Smith was not acting alone but had the active and full support, participation and encouragement of, and/or was aided and abetted by the GPF, the GDF, agencies of the State, and the political directorate.” — Commission of Inquiry Report, 2016
The 592 Guardian marks this anniversary not with ceremony, but with the truth — which is, in the end, what Rodney always demanded.
THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY MIND
Walter Rodney was born on 23 March 1942 into a working-class family in Georgetown, British Guiana — a colony still bound by the logic of plantation extraction and racial stratification that his life’s work would systematically dismantle. He attended Queen’s College, graduating first in his class in 1960, and won an open scholarship to the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, where he achieved first-class honors in History in 1963.
He then entered the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. At twenty-four, he received his doctorate in African History with honors. His thesis, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, was published by Oxford University Press in 1970. He was not yet thirty.
What distinguished Rodney from his contemporaries in the postcolonial academy was the marriage of rigorous scholarship to political commitment. He did not write for tenure committees.
The Manley government found him dangerous and banned him from returning to Jamaica in 1968. The ban backfired: the Rodney Riots that followed revealed how deeply he had already taken root.
HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA — AND GUYANA
In 1972, Rodney published How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. The book was a detonation.
The book remains in print, in continuous use in university syllabuses across four continents, over fifty years later. Its analytical framework — that underdevelopment is not a natural state but an actively produced condition — maps with uncomfortable precision onto Guyana’s present moment. The Gas-to-Energy project, the sole-source power contracts, the mining deals structured to maximize foreign extraction and minimize domestic transformation: Rodney would have recognized every mechanism. He had already named them.
He taught at the University of Tanzania, Dar es Salaam — then arguably the intellectual capital of African liberation thought — before returning to Guyana in 1974 to take up a professorship at the University of Guyana. The Forbes Burnham government, recognizing the threat, rescinded the appointment before he could take it up.
THE WPA AND THE CHALLENGE TO BURNHAM’S DICTATORSHIP
By the mid-1970s, Guyana had descended into precisely the authoritarian patronage state that Rodney’s work had theorized at a continental level. Forbes Burnham’s People’s National Congress had rigged elections since 1968, nationalized industries not to redistribute wealth but to extend PNC control, and constructed a party-paramountcy system in which the state, the military, and the ruling party were effectively indistinguishable.
Rodney joined the Working People’s Alliance — a coalition of smaller organizations—ASCRIA|IPRA|Ratoon|WPVP— that coalesced into a political party in 1974 and declared itself publicly in June 1979. The WPA was the first credible multi-racial opposition Burnham had faced. It was explicitly not ethnic in its appeal: it sought to unite African and Indian Guyanese workers around class solidarity rather than the ethnic tribalism on which both major parties had long depended. This was its power — and the reason it had to be destroyed.
In July 1979, Rodney, Dr. Rupert Roopnarine, and Dr. Omawale were arrested and charged with arson following the burning of two government offices. They denied any involvement. The government, unable to produce evidence, was eventually forced to drop the charges — but not before the arrests had served their purpose: intimidation, destabilization, and the display of state power.
That same year, Father Bernard Darke — a Jesuit priest and photographer who had documented the WPA protest surrounding those very arrests — was stabbed to death in broad daylight by a member of the House of Israel, a cult that operated with the effective patronage of the PNC government. Ohene Koama, a young WPA member, was also killed. 1979 was a year of blood.
THE ASSASSINATION — A STATE CRIME, CONFIRMED
On the night of 13 June 1980, Walter Rodney sat in his brother Donald’s car on John Street near the Georgetown Prison. He held a walkie-talkie on his lap — a communications device supplied by a man named Gregory Smith, who had presented himself as an ally interested in helping the WPA build a radio network.
Gregory Smith was, in fact, an electronics expert and active sergeant in the Guyana Defense Force. The walkie-talkie contained an explosive device. Smith remotely triggered it. Walter Rodney died at 38. Donald Rodney survived, grievously injured, and was subsequently charged with unlawful possession of explosives — a charge that was not overturned until April 2021, forty-one years later, when the Guyana Court of Appeal found it had been constitutionally unsound from the outset.
The Burnham government initially denied that any Gregory Smith existed in the GDF. They maintained this position until the Catholic Standard — then one of Guyana’s few independent publications — published a photograph of Smith in full GDF uniform. The denial collapsed. Smith was quietly spirited out of Guyana to French Guiana, where he lived under the alias Cyril Milton Johnson. He is reported to have died in 2002.
For thirty-four years, the full institutional truth remained contested. Then, in 2014, President Donald Ramotar authorized a Commission of Inquiry. The three-person panel of eminent Caribbean jurists — chaired by Sir Richard Cheltenham of Barbados — worked for two years. Their report was delivered on 8 February 2016.
The findings were categorical: the GPF, the GDF, agencies of the state, and the political directorate — up to and including Forbes Burnham himself — bore collective responsibility for the murder. Gregory Smith did not act alone. He acted on orders.
The APNU+AFC government that came to power in 2015 moved to prematurely terminate the Commission’s work before the report was finalized, though the Commissioners issued it nonetheless.
When the report was tabled in the National Assembly in 2016, the APNU+AFC members amended the tabling motion to merely “acknowledge” rather than adopt the findings. It was not until August 2021 — under the PPP/C government — that the National Assembly formally adopted Resolution No. 23 of 2021, accepting the Commission’s conclusions.
Justice, on paper, had arrived. Forty-one years late. No one has been prosecuted. No institutional accountability has followed. The state that murdered Walter Rodney has been succeeded by other states. The machinery that killed him — patronage, ethnic mobilization, captured security services, and the suppression of genuine multi-racial working-class politics — persists, in updated form, to this day.
WHAT WE LOST — AND WHAT WE REFUSE TO RECKON WITH
Walter Rodney was 38 years old. He had a wife, Patricia, and three young children. He had already written works that will endure longer than any building the Burnham government erected with nationalized bauxite revenue. He was in the middle of a multi-volume history of the Guyanese working class that was never completed.
It was the one political formation in Guyana’s history that seriously attempted to build class solidarity across the African-Indian divide. Rodney was its moral center. His death was not incidental to its eventual disintegration.
The WPA survived Rodney’s assassination but was never the same. In subsequent decades, it entered coalitions with the very political formations it had been formed to oppose. Dr. Roopnarine, Rodney’s brother in struggle, eventually served as Education Minister in the Granger administration — the APNU+AFC government that initially refused to adopt the Commission’s findings on Rodney’s murder. Dr. Roopnarine died in February 2026.
These are not simple betrayals; they are the complicated archaeology of a small country’s political survival. But they are also what happens when a movement loses the irreplaceable.
This anniversary passed — as the writer who prompted this editorial observed — without fanfare. Even the party Rodney co-founded did not publicly mark it in any notable fashion. This silence is its own political act. It tells us something about what the WPA has become, and something about what Guyana has accepted.
THE RELEVANCE HE EARNED
It is fashionable, in commemorative pieces, to invoke the dead as eternal relevance. We resist that convention here, because in Rodney’s case, no such effort is required. His relevance is structural, not rhetorical.
His insistence on multi-racial class solidarity as the only durable basis for Guyanese democracy remains the unresolved challenge. Every election cycle in which ethnic arithmetic determines outcomes, every patronage distribution calibrated by community, every public service appointment where race is the first variable, is evidence that Guyana has not yet found an answer to the problem Rodney identified and died trying to solve.
“There are many people who believe that a revolution is about blood… But the most important element in revolution is what happens in the minds of men and women.” — Dr. Walter Rodney, WPA Address, 1979
He believed, with rigorous optimism, that political consciousness could be built — that working people, regardless of ethnicity, could recognize their common interest and act on it. He was killed precisely because the regime understood that he might be right.
AN EDITORIAL VERDICT
The 592 Guardian does not traffic in uncritical hagiography. We mark Rodney’s anniversary because the record demands it — and because the silence around it is itself a story.
The Commission of Inquiry confirmed, in formal legal terms, what Rodney’s comrades, family, and supporters knew from the night of 13 June 1980: that the state murdered him. No prosecution has followed. No senior official has been held to account. The man who built and detonated the bomb is dead. The men who gave the orders are also dead. The institution — the Guyanese state in its PNC form — has been constitutionally succeeded but never truly dismantled or reformed.
The WPA, the party he helped build, marks no public commemoration. The government of President Irfaan Ali — which formally adopted the Commission’s findings in 2021 — has made no visible effort this anniversary to honor what those findings mean, or to advance any of the institutional reforms the Commission recommended, including the professionalization of the security services that participated in his murder.
Guyana is, in 2026, a country of extraordinary potential and familiar pathologies. Its oil revenues have transformed its GDP figures. Its governance has not kept pace.
The structural critique that Walter Rodney spent his life articulating — that extractive economies reproduce inequality, that ethnic politics immunizes ruling classes against accountability, that institutions serve power rather than principle — remains as applicable as it was in 1980.
He deserved better from his country. He deserved prosecution of his killers when they could still be prosecuted. He deserved a University of Guyana that would have let him teach. He deserved an election in 1980 that was not rigged. He deserved to see his children grow up with their father.
He deserved, at minimum, a commemoration on the forty-sixth anniversary of his murder. Guyana could not even manage that.
The 592 Guardian acknowledges the poem ‘Trouble in the Sun’ by Dmitri Allicock, which provided personal and historical framing for this editorial. Copyright remains with the author. We also acknowledge the Walter Rodney Foundation, the Commission of Inquiry Report (2016), and the National Security Archive’s documentation of the Rodney assassination for factual reference.
— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board | June 2026
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