In concert, LKJ frequently name-checks the title of Rodney’s book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa-the title of the German publication, it should be noted, was Afrika: Die Geschichte einer Unterentwicklung .
Who are we talking about? None other than the anti-imperialist fighter Walter Rodney.
And even today people remember the “Rodney riots,” as they were known, that broke out among university students in the West Indies in 1968 when the Jamaican government barred him from teaching after he traveled to Cuba and the Soviet Union. The British dub-poet Linton Kwesi Johnson (LKJ) dedicated a song to him after he was killed, in 1980, by a bomb set in his car. Why are African countries “underdeveloped”? And how did the imperialist plunder of the continent begin? Was slavery a product of racism? Or did racism rather emerge out of the economic exploitation of the African labor force? The Guyanese anti-imperialist Walter Rodney delivers materialist answers to these questions.
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