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"Rodney, Walter."
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‘Grounding together’ or digging movements into the ground? South African scholaractivism 30 years after democracy
The fiftieth anniversary of ROAPE coincidentally marks 30 years of what may be called ‘bourgeois democracy’ in South Africa. Walter Rodney’s debate with mainly white lecturers (including early contributors and founders of ROAPE) at Dar es Salaam in 1971 offers a pivot from which to explore the representation of popular movements in South Africa in the 2000s, which centred on the assumption that the working class had fallen victim to the adoption of neoliberal policies by the ruling African National Congress. This article explores the relationship between race, class and knowledge production as well as contested meanings of transformation in this context. While the independent left (those outside of mainstream political parties as well as the tripartite alliance) in South Africa has at times heroically supported the struggles of grassroots movements, the article argues that we have reached an impasse. Our consistent socialist rhetoric and methods of movement building tend to be out of touch with grassroots movements. A renewed political dialogue is required to explore the extent to which it remains possible to ‘ground together’ (Rodney 1969) in collaboration with the various streams of discontent and militancy in the country.
Journal Article
The 'Catastrophic Consciousness of Backwardness': Culture and Dependency Theory in Latin America and the Caribbean
This article examines the relationship between economic and cultural dependency. Its analysis is framed by Enrique Dussel's methodological insistence on the international transfer of surplus value as the essence of dependency. Beginning with an examination of the heyday of classical
dependency theory in Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 1970s, the article moves on to consider the increasing importance accorded culture as a site of power and struggle, focusing on the work of Sylvia Wynter. The second half of the article turns to the literary registration
of dependency. Arguing that literary works can provide a barometric reading of the pressures of underdevelopment in advance of political-economic analyses, I consider Patrícia Galvão's Parque Industrial (1933) and Olive Senior's 'Boxed-In' (2015). Published, respectively,
some forty years either side of the heyday of dependency theory, these paradigmatic fictions are examples of both the diagnostic and active role of literature in responding to the depredations of dependency.
Journal Article
African People, Education for Liberation & Staying Human: Reflections on Walter Rodney and the Pan-African / Black Liberation Tradition
On March 25th, 2017, Dr. Joyce E. King delivered this talk as the day two keynote of the 14th Annual Walter Rodney Symposium at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta, Georgia.
Journal Article
Reflections on Kenya’s Economic Impasses in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari and Wizard of the Crow
Departing from the regularly made references to Kenya's economy in the post-independence period by Ngügí wa Thiong'o in his works Matigari (1989) and Wizard of the Crow (2006), this essay argues that Ngügí, under the influence of Marxist aesthetics and Walter Rodney's dependency theory, has both chastised and offered strategies/suggestions to counter the persistent economic problems of Kenya and, to a broader scale, of Africa. Considering the developments in the Kenyan economy in the 20th century onward, this paper comparatively sketches Ngügí's treatment of economy-related problems in their evolving process in Matigari and Wizard of the Crow for Kenyans and syncretizes the changing economic conditions in Kenya with the Ngügí's literary criticisms and approaches to the issue.
Journal Article
Colonialism and Mimicry: A Literary Lens into Governance in Africa
In the recent past, scholars have delved into the challenges African countries face in establishing Western-style democracy, often overlooking the insights provided by literary works. Most political and social science writers attribute these challenges to corruption, ethnic mobilization, and illiteracy (Forson et al. 2016). However, little attention has been given to the similarities between colonial structures and post-independent African autocracies as delineated in literary works. The pioneer modern states in Africa emerged during colonialism and were inherently authoritarian, with aims inconsistent with democratic principles. While early Black thinkers highlight colonial violence as a key aspect to mimic for Africa’s liberation, contemporary scholarship has paid little attention to imitation of other colonial elements such as negative ethnicity, autocracy, corruption, political assassinations, and murders in literary works. This study examines the nexus between poor governance and colonial heritage as represented in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautiful One Are Not Yet Born (1968), Brian Chikwava’s Harare North (2009), and David Mulwa’s Inheritance (2005). This analytical study was carried out on the three African works of fiction and drama to interrogate the impact of colonial heritage on the sparse democratic gains and poor governance in sub-Saharan Africa today. The primary texts were purposively sampled because of the prevalence of the subject. Using qualitative inquiry, I deploy narrative research to analyze data from primary and secondary texts. The study was anchored in Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial concept of mimicry as a theoretical base for interpretation.
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Groundings in Cuba: Echoes of Walter Rodney Today
This brief essay places Rodney in the context of the development of trans-Atlantic African Diaspora consciousness and culture, and the development of non-Western contingent Marxist theories from dependency to his underdevelopment thesis. Rodney's biography and intellectual development are contextualized in their Caribbean, Latin American and Diasporic Black contexts, and in the context of Rodney's engagement with people, pedagogy and political processes in Jamaica, Tanzania, London and Guyana. Specifics of his Cuban sojourns and evolving conceptions of the revolution, his work on a book while there, and his placement within Cuban research and broader Caribbean and Latin American tendencies are examined. Keywords: Walter Rodney, Cuba, Cuban Revolution, Pan-Africanism, Marxism, decolonization, African historiography, underdevelopment, dependency, Latin America, epistemologies
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Critical Perspectives on Race and Revolution: Fugitive and Dissonant Afro-America through a Cuban Lens
Ethnographer, choreographer and poet Rogelio Martínez Furé (August 1937- October 2022), whose written and performed excavations of the idiosyncracies and fugitivities of interwoven African and Cuban cultural and spiritual tapestries is as timeless in acumen as unbounded in fecundity, leaves a legacy of emancipatory erudition. Zanj honors his memory by giving voice to those who, from the pulpits of scholarship to the archives of orality and the credos of everyday struggle, forage Cuban history for clues to the mysteries and palimpsests of identity. We are indebted to his patient disavowal of the shackles of epistemic colonialism, linguistic and disciplinary silos, and to his knowledge of sacred and profane Afro-diasporic storytelling. 2012 was the year of the bicentennial of the Yoruba-descended carpenter José Aponte’s planned rebellion for freedom against slavery, the centennial of the uprising and repression of the Independent Party of Color led by mambi veterans Evaristo Estenoz and Pedro Ivonnet, and the founding of the community-based Red Barrial Afrodescendiente (Afro-Descendant Neighborhood Network) in Cuba.
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