When lions write history : Walter Rodney’s black Marxism.

Cuando los leones hacen la historia : el marxismo negro de Walter Rodney.

What are the whereabouts of Walter Rodney? Who remembers him? One of the brightest minds in the Caribbean, the historian who talked to the exploited and the oppressed, the anticolonial nationalist militant, the speaker of the Caribbean Black Power, the socialist Pan-Africanist, the black Marxist, one of the last black radicals in the Caribbean, along with Tim Hector. This paper intends to be an introduction to the Guyanese historian and political activist. This work is made up of four sections: a biographical introduction, and three moments in which we may observe how he conceived teaching and history as tools for African freedom and their diaspora. As we account for Rodney’s theoretical and political movements departing from his original notion of Marxism and his dialectic use of the notions of class/race in three contexts: Jamaica, Tanzania, and Guyana, this work primarily aims at showing the monumental legacy of a Caribbean radical and the currency of a number of formulations of his as a guide to think and act nowadays.

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