And Paid the Ultimate Price

History as a Weapon: The Life and Ideas of Walter Rodney

When Rodney was killed by a bomb in Georgetown, Guyana, on June 13, 1980, he was only thirty-eight years old. By then, however, he had already become one of the most important historians and political thinkers produced by the Caribbean. He had written one of the twentieth century’s most influential books on Africa and colonialism, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa; taught in Jamaica and Tanzania; participated in the Black Power movement; spoken with Rastafarians, workers, and poor communities; and helped build a political movement capable of challenging the government of Guyana. His assassination ended a life, but it did not end the problem he had spent his life trying to explain.

Why are some countries rich and others poor? Why did Europe emerge as the center of the modern world while Africa, despite its immense natural and human resources, became associated with poverty and dependency? And perhaps the most uncomfortable question of all: what if the wealth of the modern world and the poverty of the colonized world were not separate stories, but chapters of the same story? That was Walter Rodney’s great historical question, and his answer was devastatingly simple: Europe did not merely develop while Africa failed to do so. Europe developed, in significant measure, through a historical system that simultaneously underdeveloped Africa.

That idea made Rodney one of the most important intellectual heirs of the great anti-colonial tradition. It also made his work deeply uncomfortable for those who preferred to explain global inequality as the result of cultural deficiencies, national incompetence, or racial differences. Walter Rodney refused those explanations with the full weight of his scholarship and the full force of his conviction. History, he insisted, told another story altogether, and that story demanded to be heard.

A Brilliant Student from British Guiana

Walter Anthony Rodney was born in Georgetown, British Guiana, on March 23, 1942. Guyana was still a British colony then, and Rodney grew up in a world shaped by the plantation economy, racial hierarchy, colonial administration, and the gathering storm of anti-colonial political struggle. He was an exceptional student from the very beginning, the kind of mind that teachers recognized early and institutions sought to claim. After attending Queen’s College in Georgetown, he received a scholarship to study history at the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica, where he graduated with First Class Honours in 1963 before continuing his education at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

There, Rodney specialized in African history and completed his doctoral work at the age of twenty-four, an achievement that was remarkable by any measure. But Rodney was not interested in becoming the kind of historian who would spend his life writing for other historians, accumulating footnotes in the quiet of an archive while the world outside demanded explanation. He wanted to understand history because history explained the present. Why was Africa poor? Why had European societies become wealthy? Why were former colonies politically independent but economically dependent? Why did racial divisions survive the end of colonialism? For Rodney, these were not abstract academic questions. They were political questions, and political questions were, at their root, questions about power.

The Historian Who Refused to Put Africa Outside History

For centuries, European intellectual traditions had frequently described Africa as a continent without history. Africa was portrayed as static, primitive, tribal, a place outside the great currents of modernity, a land waiting to be awakened by the touch of civilization. Europe, by contrast, was represented as the place where history happened: the birthplace of progress, science, capitalism, democracy, and modern civilization itself. Rodney rejected this intellectual geography with the full force of his scholarship and his moral imagination. Africa had history before Europe colonized it, and African societies had developed agricultural systems, political institutions, trade networks, technologies, cultures, cities, and systems of knowledge long before European ships appeared on their shores.

Rodney’s point was not to replace one mythology with another. He was not claiming that precolonial Africa was a paradise, nor was he romanticizing the past in the service of a political agenda. His argument was more historically serious and more intellectually honest than that. Africa was following its own historical trajectories when European expansion violently redirected them, altering the course of societies that had been developing on their own terms. This distinction became fundamental to Rodney’s later work. If Africa had once possessed dynamic historical societies, then its contemporary poverty could not simply be explained by claiming that Africans were incapable of development. The historical question had to change. Not: Why did Africa fail? But: What happened to Africa?

The Groundings with My Brothers: Knowledge Must Come Down from the University

Walter Rodney was a scholar, but he did not believe knowledge belonged to scholars. During his years in Jamaica, Rodney developed close relationships with Rastafarians, workers, unemployed young people, and poor communities throughout the island. At a time when many academics maintained a careful distance from popular political movements, treating the boundary between the university and the street as though it were sacred, Rodney crossed that distance deliberately and without apology. He listened, he discussed, he argued, and he learned, treating every conversation as an opportunity to understand the world from a vantage point that no library could provide.

The conversations that emerged from these encounters became associated with what Rodney called “groundings,” and they formed the basis of The Groundings with My Brothers. The idea behind the book was radical in its simplicity: intellectual life should not be organized as a hierarchy in which professors produce knowledge and ordinary people receive it. Knowledge could emerge from struggle. A worker understood something about exploitation that might not appear in a university textbook. A Rastafarian could understand something about racial alienation that escaped colonial institutions. A poor community could recognize the effects of political power more directly than the people who governed it. For Rodney, the task of the intellectual was not simply to speak for the oppressed. It was to participate in a process through which people understood their own history and came to recognize their capacity to change it.

Rodney and Frantz Fanon: Colonialism Occupies Both Land and the Mind

Among the major thinkers associated with anti-colonialism, Frantz Fanon has one of the strongest intellectual relationships with Walter Rodney. Both understood colonialism as something far more complex than foreign rule imposed from a distance, a matter of flags lowered and raised and administrators replaced. Colonialism occupied territory, but it also occupied consciousness. It reorganized economies, but it also reorganized identities. It extracted resources, but it also produced hierarchies of race and culture that shaped how colonized peoples understood themselves and one another, reaching into the most intimate corners of human experience.

Fanon concentrated particularly on the psychological violence of colonialism and the divided consciousness it produced among colonized peoples, exploring how domination could fracture a person’s relationship to their own language, their own body, their own sense of self. Rodney approached the same historical world through political economy, slavery, colonialism, and the international development of capitalism. Their questions were different, but their conclusions often converged. Political independence was not necessarily liberation. A country could lower the colonial flag while preserving colonial economic structures. It could replace European administrators with local elites while maintaining inequality. It could become formally independent while remaining dependent. That insight would become one of the central themes of Rodney’s intellectual life.

The Book That Changed the Debate: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

In 1972, Walter Rodney published the book that would make his name internationally: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. The title itself was an argument, and it challenged an entire vocabulary that had been built to describe the relationship between Europe and Africa. Africa was not simply “underdeveloped.” Europe had underdeveloped Africa. The difference between those two statements is enormous. The first describes a condition, as though poverty were something that simply existed. The second describes a historical process, a process involving centuries of organized extraction, violence, and structural transformation that left deep scars on the continent.

Rodney argued that Africa’s poverty could not be understood independently from Europe’s wealth. The two had developed within the same expanding historical system. The Atlantic slave trade removed millions of people from Africa, draining the continent of its labor force and disrupting its social fabric. European commerce reorganized African economies, redirecting trade toward European markets and away from African needs. Colonialism subordinated production to European priorities. African raw materials fueled industries elsewhere while the societies that produced them remained impoverished. Railroads and ports frequently connected mines and plantations to European markets rather than African societies to one another. Labor systems were reorganized, political institutions were transformed, and local economies were subordinated to external priorities. The result was not simply that Europe became richer and Africa remained poor. The historical relationship itself helped produce both outcomes.

Underdevelopment Was Not an Accident

One of Rodney’s most important contributions was to redefine the meaning of underdevelopment itself. Underdevelopment was not the absence of roads, factories, machines, or technology. A colonial economy could have railroads and still be underdeveloped. It could export enormous quantities of minerals and remain poor. It could produce wealth without controlling that wealth, sending profits overseas while the people who extracted it lived in conditions of deprivation. For Rodney, the crucial question was not simply whether an economy produced more, but who controlled production and who benefited from it.

A mine could enrich a European corporation while leaving the surrounding African population impoverished. A plantation could produce millions in exports while the workers who cultivated it remained poor. An economy could grow while becoming more dependent on external markets and foreign capital, its apparent prosperity concealing a deeper structural weakness. This was the intellectual force of Rodney’s analysis. He transformed underdevelopment from a national defect into a relationship of power. Poverty was not something that simply happened to a country, a misfortune that befell it like drought or disease. It was something produced within a system, and that system had a history that could be studied, understood, and ultimately challenged.

Walter Rodney and Eduardo Galeano: Two Continents, One Historical Wound

Few writers from Latin America can be more naturally placed alongside Rodney than Eduardo Galeano. Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America and Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa are not identical books. They emerged from different intellectual traditions and employ different styles of writing and argumentation, Galeano’s prose lyrical and incantatory, Rodney’s more measured and analytical. But they ask strikingly similar questions, and their answers converge on a shared insight about the relationship between wealth and poverty in the modern world that neither continent can escape.

Why did regions rich in natural resources become poor? Why did the extraction of gold, silver, sugar, rubber, minerals, and agricultural products enrich distant powers while leaving producing societies dependent? Why did independence fail to eliminate economic dependency? Galeano examined Latin America, tracing the veins of extraction that ran from the mines of Potosí to the counting houses of Europe. Rodney examined Africa, following the routes of the slave trade and the paths of colonial commerce. Both discovered that poverty was not simply the opposite of wealth. Sometimes poverty was produced by wealth. More precisely, one region’s wealth could depend upon another region’s impoverishment. The mines, plantations, and ports of the colonial world were not isolated from the factories, banks, and cities of Europe and North America. They belonged to the same historical system.

Rodney and Atilio Borón: Imperialism Is Not Ancient History

Walter Rodney’s work also has a strong intellectual affinity with Atilio Borón’s critique of capitalism and imperialism. Both thinkers reject explanations of global inequality that isolate countries from the international systems in which they exist, as though a nation’s poverty could be explained by its own choices alone. A country is not poor simply because it makes bad decisions, though political decisions certainly matter. Countries do not make those decisions on an equal playing field, and the playing field itself was constructed over centuries of colonial expansion, war, and economic restructuring that no single nation could control or undo.

Some societies entered the modern world economy as imperial powers, armed with capital, technology, and military force. Others entered it as colonies, their economies organized to serve the needs of distant metropolises. Some accumulated capital. Others provided cheap labor. Some controlled technology, finance, shipping, and military power. Others were incorporated into the global economy primarily as producers of raw materials, their futures tied to commodity prices set in cities they had never seen. Rodney’s Africa and Borón’s Latin America are different historical worlds, but the underlying problem is related. The international distribution of wealth is also a distribution of power. And power has a history, a history that continues to shape the present in ways that conventional development theory often refuses to acknowledge.

Rodney and Ha-Joon Chang: The History That Development Theory Forgets

Ha-Joon Chang’s work also intersects with one of Rodney’s most important methodological arguments. Modern economic discussions often treat wealthy countries as examples of policies that poorer countries should imitate, as though the path to prosperity were simply a matter of adopting the right set of reforms from a menu of options. Chang has demonstrated that many industrialized countries used state intervention, protection, public investment, and industrial policy during their own development, even while they later preached free-market orthodoxy to the countries they had once colonized, prescribing for others what they had never practiced themselves.

Rodney approached the problem from a different direction. His central concern was colonialism and the incorporation of Africa into global capitalism, rather than the policy choices of individual governments. Yet both thinkers insist on something that modern development theory frequently forgets: history matters. Countries did not begin from the same starting point. They did not enter the global economy under the same conditions. And they did not accumulate wealth through identical processes. A theory of development that ignores colonial history is therefore not simply incomplete. It can become misleading, and even actively harmful, when it is used to prescribe policies that ignore the structural realities created by centuries of extraction and dependency.

Rodney and Edward Said: Empire Also Writes the Story

Colonial power requires more than soldiers and administrators. It also requires stories, narratives, and systems of knowledge that explain why some people deserve to rule and others deserve to be ruled. Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism demonstrated how systems of knowledge could construct colonized peoples as inferior, irrational, exotic, backward, and incapable of governing themselves. These representations were not innocent scholarly errors, the product of well-meaning scholars who simply got the facts wrong. They served political functions, and they were embedded in institutions that gave them the authority of expertise.

Walter Rodney confronted a parallel historical construction of Africa. Africa was described as a continent without civilization, without history, without progress, without the capacity to develop itself. These representations were not politically innocent. If a people could be represented as incapable of governing themselves, colonial rule could be presented as necessary. If their societies were described as primitive, intervention could be described as progress. If their poverty was attributed to their culture, economic exploitation could disappear from the story entirely, leaving behind only the image of a continent that had failed to develop on its own. Rodney and Said approached these questions from different intellectual traditions, but both understood that power does not merely control territory. Power also controls the language used to describe territory.

Rodney and Achille Mbembe: The Long Shadow of Colonial Power

Achille Mbembe belongs to a later generation and works within a different philosophical tradition, but his analysis of colonial and postcolonial power can be meaningfully read alongside Rodney’s work. Rodney focused heavily on political economy, tracing the material structures through which colonialism extracted wealth and reorganized societies with a historian’s eye for detail and a political economist’s sense of system. Mbembe has concentrated more on power, sovereignty, violence, and the political conditions created by colonial and postcolonial systems of domination, exploring the psychic and cultural dimensions of life under regimes that survived their own formal abolition.

Their languages are different and their theoretical frameworks diverge in important ways, but both reject the idea that colonialism ended simply because colonies became independent nations. Colonial structures leave institutions behind. They leave borders drawn by imperial powers, cutting through communities and ecosystems with no regard for the people who lived there. They leave economic relationships that persist long after the formal end of colonial rule. They leave political hierarchies, patterns of violence, and systems of knowledge that continue to shape how postcolonial societies understand themselves. The end of colonial administration does not necessarily mean the end of colonial power. That is one of the questions that connects Rodney’s generation to Mbembe’s, and it remains as urgent in the twenty-first century as it was in the twentieth.

Back to the Archives: A History of the Upper Guinea Coast

Before Rodney became internationally famous for his political analysis, he was already an accomplished historian. A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800 emerged from his doctoral research and examined African societies during centuries of expanding European commercial activity and the Atlantic slave trade. The importance of the book lies in its historical method. Rodney did not write about Africans merely as victims of European expansion, nor did he reduce them to passive objects of forces beyond their control. African societies possessed their own political conflicts, commercial systems, institutions, and historical strategies, and they made decisions within the constraints and possibilities of their own worlds.

But European expansion changed the environment in which those societies developed, altering the terms on which they engaged with the wider world and reshaping the structures within which they pursued their interests. This was an essential part of Rodney’s intellectual method. Africa had agency, and African actors made decisions, pursued interests, and struggled for power within their own historical contexts. But agency existed within changing structures of power. To recognize African agency did not require denying the destructive consequences of slavery and colonialism. It required understanding that African societies were historical actors, not simply victims, and that their histories could not be reduced to the story of European domination alone.

Guyana: The Return of the Historian to Politics

Rodney eventually returned to Guyana. He expected to continue his academic career, but the government prevented his appointment to the University of Guyana, closing the door that should have been open to him and pushing him into a different kind of struggle. The decision pushed Rodney even more deeply into political life, and he became a central figure in the Working People’s Alliance, a movement attempting to overcome one of Guyana’s most persistent political problems: the deep ethnic division between Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese communities. These divisions were not accidental. They were products of a colonial history that had brought enslaved Africans and indentured Indian laborers to the same small colony and then structured their relationship around competition rather than solidarity.

Rodney understood that these divisions could be politically manipulated. Colonial societies had frequently divided populations in order to govern them, and the tragedy was that these divisions could survive colonialism and become the foundation of postcolonial politics. Rodney’s political project therefore became increasingly ambitious. He was not simply opposing a government. He was trying to create a political movement that could transcend the divisions upon which the existing political system depended. He believed that working people across ethnic lines shared common economic interests, and that a genuinely democratic politics required building organizations that could make those common interests visible and politically effective.

A History of the Guyanese Working People: Race, Class, and Division

Rodney’s A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905, published after his death, returned to the history of his own country. The book examined labor, emancipation, indentured immigration, plantation economies, and the formation of working communities in Guyana during a period of enormous social transformation, when the colony was being reshaped by the collision of old structures and new forces. Its central historical lesson was profoundly political. Working people could have common economic interests while remaining divided by race and ethnicity, and those divisions were not natural or inevitable. They were produced and reinforced by colonial institutions that benefited from a fragmented and mutually suspicious labor force.

The political consequences were enormous. A society divided into competing ethnic communities could be governed through fear, and fear was a currency that political leaders could spend freely. Political leaders could present themselves as defenders of one group against another, mobilizing ethnic loyalty rather than class solidarity. Economic problems could be transformed into ethnic conflicts, deflecting attention from the structures of exploitation that affected all working people regardless of their background. Rodney believed that overcoming those divisions was essential to creating a genuinely democratic and egalitarian politics. This belief would become increasingly central to his own political activity and to the vision of the Working People’s Alliance.

The Assassination of Walter Rodney

On June 13, 1980, Walter Rodney was killed in Georgetown when an explosive device detonated. He was thirty-eight years old, and his death immediately became one of the most consequential political events in modern Guyanese history. The circumstances surrounding the explosion were controversial from the beginning. Gregory Smith, a former member of the Guyana Defence Force, played a central role in the events surrounding Rodney’s death. Questions concerning Smith, the device, the involvement of state institutions, and the political context of the assassination continued for decades, casting a long shadow over the country’s political life and refusing to fade into the past.

The significance of Rodney’s death cannot be separated from the political environment in which it occurred. Rodney was no longer simply a historian. He had become a major political figure. He was helping build an opposition movement. He was capable of speaking across ethnic divisions. He possessed international recognition. And he combined intellectual authority with grassroots political credibility in a way that few figures in the Caribbean or anywhere else could match. Those qualities made him unusually dangerous to authoritarian power, and they ensured that his death would be interpreted not as an accident but as a political act with consequences that reached far beyond Guyana itself.

The Commission of Inquiry and the Political Meaning of the Assassination

The later Commission of Inquiry into Rodney’s death examined the circumstances surrounding the explosion and the evidence related to Gregory Smith and possible state involvement. The Commission became an important part of Guyana’s long and difficult attempt to confront the political violence of its past, and it represented a formal acknowledgment that questions which had been suppressed for decades could no longer be ignored. The question of Rodney’s assassination is therefore not merely a historical mystery, a puzzle to be solved by forensic evidence alone. It is part of a larger question about accountability and the relationship between political power and justice.

What happens when states or individuals connected to state institutions use violence against political opponents? How does a society investigate political crimes when those responsible may possess institutional power? And how long can a political system avoid confronting the violence that helped preserve it? Rodney’s assassination continues to raise these questions because his death represented the intersection of intellectual freedom, political opposition, and state power. It is a reminder that the struggle for justice is not only about the past. It is about the conditions under which societies are willing to examine themselves honestly and hold the powerful accountable for what they have done.

Why Walter Rodney Was Dangerous

Walter Rodney was dangerous because he understood that ideas become more powerful when they leave books. A historian who writes about exploitation can be ignored, shelved away in a library where no one outside the academy will ever read it. A professor who lectures about inequality can be tolerated, dismissed as an idealist or a provocateur who poses no real threat. But an intellectual who explains inequality to ordinary people—and helps them organize politically—becomes something else entirely. Rodney crossed that line deliberately, and he did not look back.

He moved between archives and public meetings, between academic history and political organizing, between African history and Caribbean politics, between Marxist theory and conversations with workers who had never read Marx. He believed that intellectuals should not speak for the oppressed while remaining safely outside their struggles. They should participate in the difficult process through which people understand and transform their own historical conditions. That was the meaning of Rodney’s intellectual life, and perhaps that is why his enemies feared him. He was not content to describe the world. He wanted to change it, and he believed that understanding the world was the first necessary step in changing it. That combination of intellectual rigor and political commitment made him a figure who could not be easily categorized, dismissed, or controlled.

Walter Rodney and Noam Chomsky: Questioning the Official Story

Noam Chomsky and Walter Rodney worked in different academic fields, but they share an important intellectual instinct. Both distrust official narratives when those narratives protect powerful institutions from scrutiny and accountability. Rodney examined the historical stories used to justify colonialism and explain African poverty. Chomsky has investigated propaganda, media systems, state power, and the manufacture of political consent in modern democracies. Despite the differences in their subjects and methods, both ask a similar question: Who benefits from the story we are being told?

A narrative that explains poverty as cultural failure may protect the history of economic extraction. A narrative that describes imperial intervention as humanitarian may conceal strategic interests. A narrative that portrays political violence as accidental may protect institutions from accountability. For both Rodney and Chomsky, intellectual work begins with suspicion—not cynical suspicion, but historical skepticism grounded in evidence and a willingness to challenge comfortable assumptions. The official story must be tested against evidence, and when the evidence contradicts the story, the story must be revised, no matter whose interests it serves.

Walter Rodney’s Most Radical Idea

Rodney’s most radical idea may have been his simplest. Poverty has a history. It is not natural. It is not inevitable. And it is not always the consequence of failure. Sometimes the poor are poor because others became rich, and the relationship between wealth and poverty is not accidental but structural and historical. This idea changes the way we understand the modern world. Europe’s industrial development cannot be studied without slavery. The wealth of colonial powers cannot be separated from colonial extraction. The poverty of former colonies cannot be understood without the systems that reorganized their economies.

Development and underdevelopment belong to the same history. They are not opposites but counterparts, two sides of a single process of global expansion that enriched some societies while impoverishing others. That is the intellectual revolution at the center of Walter Rodney’s work. It is an idea that continues to challenge conventional explanations of global inequality, and it remains as relevant today as it was when Rodney first articulated it. The world has changed in many ways since 1972, but the fundamental structure of inequality that Rodney described has not disappeared. If anything, the gap between rich and poor nations has widened, and the need for Rodney’s analysis has only grown.

Walter Rodney’s Legacy

More than four decades after his assassination, Walter Rodney remains one of the indispensable thinkers for understanding colonialism and global inequality. His work speaks to historians because of its archival seriousness and its refusal to reduce complex historical processes to simple formulas. It speaks to economists because it challenges conventional explanations of development and insists that economic outcomes cannot be understood apart from the political and historical structures that produce them. It speaks to political activists because Rodney believed knowledge should contribute to liberation.

And it speaks to contemporary societies because the problems he studied have not disappeared. Africa remains extraordinarily rich in natural resources, yet many African societies remain trapped within unequal global economic relationships. Former colonies remain formally independent while dependent upon international finance, foreign corporations, commodity markets, and powerful states. Ethnic and racial divisions continue to be politically manipulated. And official narratives continue to explain inequality without examining the historical systems that produced it. Rodney would probably recognize many of these debates, and he would probably insist that the task of understanding them remains as urgent as ever.

Conclusion: History Can Be a Weapon

Walter Rodney’s life ended violently, but his intellectual project survived. He demonstrated that Africa had history before colonialism, and that African societies were not passive recipients of European influence but active historical agents. He demonstrated that European development and African underdevelopment were historically connected, and that the two could not be understood in isolation from one another. He demonstrated that political independence could coexist with economic dependency, and that the formal end of colonial rule did not necessarily mean the end of colonial power.

He demonstrated that race and ethnicity could be used to divide people with common interests, and that this division was not accidental but produced by institutions that benefited from a fragmented and suspicious population. And he demonstrated that intellectual work could become politically dangerous when it helped ordinary people understand the structures of power governing their lives. Walter Rodney did not believe history was a museum, a collection of artifacts to be admired from a safe distance. He did not believe the past was safely behind us. History explained the present, and if the present could be understood, it could also be changed. That was Rodney’s greatest intellectual conviction. History was not only something to remember. History could be a weapon.

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Bibliography: Major Works by Walter Rodney

Rodney, Walter. West Africa and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1967.

Rodney, Walter. The Groundings with My Brothers. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1969.

Rodney, Walter. A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970.

Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications; Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1972.

Rodney, Walter. World War II and the Tanzanian Economy. 1976.

Rodney, Walter. A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1981.

Rodney, Walter. Walter Rodney Speaks: The Making of an African Intellectual. Edited by Howard Dodson and Robert Hill. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990.

Rodney, Walter. The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World. London: Verso, 2018.

Selected Works on Walter Rodney

Lewis, Rupert. Walter Rodney’s Intellectual and Political Thought. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998.

Alpers, Edward A., and Pierre-Michel Fontaine, eds. Walter Rodney, Revolutionary and Scholar: A Tribute. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies and African Studies Center, University of California, 1982.

Campbell, Horace. Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1985.