Walter Rodney

Walter Rodney was a Guyanese historian, political activist and academic, born into a working-class family in Georgetown. After a PhD in African History in London in 1966, he taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania; his ban from Jamaica in 1968 set off protests known as the Rodney riots. His How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) argued that exploitation by European imperialists led directly to the modern underdevelopment of most of the continent. A Pan-Africanist and Marxist, he joined the Working People's Alliance in Guyana and was killed by an explosive device in his car in 1980; a Commission of Inquiry concluded it had been a state-ordered killing.