Walter Rodney, born in Guyana on 22nd of march in 1942, Pan-African, Marxist intellectual who was assassinated by the Guyanese government in 1980 at 38 years old.

Rodney attended the University College of the West Indies in 1960 and was awarded a first class honors degree in History in 1963. He later earned a PhD in African History in 1966 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England, at the age of 24.

Rodney traveled extensively and became well-known as an activist, scholar, and formidable orator. He taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania from 1966-67 and 1969-1974, and in 1968 at his alma mater University of the West Indies.

On October 15th, 1968, the government of Jamaica declared Rodney a "persona non grata" and banned him from the country. Following his dismissal by the University of the West Indies, students and poor people in West Kingston protested, leading to the "Rodney Riots", which caused six deaths and millions of dollars in damages.

In 1972, Rodney published "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa". Historian Melissa Turner describes the work this way: "A brutal critique of long-standing and persistent exploitation of Africa by Western powers, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a powerful, popular, and controversial work in which Rodney argued that the early period of African contact with Europe, including the slave trade, sowed the seeds for continued African economic underdevelopment and had dramatically negative social and political consequences as well. He argued that, while the roots of Africa’s ailments rested with intentional underdevelopment and exploitation under European capitalist and colonial systems, the only way for true liberation to take place was for Africans to become cognizant of their own complicity in this exploitation and to take back the power they gave up to the exploiters."

On June 13th, 1980, Rodney was killed in Georgetown, Guyana via a bomb given to him by Gregory Smith, a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force, one month after returning Zimbabwe. In 2015, a "Commission of Inquiry" in Guyana that the country's then president, Linden Forbes Burnham, was complicit in his murder.

"If there is to be any proving of our humanity it must be through revolutionary means."

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    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      8 months ago

      Someone who is good at tongues should tell me if this means that owls were not local to whatever region this language developed in and that's why they hace a compound word instead of their own name.

      • bendan [none/use name]
        ·
        8 months ago

        My guess, pandas are also named this way, 熊猫 xióngmāo “bear cat”, but that could be because it’s a rare animal people weren’t talking much about, or that it historically was found in or beyond the southern regions that spoke different dialects or languages. But owls actually exist literally everywhere except the ice caps 🤷

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]
          ·
          8 months ago

          Sussy ice caps what are their secrets?

          I bet those "proto indo european linguistic larping nerds have theories about how new words develop over time.

          Afaik we've only had cats pushing things off counters for ten thousand years, but ten thousand years is a really long time.