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Looking at the Walter Rodney Papers: Atlanta, Georgetown and London

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2022

Amzat Boukari-Yabara*
Affiliation:
Centre d'Etudes Africaines, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS-Paris)
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Extract

Walter Rodney was born in Georgetown, Guyana on March 23,1942. Raised in a middle class family, he won a scholarship to enter the most prestigious local school, Queen's College in Georgetown. In 1960, he went to the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Jamaica. After his undergraduate degree, he attended the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London where, at the age of 24, he received his PhD with honours in African History. Rodney's thesis, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800, was published by Oxford University Press in 1970.

During his studies at SOAS, he travelled to Spain, Italy and Portugal in order to access archives about Guinea coast. In these countries, he made contact with anticolonialist movements, especially the Portuguese one headed by Amilcar Cabral.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2010

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References

Notes

1 See Rodney, Walter : the making of an African Intellectual, Africa World Press, Trenton, N.J., 1990.Google Scholar This book is a transcription of some of his declarations during a meeting at the Institute of the Black World of Atlanta in 1975.

2 Thomas, Ewart “Towards the Continuance of Walter Rodney's Work” in Alpers, E. and Fontaine, P.M., Walter Rodney, revolutionary and scholar: a tribute, Center for Afro-American studies and African Studies Center, University of California, 1982, pp.43-44Google Scholar

3 ibid.

4 Many papers emanate from the Guyana Symposium Organizing Committee, Committee Against Repression in Guyana (CARIG), Committee of Concerned West Indians, Working People's Alliance UK Support Group

5 His widow left Guyana few days after his death, returned only in 2005. Pat Rodney decided only a few years ago to stay in Atlanta, because she remembered that when Walter became seriously ill in June 1974, he was successfully treated in Atlanta.

6 London Metropolitan Archives, Information Leaflet no.35, “Researching Walter Rodney in the Huntley Archives”.

7 For example, there are papers from Bogle-L'Ouverture, from the friends of Bogle and different black British Caribbean organisations about events in the 1970s and mostly in the 1980s after Rodney's death.

8 Emma Agyemang and Robert Wiltshire made a presentation of the Walter Rodney archives at London Metropolitan during the Huntley Conference on February 2009.

9 The Walter Rodney Papers Collection was officially opened by Karen Jefferson in February/March 2008, but I made four visits to the Papers in August 2007, in March and May 2008, and in November 2009.

10 Especially at the Institute of the Black World of Atlanta, in UCLA, in Ann Harbor Michigan University, in Cornell and in Binghamton University

11 Mac Master University of Ontario, Waterloo University