Walter Rodney (1942–1980) – panafrikanischer Revolutionär und marxistischer Historiker: Offenes Kolloqium und Filmvorführung mit einem Vortrag von Bafta Sarbo

In the organizer's words:

We are showing the documentary film by Daniya Harris-Vajda and Arlen Harris, which was made in close cooperation with the Walter Rodney Foundation: "Walter Rodney: What They Don't Want You To Know" (2023, 72 min, OmeU). Bafta Sarbo will speak.

Before the film screening, an open colloquium with Bafta Sarbo on the newly translated writings of Walter Rodney "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa" and "Decolonial Marxism" will take place at the same location at 15:00-17:30. The texts will be handed out and we will read them together. No previous knowledge is necessary, everyone is welcome!

Bafta Sarbo has worked intensively on the life and writings of Walter Rodney and has written a foreword for the new edition of "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa". Together with Eleonara Roldán Mendívil, she published the anthology "Die Diversität der Ausbeutung - Zur Kritik des herrschenden Antirassismus" in 2022.

Walter Rodney was born on March 23, 1942 in the colony of British Guiana and received a scholarship to study in London due to his academic achievements. There he came into contact with Marxist-Panafrican circles around people like C.L.R. James ("The Black Jacobins", 1938). He completed his doctorate with a thesis on the devastating effects of the transatlantic slave trade, using the example of West Africa in the period from 1545 to 1800. This was followed by research and teaching activities in Tanzania and Jamaica, during which he also participated in and inspired the then growing Black Power movement outside the university.

When Jamaica refused him entry in October 1968, there were days of unrest in Kingston, the "Rodney Riots". He returned to the University of Dar es Salaam and wrote his book "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa", published in 1972, which made him famous beyond the Caribbean and Africa. He wrote a history of Africa without any academic attitude, and he wrote it primarily for the people of Africa. In it, he shows how contact with Europe bled the continent dry by stealing millions of people and how colonialist plundering drove it into the "underdevelopment" that persists to this day.

In Tanzania, he also researched the role of Germany, which exploited the area as a colony from 1885 to 1916 and brutally suppressed the resistance that culminated in the Maji Maji uprising in 1905. One of the leading military figures in the suppression of the resistance, Hermann Wissmann, is still honored today in Cologne with a street name in Ehrenfeld and a grave on Melaten.

After several trips to the Caribbean and a semester of teaching in Hamburg, he returned to Guyana in 1974, which had now become independent, and joined the left-wing opposition party, the Working People's Alliance (WPA). Rodney and the WPA sought above all to overcome the division between people of African and Indian origin through consistent class politics. In doing so, he provoked the increasingly authoritarian "Afrocentric" government of Forbes Burnham, who assassinated him with an explosive attack on June 13, 1980. After years of efforts by his wife Patricia and friends to clear up the case, the current government admitted that the state had commissioned the attack.

https://www.allerweltshaus.de/veranstaltungen/film-und-vortrag:-walter-rodney-(1942-1980)

An event of the "Lesekreis in der TtE-Bücherei" in cooperation with the "Global South Studies Center" of the University of Cologne, the "Afrika Film Festival Köln", the "Forum Decolonizing Academia" at the University of Cologne, the "Sonnenblumen Community Development Group e.V.", the "Theodor Wonja Michael Bibliothek" and the "AvantGarden Kollektiv"