Walter Rodney looms large at UWI

Robyn Miller, Contributor

More than 40 years after his shocking expulsion from the institution where many of his ideals were shaped and 31 years after his death, Walter Rodney packed the Neville Hall Lecture Theatre at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona campus.

The controversial Guyana-born political activist and lecturer of history drew a roomful of academics, members of civil society and students at the 13th annual lecture series held in his honour recently.

Lecturer in the Department of Government, Faculty of Social Sciences at UWI, Horace Levy, who delivered 'Democracy and a New Paradigm of Authority', summed up the life of the man who dared to venture beyond the walls of UWI to connect with the people of Trench Town and other communities across the country.

Borrowing a quote from an earlier lecture by the late Professor Barry Chevannes, Levy said, "Rodney was a man whose image matched his conviction," as he recalled the heady days of the 1960s.

"I took part in the march against the government's decision to bar him from re-entering the country," he told the gathering.

That decision was the Hugh Shearer-led government's designation of Rodney as persona non grata and refusing to allow him re-entry into the island on October 15, 1968, on his return from a Black Writers' Conference in Toronto. This, it is said, was due to his alleged involvement in "destructive, anti-Jamaican" activities in sections of the island.

Tempers flaring

The move sent tempers flaring as students and faculty took to the streets in a protest that spilled over into city-wide vandalism squaring off with the police, climaxing with the suspension of classes on the campus for two weeks.

Rodney returned to Guyana, where he was assassinated two years later, at age 38, by a car bomb in the capital.

Levy, the head of the Peace Management Unit (PMI), was quick to point out that he was "not seeking to castigate those who have offended Rodney", but said the "disparity and inequality in the society then was very blatant".

Decrying the deterioration in the society, he asked, "Is it any wonder that this country has moved like a quadruplet against our people? We've had three decades of runaway murder rate. Discrimination and a failure to open the channels of governance have not helped either".

His concerns about governance did not stop there as he bemoaned the protracted agenda for local government reform, the need for which "dates as far back as 1974". Commissioned in the 1990s, the reform "only came into being this year".

"Constitutional change is still not with us" he said, as he signalled the threat to democracy and chided the politicians who "have largely kept power to themselves".

politics breeding violence

Levy, who saw the May 2010 incursion into Tivoli Gardens as the beginning of the dismantling of garrison politics, said, "There's no place for a Dudus. Tivoli has shaken up all garrisons; the garrisons are dying after Tivoli. Violence became embedded by politics."

He added: "With community policing and the social intervention of the PMI and GraceKennedy and staff, [in downtown Kingston], murders have come down, but we have seen a resurfacing (of murders) because of the blindness of our leaders".

Levy believes civil society is the antidote for a Jamaica teetering on the brink of self-destruction and with its own unique brand of tribal politics.

"Civil society has a vital role to play in governance. Civil society is the agent of change, but it requires the collective contribution of all Jamaicans. Civil society has a task on its hands," he declared.

Commending the Government earlier in the evening, for its "resurrection" of local government, he said it had died under the previous Jamaica Labour Party government after its establishment by the People's National Party, under Prime Minister Michael Manley.