Civics: When We Are All Enemies of the State
In September 1974, at a protest in London, Stuart Hall delivered a speech in support of fellow Caribbean-born radical intellectual Walter Rodney. After being offered a professorship at the University of Guyana, Rodney had resigned from the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to accept the job. As he returned home to join his wife Patricia and their children in Guyana, Rodney was informed that the offer had been rescinded under pressure from the government of Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham. A revised version of Hall’s remarks was recently discovered in the Stuart Hall Archive at the University of Birmingham; they are published here for the first time.
The “Reinstate Walter Rodney Now!” protest in London was just one episode in a global solidarity movement that erupted in support of Rodney, who by that point had established an international reputation following the publication of The Groundings with My Brothers (1969) and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972). His scholarship focused on exploitation by the “colonial capitalist system.” Yet Rodney also argued that formal independence, including Guyana’s, was not the fulfillment of anticolonial struggle: on the contrary, it had resulted in the ascension of a governing class—exemplified by Burnham’s rule—that spoke the language of national liberation and socialist movements while advancing interests contrary to those of workers and peasants. Independence, Rodney warned, had not fundamentally altered the “map of the world” or shifted the material conditions of the masses.
The year 1974 was a pivotal historical moment—or as Hall and Rodney might say, a conjuncture. That year, Rodney became a member of the newly formed Working People’s Alliance in Guyana, a multiracial class alliance formed to resist the U.S.-backed Burnham dictatorship. The organization challenged the Burnham regime’s nationalist narratives, which portrayed racial conflicts between African and Indian working people as inexorable features of Guyanese society. For this work, Rodney and his comrades were subject to multiple arrests and harassment.
