Walter Rodney

Dr. Walter Anthony Rodney was an internationally acclaimed Guyanese historian, Pan-Africanist scholar, and working-class political leader whose writings reshaped global post-colonial historiography.

Earning his doctorate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London at just twenty-four, Rodney authored the groundbreaking masterwork 'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa' (1972), demonstrating how European imperialism actively extracted wealth from the African continent.

Returning to Guyana to co-found the multiracial Working People's Alliance (WPA), he united Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese sugar and bauxite workers against authoritarianism before being assassinated by a bomb blast in Georgetown in 1980.