Walter Rodney

African Revolutionary Writers, Part 10a

Walter Rodney

1942 - 1980

Walter Rodney was a revolutionary intellectual born in Guyana who is also indelibly and eternally associated with the Dar-es-Salaam University.

This downloadable text linked below is a much longer text than usual and in this first edition of the Communist University African Revolutionary Writers Series it is the last to be sent out. It is the 44-page Chapter Six of Walter Rodney’s “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”.

The entire book can be downloaded in PDF format by clicking here (1069 KB).

Walter Rodney was assassinated in the middle of his birthplace of Georgetown, Guyana, on 13 June 1980. There is a short biography of Walter Rodney here.

Rodney is famous as one of the illustrious Dar Campus, of which we have already featured two others, namely Issa Shivji and Mahmood Mamdani.

“How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” made a huge impact when it was first published and it still continues to have legendary status among the African Revolutionary writings.

Rodney marshals the facts and the literature and he makes the arguments. He takes on Imperialist theories of “underdevelopment” head-on, and he overturns them.

Bourgeois theorists and academics, to the surprise of the more naïve among us, proceeded to ignore Rodney and to revert to even more reactionary theories than before in their universities. Hence the importance of maintain the currency of this literature, and in keeping the dialogue around it fresh, in a virtual University, or Republic of Letters.

Viva, Walter Rodney, Viva!

Viva all the African Revolutionary Writers, Viva!


Viva the Communist University, Viva!

Please download and read the text via this link:

Walter Rodney, Colonialism, System for Underdeveloping Africa, C6, 1973, 1973 (34211 words)

Further reading:

Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-colonialism, 1965, Compilation (10643 words)

Nkrumah, African Socialism Revisited, 1967 (2587 words)