WPA calls for renaming of University of Guyana after Walter Rodney

Last Updated on Friday, 13 June 2025, 18:32 by Writer

The Working People’s Alliance (WPA) has called for the renaming of the University of Guyana after its co-founder Dr Walter Rodney who was assassinated 45 years ago.

“The WPA puts on the national agenda, the renaming of our national university, the Walter Rodney University of Guyana. While small steps, mostly opportunistic, have been made to recognize his contributions, his name is not affixed to a visible national institution,” the WPA said in a statement. 

That party said renaming UG in his honor and memory is a most fitting recognition of Rodney as a scholar and educator who took Guyana into the wider world of education as liberation.

Dr Rodney was killed in a bomb-in-a-walkie-talkie blast while seated in his Mazda Capella car, PBB 2349, on June 13, 1980 on John Street outside the Georgetown Prison. Evidence later surfaced that his brother, Donald, had minutes earlier collected a walkie-talkie from then Guyana Defence Force (GDF) electronics expert, Sergeant 4141 Gregory Smith. Smith days later left for French Guiana where he lived and worked under the assumed name, Cyril Johnson, until his death from cancer in 2002. 

Dr Rodney was killed at the height of a civil rebellion to remove the then Forbes Burnham-led People’s National Congress dictatorship “by any means necessary.” 

The WPA and the PNC-Reform have since found an accommodation in coalitions in 2011, 2015 and 2025, despite the assassination.

“Although four and a half decades have passed since that fateful night, the wounds are still fresh in the psyche of those who lived through those times, especially Rodney’s family and close comrades. Rodney’s assassination brought Guyana and the Caribbean face to face with the contradictions of post plantation societies. Walter Rodney was a victim of the political degeneracy that accompanied attempts at post-colonial nation-building,” the WPA said. 

Dr Rodney, a world-acclaimed historian, had also been barred from taking up a teaching job at the University of Guyana, the brainchild of the Cheddi Jagan administration in 1963, during the PNC’s 1964-1992 period in office.

Ahead of Guyana’s general and regional elections scheduled for September 1, 2025, the WPA said it “injects the Rodneyite vision of National Unity and Reconstruction or what is today popularly called coalition politics.”

“Our unwavering advocacy and struggle for a grand coalition to contest the upcoming election is more than electoral strategy—it is deeply rooted in our historical drive for national jointness. WPA will firmly plant the Walter Rodney banner of People’s Power/No Dictator in the imminent campaign,” the party said.

The WPA says it remembers Rodney as a “fighter, visionary and apostle of people’s power. Although Guyana and the world have undergone changes since 1980, his revolutionary ideas and example are as fresh and relevant to our collective destiny as they were when he was alive. As Guyana continues to grapple with the demons of its post-coloniality, Rodney looms large on the national spectrum as both a persistent warning about our inevitable pitfalls and our simultaneous capacity for transformation.

The WPA says it recommits itself to the “Rodeyite vision of a free and independent Guyana premised on racial and class equality and equity. Walter Rodney confronted our class-race dilemma, not by denial but by active engagement at both the intellectual and activist levels. He reached for a multiracial praxis without denying his own racial identity.”

The WPA said Dr Rodney worked for working class empowerment without denying the profundity of racial identity. “WPA holds fast to that praxis as we navigate the complex terrain of the post-plantation petrostate.”