Throughout the writing of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter had taught, designed new courses with his colleagues on the Hill, and, once more, become a father, with the birth of Asha in 1971. It was his extraordinary focus that gave him the time to complete this enormous historical undertaking. Patricia describes how he would work on the manuscript of HEUA while Asha slept on his lap—reflecting both his characteristic focus and care for his children. Still, there were great distractions. One noisy dispute, which has continued to hang in the air for the last fifty years, was on the question of race.
Rodney was not simply an adherent of the radical movement for Black Power but also someone who had helped shape its expression and politics in the Caribbean. He had earned this role, not least with his expulsion from Jamaica over his involvement in a mass program of education, out of which his extraordinary Groundings with My Brothers emerged. He was a leading intellectual at the university in Dar es Salaam, and more widely—lecturing and speaking to activist groups throughout East Africa.
Rodney was acutely aware of his role in Tanzania: he was a guest. He was clear that his position as a socialist was to intervene, and to participate in debates, but that this involvement had to acknowledge his place in the country. Tanzania’s political transformation—its own project of socialism—was ultimately a matter for communities in the country and region itself. As Rodney expressed in 1974: “I can make my contribution here, but I will never be able ever to grasp the idiom of the people. I will not be able to connect easily.”
Unlike other visiting comrades, Rodney understood that he needed to be extremely sensitive when it came to how he operated at the university. Eventually, Rodney would leave, with his family, and so would most of the other comrades. In the end, Tanzanians would be left to continue the debates and struggles in the country. It would also be, at a basic level, Tanzanians who had to fill the posts at the university, in the civil service, in government departments, and in schools and technical colleges. Europeans, whatever their political allegiance and commitments, would have to go.
The various political complexions of the visiting Left, their motivations and idiosyncrasies, were labyrinthine; they did not come from a single tradition, share a unified political perspective, or agree on how to intervene in Tanzania’s transformation. Peter Lawrence, for one, recalls the conditions in the country upon his arrival in 1968, including the complexity of the Left among the various expatriates, their involvement in Ujamaa, and their relationship to Tanzanian comrades and colleagues:
There wasn’t a distinct Left grouping, though I remember that [Giovanni] Arrighi, [John] Saul, [Lionel] Cliffe, and other like-minded people tended to have coffee and tea at around the same times of the day. . . . I can remember an American, Bill Luttrell, who was married to a Tanzanian and who together with a Tanzanian, Simon Mbilinyi, started an Ujamaa shamba [cultivated plot of ground] on some land given by the university and tried to get other academics involved. It didn’t last long, partly because non-Tanzanian academics were not much good at agriculture in practice, and also that no one was prepared to live on the shamba to protect in against wild animals that lived in the outer campus. So the Left comprised many who were enthused by Ujamaa (especially non-Tanzanians) and the Marxist Left, some who took the view that this was Tanzanian business and they were there to do a job—that would have been the Communist Party line—and those, like Saul, Cliffe and others, who thought in terms of more active political solidarity and were critical of those for whom being there and doing a job was solidarity enough. Then [there were] the Left critics of Nyerere and the idealism of Ujamaa, and those who saw the unreality of socialism in one poor country in the age of imperialism. I think people like Lionel, who had already been in East Africa for eight years by then, saw political solidarity as supporting the Tanzanian Left, while Saul saw this as actively leading if necessary, rather than listening. I took that line too, which got both him and me into trouble over faculty reorganization. And Rodney took a critical view of this because we hadn’t taken enough Tanzanians with us. Lionel, who was on his way out at the time, having been replaced by a Tanzanian, also took that view. He was closer to Walter (although the Sauls and Rodneys were neighbors on the campus and had been good friends).
There were only a few Communist Party members from the UK, but there were quite a few East Europeans whom, according to Lawrence (then also a British Communist Party member), could best be characterized as enjoying their time away from their state socialisms. He records that “politically, they were hopeless—except for [Tamás] Szentes of course.”
As Lawrence argues, Rodney—with others—understood the role he had as a lecturer at the university had to, in large part, be about creating the conditions for this “replacement.” When, in 1974, Issa Shivji asked Rodney to stay in the country, he refused. Tanzania could never be his home—not completely.
Rodney worked toward these objectives in a number of ways. Firstly, as an intellectual, he threw himself into the work of redrafting the country’s high school history curriculum. Tanzanians had to have a good and clear sense of their history and the history of the continent. Ultimately, this would prove the overriding intellectual commitment in his life. This project of rewriting the history curriculum had taken up a considerable amount of his time while he was in Dar, and then after his return to Guyana. For a young generation, Rodney was preparing the ground for a sustainable, just, and thorough understanding of the country’s independence—its position in the world order, and the continent’s “historic tasks” for the future.
The second groundwork took place at the university, which, he argued, also needed to be transformed. Indeed, this was a central question with which faculty members and students were engaged: How could an essentially colonial institution be built to service the needs of a new nation?
Surrounded by trees and flowers, a central road winds its way through the University on the Hill, or Mlimani (“the mountain” in Kiswahili). Smaller roads and cul-de-sacs lead to large bungalows, built in the 1960s, with gardens that circle the houses. Set back from the main road are the faculties, lecture halls, dining rooms, and student accommodations. Between the different departments—most of them long, two-story buildings, with offices on both floors—are a series of pathways that meander through the lush green hills of the campus. Today, the university has a population of more than twenty thousand students, and the infrastructure staggers under the impact of years of restructuring and underfunding. However, during Rodney’s days at the university, the notion of “the Hill” expressed not just the verdant hilly beauty of the campus—still visible today, despite decades of austerity and sweeping budget cuts—but also its isolation and privilege from the hardships faced in the city and country. The air on campus was rarefied; its debates seemed distant and obscure to the struggles going on in the country and continent below.
This could not be more clearly illustrated than in a debate that took place in a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences on November 24, 1971. A faculty committee had been set up to investigate changes to the curriculum, and its recommendations included a new direction in undergraduate teaching. Committee member John Saul—a prominent Canadian socialist at the university who remained a vital and radical critic of devastating neoliberal reforms that ripped across the continent in the 1980s and 1990s—saw resistance to progressive changes from less radical expatriate colleagues, now joined by returning Tanzanian academics; the latter had no enthusiasm for changes in the curriculum that could be perceived as undermining their expertise. Saul has since argued that the debate over the report—which was in the end rejected—pitched those who wanted to challenge and reform the “academic infrastructure” (work that had been started with the Common Course) against resistance from within the “professoriate.” According to Saul, the defeat in the highly divisive and angry faculty meeting was a turning point—confirming that radical efforts at reform in the university (and perhaps elsewhere) had crashed on the rocks of philistinism. Tanzania’s grand adventure at radical reforms was being extinguished. “It was now to be only a matter of weeks before a number of us, Tanzanian and expatriate, black and white alike, were sacked and more or less forced to leave the country.”
Saul’s account, still fresh with the anger of the meeting itself, is partial, and the nature of the dispute complex. Given the lofty claims made for this fork in the road, it is worth examining the issues behind it in some detail. Sitting in the large…