Walter Rodney - Later Years and Assassination

Later Years and Assassination

In 1974 Rodney returned to Guyana from Tanzania. He was due to take up a position as a professor at the University of Guyana but the government prevented his appointment. He became increasingly active in politics, founding the Working People's Alliance, a party that provided the most effective and credible opposition to the PNC government. In 1979 he was arrested and charged with arson after two government offices were burned.

On 13 June 1980, Walter Rodney at the age of thirty-eight was killed by a bomb in his car, a month after returning from the independence celebrations in Zimbabwe and during a period of intense political activism. He was survived by his wife, Pat, and three children. His brother, Donald Rodney, who was injured in the explosion, said that a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force named Gregory Smith had given Walter the bomb that killed him. After the killing Smith fled to French Guiana, where he died in 2002.

It was, and is still widely believed - although technically hard to prove - that the assassination was a set-up by then President Linden Forbes Burnham."The grand betrayals of Walter Rodney", Kaieteur News, 16 June 2012. Rodney's ideas of the various ethnic groups who were all historically disenfranchised by the ruling colonial class, working together, was in conflict with Burnham's maniacal need for control.