The shifting influence of Frantz Fanon on Walter Rodney’s anti-imperialism
S. E. Anderson
To mark the 84th anniversary of the birth of Afro-Guyanese Marxist historian and revolutionary Walter Rodney (23 March 1942), we share an article from ROAPE’s special issue 186 on Frantz Fanon that examines the shifting imprint of The Wretched of the Earth on Rodney’s evolving anti-imperialist politics. Drawing on material from the Walter Rodney Papers and beyond, Chinedu Chukwudinma and Baindu Kallon argue that Rodney’s changing engagement with Fanon reveals key patterns and nuances about his political development on questions of class as the strategy and tactics of liberation. They contend that while Rodney initially embraced Fanon’s ideas, he gradually refined, challenged and at times rejected them as he grappled with the failed promises of post-independence Jamaica and Tanzania.
Introduction
In June 1974, a severe bout of malaria confined Afro-Guyanese historian Walter Rodney to a bed at Muhimbili National Hospital in Dar es Salaam. As he lay ill in his mid-thirties, Rodney was perhaps haunted by the memory of Frantz Fanon’s premature death from cancer at the age of 36. That fate loomed large in the imagination of the comrades who stood by his bedside. Horace Campbell later recalled that when a European doctor proposed transferring him to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC—where Fanon had died 13 years earlier—Rodney’s comrades protested. They eventually secured his release into the care of a fellow activist, under whom he recovered (Campbell 1974, 178—179).
The spectre of Fanon in Rodney’s life extended far beyond mortality. Though born 17 years apart, both men traced remarkably similar paths: descendants of enslaved Africans from the Caribbean who saw Africa’s liberation as essential to their own. Each moved from intellectual critique to revolutionary organisation: Fanon as an activist in Algeria’s National Liberation Front, and Rodney as a Marxist leader of Guyana’s Working People’s Alliance (Lewis 1998; Boukari-Yabara 2018; Zeilig 2021, 2022).
This article examines how Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), though written on the eve of African independence, inspired Rodney to reflect on questions of strategy and class in the anti-imperialist struggles of postcolonial Africa and the Caribbean from 1968 to 1978. Drawing on material from the Walter Rodney Papers (WRP) and beyond, it argues that Rodney’s shifting engagement with Fanon’s work illuminates important patterns and subtleties in his political development. While Rodney initially embraced many of Fanon’s ideas, he gradually refined, challenged and at times rejected them. Recognising their limits amid the pitfalls of anti-imperialist struggles, he turned to Marxist theory as a more powerful guide to revolution.
The article begins by challenging how the historiography has at times either downplayed or overstated Fanon’s influence on Rodney, to advance our claim that his transition from the Caribbean’s Black Power movement in 1968 to the African liberation struggle represented a decisive political evolution. Rodney moved beyond what he saw as Fanon’s celebration of spontaneity and towards a focus on the political organisation of armed struggle. We then demonstrate that, while Rodney initially accepted Fanon’s view of the African petty bourgeoisie as a comprador class that might ally with or betray the masses, he came to recast its Tanzanian counterpart as a ruling class incapable of reform amid its authoritarian turn after late 1971. Finally, Rodney and Fanon diverged from the outset in their views of the African working class yet stood united in their dismissal of it. Unlike Fanon, Rodney would come to see the working class’s central importance in the struggle against imperialism, in light of the strikes and occupations that erupted in Tanzania during the 1970s.
From spontaneous revolutionary violence to the problem of organisation
Between 1968 and his death in 1980, Rodney’s political development reflected a growing reckoning with the limitations of spontaneous uprisings and a subsequent turn towards the problem of organisation. Although his shift unfolded in dialogue with Fanon’s ideas, the depth and significance of this exchange has often been obscured by the scholarship on Rodney, which has at times understated or exaggerated Fanon’s influence on his political thought.
Accounts of Rodney’s activism in Jamaica in 1968 often romanticise him as a wandering black intellectual (Campbell 1987; Lewis 1998; Gibbons 2010; Boukari-Yabara 2018). They dwell on Rodney’s participation in informal grassroots gatherings, known as groundings, with unemployed youth, community groups and Rastafarians, where people discussed African and Caribbean history, politics and global Black liberation movements. As Rodney’s biographer Rupert Lewis observed in his pioneering account, ‘it was his expertise on Africa and his ability to relate this knowledge to the traditions of resistance of black people which consolidated a youthful Jamaican audience’ (Lewis 1994, 23). These accounts understandably exist to counter the Jamaican state’s narrative, which sought to justify Rodney’s expulsion from the country in October 1968 by portraying him as a mean-spirited and violent demagogue conspiring to overthrow the government (West 2005). Yet they obscure a crucial dimension of Rodney’s political identity—one that made him unapologetically Fanonian and popular among the Jamaican youth who partook in the riots sparked by his banning.
In truth, the Rodney of 1968 hoped that his Black Power agitation would help lay the groundwork for Jamaica’s next violent, spontaneous upheaval against neocolonial rule. In an unpublished draft chapter entitled ‘Africans Abroad in Jamaica’, likely written from Cuba months after expulsion from Jamaica, Rodney offers his own account of why he was expelled:
It turned out that Rodney was regarded by the government as a threat because he put himself at the service of a black power movement both within the university and outside, and because he was prepared to discuss the question of revolutionary violence as a means of ending injustice. (Rodney n.d., WRP, Box 13, Folder 11, emphasis ours)
Rodney did not view himself as gentle teacher but as an agitator showing the utmost concern for what he believed to be Fanon’s ideas on violence and spontaneity. In much of the draft he celebrated the spontaneous ‘Rodney Riots’, which bought Kingston to a standstill for several hours (Rodney n.d., WRP, Box 13, Folder 11). He argued that they represented a crucial step from theory to practice, where black youth showed a high degree of creative ability. ‘The black masses in [Jamaica] are slowly developing a theory of armed struggle’ (Rodney n.d., WRP, Box 13, Folder 11). Furthermore, the uprising would pull students and academics away from their naïve embrace of non-violence.
Rodney also fully accepted Fanon’s claims regarding the therapeutic benefits of violence during this period. This point is well illustrated in his intervention during the Q&A session of Alvin Poussaint’s talk at the 1968 Montreal Congress, recorded in David Austin’s volume, that Rodney participated in shortly before being refused re-entry into Jamaica (Austin 2018). Paraphrasing Fanon’s thesis, he emphasised that violence lay at the very essence of a racialised imperialist world. Rodney argued that black people possessed ‘a very unbalanced conception of force and violence’, experiencing it only as victims—‘it is something that people always do to us’ (Rodney, quoted in Austin 2018, 121). By reclaiming violence as a means of resistance, he suggested, the oppressed could restore balance and achieve liberation on both collective and individual levels.
More importantly, the threads of Fanon’s embrace of the revolutionary lumpenproletariat were woven into Rodney’s engagement with the black masses in Jamaica. Although Rodney did not produce a detailed class analysis of Jamaican neocolonial society, he clearly identified the unemployed black youth—those abandoned by neocolonialism—as a potential revolutionary vanguard (see Rodney 2019; Rodney n.d., WRP, Box 13, Folder 11). At the Montreal Congress, he warned that a violent uprising was imminent: ‘Throughout the country, black youth are becoming aware of the possibilities of unleashing armed struggle in their own interest’ (Rodney 2019, 29).
The failed uprisings in Jamaica 1968 and Trinidad in 1970 led Rodney to reconsider the limits of spontaneous revolt. In 1972, he reflected on these events:
Some very beautiful brothers and sisters sprung up in that situation, challenged it, and from all respects it seems to me that, at a certain point in time, our friend [Prime Minster Eric] Williams was out of power; de facto, the government of Trinidad had fallen. If only there was some other organizational structure to take power. But that structure had not been built, through no fault, perhaps, of the people concerned. (Rodney 1972b, 12)
Rodney saw that spontaneous revolt, though politically explosive, lacked the organisational foundation necessary to seize power. The task of an uprising, Rodney argued, was not simply to challenge power but for the masses to seize it. In these terms, he identified the question of organisation as the central and urgent issue facing the Caribbean, with Cuba being the notable exception from which others had much to learn.
Rodney’s turn to the question of organisation also altered the nature of his engagement with Fanon. To appreciate this shift, it is necessary to recognise that Fanon’s influence on Rodney regarding the organisation of armed struggle has in one important aspect been overstated. In his monumental biography of Rodney, Leo Zeilig suggests that Fanon’s celebration of armed struggle exerted a lifelong influence on Rodney’s views of revolutionary violence as the ultimate form of struggle, shaping both his theoretical outlook and eventual turn to armed struggle in Guyana in 1979—80 (Zeilig 2022, 324). However, our reading of Rodney’s political trajectory after the period of Caribbean revolts tells a different story. We find Rodney less concerned with how to agitate for spontaneous revolutionary violence and more preoccupied with how violence can be channelled through a political, revolutionary organisation.
One would think, as perhaps Zeilig did, that Rodney would have turned to Fanon’s chapter on the grandeur and weaknesses of spontaneity in The Wretched of the Earth. There, Fanon praises spontaneous revolt as a powerful expression of radical anticolonial consciousness among the masses—an act of self-discipline and altruism that revitalises the political shallowness and lethargy of nationalist parties. But he does not worship spontaneity. On the contrary, Fanon describes it as a temporary dynamic that must give way to a more steadfast action through organisation (Fanon 1963). Fanon made the case for a political party rooted in the activity of the masses and in the efforts of radical intellectuals, capable of raising consciousness through political education and pursuing the struggle with a clear programme and methodology (Fanon 1963). While Rodney arrives at a similar conclusion, he casts Fanon as an apostle of spontaneity, seemingly overlooking the relevant passages of The Wretched of the Earth.
A eulogy that Rodney delivered in honour of slain Guinean leader Amílcar Cabral in early 1973 is very telling in this regard. Here, Rodney emphasised that Cabral’s detailed class analysis of Guinean society challenged Fanon’s assumption that the peasantry is a spontaneously revolutionary class: ‘Cabral was in effect renewing the battle against the concept of revolutionary spontaneity and restating the case for painstaking mobilisation by the most conscious’ (Rodney 1973a, WRP, Box 13, Folder 13). For Rodney, the debate was not about denying the peasantry’s role in the anti-imperialist struggle, but rather about stressing the need for a radical intellectual vanguard to undertake serious political mobilisation among the masses.
Rodney’s misreading of Fanon and his proximity to Cabral tell us that his politics drew from another source of inspiration. He had settled in Tanzania between 1969 and 1974, developing lasting relationships with the guerrilla movements of southern Africa that were based in Dar es Salaam such as the leadership of Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO). The examples of triumphs of guerrilla struggle against Portuguese colonialism in the mid 1970s confirmed Rodney’s sentiment that revolutionary violence was, in his words, ‘the highest form of politics’ (Rodney 1990). Rodney justifies this view in his 1978 Hamburg lectures by emphasising how his analysis differs from Fanon. Commenting on an essay on ‘Fanon’s Theory of Violence: Its Verification in Liberated Mozambique’ (Museveni 1971), written by his former student Yoweri Museveni, Rodney states:
Revolutionary violence itself is important in the sense in which Frantz Fanon analyzed it, as a necessary thing which people will seize when faced with the possibility and, in the process, transform their very personalities. However, my insistence on the pre-eminence and leading role of the armed struggle is not based on violence per se but on the political dimension of the revolutionary violence. (Rodney 1978b, WRP, Part VIII, Tape 8)
In the lectures, Rodney shared his admiration for socialist political education and the state-building experiment that guerrilla movements developed in the liberated areas to mobilise the peasantry to support the war effort. Rodney revealed his interest in Lars Rudebeck’s well-known study of liberated areas run by the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) in Guinea-Bissau as evidence for his argument (Rudebeck 1974; Rodney 1984). Rodney saw the PAIGC’s democratic village committees, people’s courts, schools, hospitals and barter food stores as initiatives that forged new forms of collective participation which not only secured the active support of the masses against colonialism but also helped them to overcome the gender and ethnic divisions entrenched by colonial rule (Rodney 1984).
Upon his involvement in the Guyanese struggle against Forbes Burnham’s regime, Rodney had moved beyond the terms of his earlier activism. Instead, he directed his activism towards building a revolutionary socialist party capable of carrying out deep-rooted political education to prepare the masses for the seizure of power. As Rodney recognised the importance of building a political organisation to harness revolutionary violence, another, more fundamental, question emerged: which class should lead the anti-imperialist struggle? On this point, Rodney’s engagement with Fanon proved particularly significant. Fanon’s major influence lay in encouraging Rodney, Cabral and an entire generation of thinkers to turn their gaze towards the problem of class in Africa—at a time when many African heads of state, even those deemed progressive, denied the very existence of class antagonism on the continent (see Shivji 1976).
Refining Fanon’s ideas on the national bourgeoisie
In the final chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’, Fanon had illustrated with prophetic clarity the grim postcolonial reality Rodney encountered in Africa in the 1970s. He warned of a stolen independence giving rise to corrupt, unpopular regimes that preserved old colonial ties while courting new imperialist masters. Above all, he condemned the very stratum that had led the liberation struggle by virtue of its colonial education, cultural assimilation and proximity to administrative power: the national bourgeoisie (Fanon 1963). Fanon chastised this small privileged urban elite as the ‘Spoilt children of yesterday’s colonialism and of today’s national government’, alienated from the rural masses (Fanon 1963, 48). Noting its lack of rooted ownership of capital, he further condemned it as a ‘little greedy caste’, willing to accept the dividends handed out by former colonial powers rather than challenge its dependency on foreign capital (Fanon 1963, 175).
Of all Fanon’s writings, ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ was the one Rodney invoked most frequently to interpret Tanzania’s socialist experiment and the broader trajectory of postcolonial Africa during his crucial time in the country from 1969 to 1974, and after his departure. Rodney accepted Fanon’s analysis but later refined it, particularly as he confronted the authoritarian turn of the Tanzanian revolution. To understand this evolution, we must distinguish between the Rodney of the early 1970s and Rodney after 1974.
The early Rodney subscribed to Fanon’s view of the national bourgeoisie as a parasitic layer between the African masses and the international bourgeoisie, rather than a fully developed class with its own interests. ‘I myself prefer to portray them as a stratum serving that international capitalist class’, Rodney remarked in ‘Problems of Third World Development’ (Rodney 1972a, 125). Both referred to the same social formation, with Rodney using the term petty bourgeoisie where Fanon spoke of the national bourgeoisie. Rodney’s 1972 speech reflects the change in terminology as Rodney spoke to a new reality that had emerged since Fanon’s death in 1961—the rise of a genuine national bourgeoisie controlling the means of production across the Third World. Yet he insisted that, in most countries, only a neocolonial petty bourgeoisie existed, ‘entirely dependent’ on ‘their external support; and second, whatever local police force they can muster’ (Rodney 1972a, 121).
In addition, the early Rodney fully embraced Fanon’s thesis on the two existential choices facing the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia in a national liberation struggle: joining the masses or betraying them. In 1972, he wrote, ‘Fanon called for the self-liquidation of the African petty bourgeoisie and their regeneration as a revolutionary intelligentsia, but of course this is far from being the case within the [African] continent as a whole’ (Rodney 1972c). Here, Rodney attributed to Fanon one of Cabral’s well-known phrases, that the petty bourgeoisie ought to commit class suicide by renouncing its privilege and identifying with the aspirations of the masses (Cabral 1979). While examples in Africa were limited, the Cold War era offered instances of an anti-imperialist petty bourgeoisie leading revolutionary change, such as Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Mao Zedong’s China, Sékou Touré’s Guinea, the anticolonial guerrilla movements in Southern Africa and, most notably, Tanzania.
Rodney’s adoption of Fanon’s ideas matched his eagerness to offer critical support for Tanzania’s socialist experiment. He viewed the one-party state, led by the petty bourgeoisie with Julius Nyerere at its helm, as the main driver of anti-imperialist and socialist development. Rodney admired Nyerere’s commitment to Pan-Africanism and non-alignment, which turned Tanzania into a base for liberation movements in southern Africa. He witnessed and endorsed the Arusha Declaration of 1967, which affirmed the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU)’s commitment to socialism and self-reliance, ending neocolonial dependence on foreign capital and announcing the nationalisation of banks, import—export firms, multinational affiliates and flour-milling businesses (Coulson 2013). Finally, Rodney supported the Ujamaa land reform policy, which sought to improve livelihoods by moving peasants from individual homesteads to collective villages with access to electricity, water and modern farming methods to boost productivity for Tanzanian exports (Hirji 2010). In Nyerere’s regime, Rodney saw a progressive state striving to share power with peasants and workers.
Although Rodney criticised the slow implementation of Ujamaa and the setbacks of nationalisation, he did not recognise these failings as those of the entire petty bourgeoisie. Instead, he believed that Tanzania’s difficulty in breaking from imperialism stemmed from ideological divisions within the petty bourgeoisie itself. This divide lay between the progressives around Nyerere in the political bureaucracy and an economic bureaucracy dominated by pro-Western reactionaries who sought to maintain ties with imperialist powers. In between them stood those Rodney deemed intellectually lazy and uncommitted to political change. As Rodney explained in 1971:
One must take this [ideological] rift inside the petty bourgeoisie as the point of departure for political action. It is not a question of revolutionary forces against the petty bourgeoisie but of a struggle within that social stratum. (Rodney 1971b, 6)
Rodney equated political action with waging a battle of ideas among the petty bourgeoisie to expose their counter-revolutionary ideas and to scrutinise the broader implications of the policies pursued by the economic bureaucracy.
The early Rodney’s willingness to carry this argument reflected his narrow understanding of capitalist social relations and his optimistic view of Tanzania’s state-led socialism. Like Fanon before him, Rodney seemed to equate capitalism only with large-scale private industry. Consequently, both viewed state ownership as a barrier to the advent of bourgeois society rather than a pathway for its development. Fanon understood that a national bourgeoise gained material privileges through its grounding in civil service. However, he still deemed bureaucrats ‘incapable of giving birth to an authentic bourgeois society’ (Fanon 1963, 176). Similarly, Rodney thought the Arusha Declaration constrained the aspirations of the economic petty bourgeoisie to become a ruling class by putting strict checks on private ownership of land, property and workplaces. Moreover, he thought that the ranks of progressives within the TANU elite were growing and would eventually eclipse the reactionaries once the ideological struggle was won (Rodney 1971b, 1972c; Hirji 2017).
The Rodney of the post-1974 drew radically different conclusions. Refining Fanon’s ideas, he came to view the entire Tanzanian bureaucracy as a ruling class rooted in production rather than a comprador elite. Consequently, he also abandoned the Fanonian notion that the petty bourgeoisie could renounce its privileges and identify with the masses. Zeilig’s biography was the first to note these shifts in Rodney’s politics, through his analysis of the 1978 Hamburg lectures (Zeilig 2022). There, Rodney remarked, ‘TANU had not been transformed[;] it remains a nationalist party under the control of the petit bourgeoisie. And that it is in fact incapable of providing the basis for sustained socialist transformation’ (Rodney 1978a, WRP, Part VIII, Tape 8).
The lectures signalled Rodney’s complete disillusion with Tanzania’s socialist experiment due to TANU’s authoritarian turn, which began three or four years earlier. Between late 1970 and 1972, Rodney witnessed the banning on campus of the Marxist student group to which he was affiliated, the suppression of a student pro-democracy protest, and the unlawful arrest and trial of his friend, Zanzibari revolutionary Mohammed Abdulrahman Babu (Hirji 2010). These examples of TANU’s growing intolerance stemmed from a perceived threat of imperialist invasion, which loomed over Tanzania because of its role as a hub for African liberation. Combined with the disappointing results of the Ujamaa land reform, TANU issued Mwongozo in 1971, a contradictory policy pamphlet that promised to revive the revolution while asserting the party’s control over all mass activity (TANU 1971; Roberts 2022). By late 1973, the one-party state ordered the compulsory villagisation and the forced resettlement of peasants into Ujamaa villages, renouncing earlier hopes that they would move voluntarily (Shivj, Yahya-Othman and Kamata 2020).
Rodney shared his disapproval with these measures six months after leaving Tanzania in a 1975 speech, ‘Class Contradictions in Tanzania’. He openly condemned the TANU bureaucracy for forcing peasants to relocate to areas unsuitable for cultivation and deploying the armed forces against those who resisted. Rodney’s pessimism towards TANU was gradual and in response to growing critiques of the nationalisation process, which failed to hand power to workers. In 1973, Rodney wrote: ‘In Tanzania, as elsewhere, the strengthening of the state has gone hand in hand with the emergence of privileged classes who themselves depend inordinately on the state machinery for power and accumulation’ (Rodney 1973c, 32).
His remarks appeared in response to a groundbreaking article entitled ‘The Class Struggle Continues’, written by Issa Shivji, a young Marxist lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam, which introduced a new characterisation of Nyerere’s Tanzania as practising bourgeois socialism (Shivji 1973). Developing this argument further in Class Struggles in Tanzania (Shivji 1976), Shivji contended that Tanzania had witnessed the emergence of a bureaucratic bourgeoisie—a high-ranking stratum of the petty bourgeoisie that used state nationalisation to accumulate capital and reproduce itself as a class. Increasingly controlling the means of production through the state, the bureaucratic bourgeoise exploited the workers and peasants. At the same time, this bureaucracy remained a neocolonial ruling class by virtue of its economic dependency on Western imperialism (Shivji 1976).
Shivji’s analysis had its problems. Among other things, it contradicted itself by portraying the bureaucratic bourgeoisie both as a ruling class and as a ‘dependent’ neocolonial elite. By describing it as neocolonial, Shivji sought to highlight TANU’s failure to achieve full economic independence from imperialism and to transition to socialism, as he believed Mao’s China had done (Shivji 1976). However, this emphasis on neocolonial dependency was a misplaced criterion for evaluating Nyerere’s regime or any form of state capitalism. Full economic independence was unrealistic for a Tanzanian bureaucracy developing within a world dominated by multinational corporations and imperialist powers. What made the Tanzanian bureaucracy an independent ruling class, despite its partnership with the West, was precisely its control over the state—its command of the police, army, nationalised enterprises and the land—which enabled it to exploit the working masses.
Nevertheless, Shivji’s work marked a turning point in Rodney as he began to acknowledge the bureaucratic sector of the petty bourgeoisie as a ruling class working against the masses. Rodney elaborated on this in his Hamburg lectures of 1978:
We might say Tanzania and Guinea would represent the development of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie … the bureaucratic bourgeoisie has dominated in some parts of Africa and the private and commercial bourgeoisie, the national bourgeoisie dominates in other sections. It makes the difference to specific policies but it makes very little difference to the basis of exploitation and alienation. (Rodney 1978b, WRP, Part XIII, Audiotape)
In these terms, Rodney refined Fanon’s understanding of the African elite. Yet, his political change remained limited. In his support for guerrilla movements fighting colonialism in Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, Rodney still held to the Fanonian idea of a progressive African intelligentsia sacrificing itself for the masses. At Guelph University in 1978, he explained why the liberation wars in southern Africa inspired more optimism than those in countries where the bureaucratic bourgeoisie had consolidated power: ‘Armed struggle … sees some glimmer [of hope], where the military clique is losing its hegemony [over] the masses’ (Rodney 1978a, WRP, Box 31, Tape 20).
Rodney here meant that the political mobilisation within guerrilla struggles had rendered the petty-bourgeois leadership accountable to the people. Like Fanon before him, he carried the illusion that armed struggle would yield better outcomes than negotiated independence. In his Hamburg lectures, he even sought to explain away the rise of a bureaucratic dictatorship, akin to Tanzania’s, in Fanon’s Algeria, despite its victorious liberation war against France a decade earlier. Rodney attributed this failure to Algeria’s armed struggle not lasting long enough to achieve full socialist transformation, even though it had continued for eight years, and to opportunists who later assumed power without having led the struggle (Rodney 1978a, WRP, Part VIII, Tape 8).
In truth, Algeria’s failure had little to do with the duration of its war or the opportunism of individuals. It stemmed from the class divisions inherent in the guerrilla movement itself, where an urban petty bourgeoisie mobilised the peasantry, only to fulfil its historic mission of propelling itself to seize the reins of state power and, by extension, control of the economy (Birchall 2012). The peasantry, as small, impoverished producers whose villages remained isolated from one another, were unable to hold their guerrilla leadership accountable once it had become a bureaucracy standing above them (Cliff 1986). For all his tremendous foresight, Rodney could not bring himself to revise his faith in guerrilla struggle, even after what he observed in Algeria. Nevertheless, his ability to reassess Nyerere’s Tanzania proved remarkable. Within a few years, he had moved from seeing the one-party state as progressive to declaring, in 1978, ‘the trend of events from 1973 to 78 [has] shown the victory of bureaucrats over the masses’ (Rodney 1978a, WRP, Box 31, Tape 20). He had lost all illusions.
Rodney and Fanon on the working class
While Fanon deeply informed Rodney’s critique of the African elite, their understandings of the African working class diverged from the outset and only deepened over time. Where Fanon and the early Rodney initially found common ground was in their shared neglect of the importance of working-class agency, largely because they developed their politics of national liberation in agrarian societies where the working class was numerically small, unorganised and therefore carried little social weight. At the same time, the most successful so-called socialist revolutions in the Third World, notably Mao’s China and Castro’s Cuba, had been won through peasant-based guerrilla struggles in the countryside. These examples reinforced the idea that Marxism required revision when applied to the global South.
Rodney’s early perspectives on the Tanzanian working class were intimately tied to his favourable view of TANU’s petty-bourgeois bureaucracy as a driving force of socialism. He largely saw the proletariat as a passive recipient of reform rather than a class capable of liberating itself. He argued that colonial underdevelopment had stripped Tanzania’s workers of the numerical strength, organisation and education necessary to provide active leadership to the nation’s liberation struggle (Rodney 1968). He made this clear in 1968: ‘Because in Tanzania proletarian skills are not yet fully developed and because the present working class provides a too narrow social base to be in exclusive control of industry’ (Rodney 1968, 78).
Four years later, Rodney wrote an article which argued that the Ujamaa policy of collective farming charted a new agrarian path to socialism—one that would preclude a workers’ revolution (Rodney 1972c). While Rodney perceived the Tanzanian working class as weak, he did celebrate workers’ struggles in the Jamaican context (Rodney n.d., WRP, Box 13, Folder 11). However, he regarded them as only one among several revolutionary sectors of the people.
Fanon’s treatment of the African working class was not merely dismissive, as in Rodney’s case, but overtly hostile. He considered the class as ‘pampered by the colonial regime’ wherein nurses, dockworkers and taxi drivers represented ‘the “bourgeois” fraction of the colonized people’ (Fanon 1963, 108—109). Even when Fanon acknowledges trade union struggles, he portrays workers’ demands for higher wages and better living conditions as scandalous and greedy, emanating from a materially privileged section of society and of little consequence to the impoverished countryside. In similar vein to Maoist interpretations of Marxism, Fanon identified the peasantry and the urban lumpenproletariat as the sole revolutionary classes in colonial society (Fanon 1963). Fanon’s conception of class carried a certain romantic idealism, grounded in the belief that those who are poorest are also the most exploited and therefore the most willing to take up arms against colonialism.
Fanon’s hostile belief in the myth of a bourgeois African working class possessed a strong kinship with Nyerere and TANU’s own fable of Tanzania workers and the global proletariat representing a labour aristocracy. ‘Workers of the world now are very wealthy; they belong to the wealthy class. … they share in the exploitation of the poor of the world’, declared the Tanzania president in 1976 (quoted in Shivji 2017, 212). If Nyerere recognised the existence of class, he did not acknowledge an irreconcilable struggle between classes. In more crude ways than Fanon, Nyerere argued that urban classes were not only alienated from poor peasants, but also active participants in their exploitation (Shivji 1976, 2017). Thus, when the Tanzanian working class launched a spontaneous strike movement in nationalised and private enterprises in early 1970s, Nyerere accused them of stealing from state property and the peasantry (Shivji 1976).
Rodney never subscribed to the notion that African workers constituted a labour aristocracy. He knew all too well that Tanzania workers had been deprived of independent organisation. Nyerere’s one-party state banned independent trade unions after accusing their leaders of supporting a soldier mutiny in 1964 (Shivji, Yahya-Othman and Kamata 2020). What proved to be a watershed moment for Rodney and his Marxist comrades at the University of Dar es Salaam was the outbreak of the workers’ movement between 1971 and 1973, which shifted his outlook on the working class. The numerous work stoppages, lockouts and factory takeovers exposed the contradictions within Mwongozo, which simultaneously sanctified the authoritarian turn of the TANU state and set out guidelines for how factory managers should act in an anti-imperialist Tanzania (TANU 1971; Shivji 1976; Roberts 2022). Workers had seized upon these very guidelines to assert not only their wage demands but also their rights for protection against workplace harassment. The rising state’s suppression of the new movement fed into Rodney’s growing distrust of Tanzania’s ruling elite.
In his analysis of the 1978 Hamburg lectures, Zeilig rightly observes that the mature Rodney viewed these strikes and occupations as not only a direct threat to Tanzania’s one-party state but also the pathway towards a new society organised from below (Zeilig 2022):
Workers of the factories and the various other branches of the economy … struggle, interestingly enough, not just for more wages: by 1973/74 the workers [were] already struggling against the hierarchy of production. And they were struggling for a greater share of control over their own production. (Rodney 1978b, WRP, Part VIII, Tape 8)
Rodney argued that the worker’s demands went beyond mere bread-and-butter issues, raising instead the fundamental question of which class should control the means of production in a genuinely socialist society.
Rodney admiration for this new movement was not merely a retrospective reflection. Previously, in 1972, he had spoken of the healthy assertion of workers as their movement unfolded in real time, marking a shift away from his earlier stance on the alleged apathy of the proletariat (Rodney 1972a). However, because he remained optimistic about Nyerere’s regime until the mid 1970s, he continued to see the one-party state as an ‘arena of struggle’ in which workers could hold its bureaucracy to account without engaging in a decisive revolutionary confrontation against it (Rodney 2022). The Hamburg lectures of 1978 marked a departure, as Rodney no longer saw such a possibility.
Rodney’s evolving politics on the centrality of the working class in Tanzania illustrated a deep engagement with Marxist theory and analysis. This contrasts with Fanon, who insisted on stretching Marxism to understand class in colonial Africa (Fanon 1963). In identifying the peasantry, rather than workers, as the revolutionary class, Fanon revealed the limits of his class analysis. Lacking a clear method, he capitulated to empiricism, relying on his instinct, observation and practical experience instead of an analysis of historical development. The Wretched of the Earth offered very little data or country-specific historical evidence to substantiate its claims. Therefore, Fanon could only make broad generalisations about class in Africa that he often derived from subjective and isolated socioeconomic factors—primarily wealth and poverty.
However, Rodney developed a Marxist understanding of class as an objective relationship between humans, formed within the realm of production. In the Marxist view, an individual’s class position relied on their specific ties to the means of producing wealth—either as owners or as those deprived of ownership, among whom the working-class figures were most prominent (Rodney 1986; Choonara 2017). These changing patterns in the allocation of the means of production in turn shaped the character of the exploitative relations of production within society. Rodney applied historical materialism to understand Tanzanian working-class militancy, identifying it as a dispossessed class compelled to sell its labour power while having profits extracted from its unpaid labour. Two monographs, World War II and the Tanzanian Economy (Rodney 1976b) and the co-authored Migrant Labour in Tanzania during the Colonial Period (Rodney, Kapepwa and Sago 1983), based on research he conducted at the University of Dar es Salaam during 1973 and 1974, the most intense years of the workers’ movement, illustrate this focus (see also Rodney 1973b).
Both monographs present a history of working-class formation in colonial society and its crucial agency in the anticolonial struggle. In these works, Rodney gives weight to the emergence of migrant labour, recruited by colonial authorities from the peasantry to work on the sisal plantations, and to the unrest that arose from their working conditions (Rodney 1976b; Rodney, Kapepwa and Sago 1983). In doing so, he presents a very different picture of the working class, marking a stark contrast with Fanon, who seemingly ignored the migrant labour system. Rodney dispels the myth of the ‘privileged worker’ by portraying the bulk of the African working class as semi-proletarianised and rural. His co-written volume on migrant labour in Tanga drew ‘attention to the tempo of working class in 1956—1958, when organised sisal workers considerably strengthened the tendency towards stabilisation and became active agents in the making of their own history’ (Rodney, Kapepwa and Sago 1983, 28). Rodney was arguing that migrant workers’ struggle for stable employment on settled plantations played a crucial role in the emergence of Tanganyika’s trade union movement during the 1950s. However, in World War II and the Tanzanian Economy, Rodney makes clear that the crux of the anticolonial resistance came from port and railway workers in the 1940s, who were closely tied to the import—export functions of the economy. This position endowed them with an understanding of the world, enabling them to draw inspiration from the class struggles and organisational forms led by their Western counterparts (Rodney 1976b).
Rodney’s research prompted him to question TANU’s portrayal of the working class as exploiters of the peasantry. He pointed out the irony in this view, noting that urban and rural workers earned only minimum wages and had been at ‘the vanguard of the struggle against colonialism’ (Rodney 1978b, WRP, Part VIII, Tape 8). The worker strikes and occupations of the 1970s made clear to Rodney that proletarians were continuously excluded from ownership of the means of producing wealth in Tanzanian society. More importantly, they revealed the strategic power of the working class—a power flowing from its unique position as the class upon which the bureaucracy depended to produce society’s essential goods and services (Rodney 1976b; Rodney 2022).
It is important to note that while Rodney and Fanon came to different conclusions about Africa’s working class, both became advocates of working-class internationalism. For Fanon, humanity’s liberation from capitalist imperialism depended on an alliance between the Western working class and the oppressed peoples of the Third World. He viewed the proletariat in capitalist countries as a revolutionary class with ‘nothing to lose’, but one that first had to awaken to the horrors of oppression both abroad and at home (Fanon 1963, 109). French workers, he believed, could never attain genuine freedom while sustaining the colonial order; their liberation depended on recognising the stakes of the Algerian struggle and supporting it (Fanon 2004, 2007). In the anticolonial armed struggle, Fanon saw an enactment of mutual recognition, in which the colonised reclaim their humanity while the European working class frees itself from its own colonial racism (Fanon 2004, 2007).
In contrast, Rodney remained deeply pessimistic about the progressive potential of the working class in imperialist countries throughout much of his early writing. He recurrently portrayed the Western working class as a labour aristocracy, bought off by the profits of imperialism and complicit in the oppression of toilers in Africa and the global South (Rodney 1971a, 2001, 2012). However, by the mid 1970s, Rodney moved away from this pessimism, as he began to reckon with the limits of Pan-Africanism. One reason for this shift lay in his realisation, particularly after the Sixth Pan-African Congress in 1974, that the slogans of ‘Pan-Africanism’ and ‘Black Power’ had been appropriated by repressive African and Caribbean governments (Rodney 1976a; Markle 2017). This pushed Rodney to look for a more radical form of internationalism—one that placed greater emphasis on building international class solidarity in line with his newfound appreciation of proletarian militancy. In a 1976 article he wrote:
Support for African liberation is now more readily portrayed as part of a historical responsibility which extends to anti-imperialist struggles in Chile, South-east Asia, the Middle East and even Europe itself, given the possibilities which have been opened up in Portugal. (Rodney 1976a, 4)
This striking yet little-known statement appeared in an article where Rodney shared his affinity with the internationalist ideas emerging from guerrilla movements in the former Portuguese colonies, which regarded white workers as comrades-in-arms. With this came a brief but significant acknowledgement that support for African liberation could also come from Portuguese workers who took to the streets and workplaces during the Carnation Revolution (Rodney 1976a). This working-class upheaval, and the progressive class solidarity it inspired with liberation movements, appears to have prompted Rodney to begin revising his earlier assumptions about the Western working class.
Rodney and Fanon in dialogue
On the key questions of spontaneous violence, class and revolution in the global South, Rodney’s deeper political engagement across time and geographical contexts pushed him to diverge from Fanon. After confronting the failure of the spontaneous uprisings in the Caribbean in 1968, Rodney shifted his focus from Fanon’s teachings on violence to exploring the forms of organisation needed to channel such struggles effectively. In Tanzania, Rodney encountered what he believed was a national bourgeoisie that would align itself with the working masses. However, his growing disillusionment with TANU indirectly challenged Fanon’s assumptions about class in African countries. He recognised the Tanzanian bureaucratic elite as a ruling class with vested interests in controlling the means of production, and he understood the central importance of working-class militancy in confronting its rule.
During the peak of his activism in Guyana, between 1979 and his assassination in June 1980, Rodney made fewer direct references to Fanon. In a context where he and his political party, the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), sought to organise a downtrodden working class by uniting them across racial lines, Fanon’s influence on him appeared to have diminished. And yet, some aspects of Rodney’s politics remained notably close to Fanon’s. Like Fanon, Rodney remained a strong proponent of international solidarity against capitalism. Until his death, Rodney, like Fanon before him, held firmly to the belief that armed struggle represented the highest form of struggle. This position was reflected not only in his support for African guerrilla movements but also in his own party’s readiness to accumulate weapons in preparation for an insurrection against Burnham’s government in Guyana (Chukwudinma 2024). However, the WPA’s turn towards armed struggle often ran counter to its strong emphasis on workers’ struggles from below, in the streets and in the workplace, because it risked encouraging a small group of revolutionaries to act on behalf of the working masses rather than alongside them (Chukwudinma 2024).
Yet despite these issues, Rodney’s dialogue with Fanon was one that helped him achieve political clarity on the role of class in the anti-imperialist struggle. For Rodney, The Wretched of the Earth provided a foundation to seriously critique the failures of Africa’s liberation struggle and push towards an embrace of Marxist theory that could deliver a genuine revolutionary movement.
Acknowledgements
Thank you so much to Leo Zeilig for comments on an early draft of this article.
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s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
"If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor." (Haiti)
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