The Groundings With My Brothers (Paperback)

~ (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 68 pages
• Publisher: Frontline Distribution International
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0948390026
• ISBN-13: 978-0948390029
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #566,016 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Man of the People, May 4, 2006

By	Elijah Chingosho "Dr Elijah Chingosho" (Nairobi, Kenya) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Walter Rodney was born in 1942 in Guyana. He was born to a poor working class family. Walter Rodney was a brilliant scholar. He attended Queen's College in Guyana and the University of West Indies in Jamaica. He obtained his PhD in 1966 (at the tender age of 24) from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England. His PhD thesis was on the slave trade on the upper Guinea coast.

His thesis was widely acclaimed for its originality in challenging the conventional wisdom on the area. He traveled widely and became very well known around the world as an activist and scholar. He taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania which was well known as the haven of pan African political thinking and activism.

Rodney was sharply critical of the middle class for its role in the post-independence Caribbean. By 1968 Rodney's groundings with the working poor of Jamaica had begun to attract the attention of the government. When he attended a Black Writers' Conference in Montreal, Canada, in October 1968, the Jamaican Government of prime Minister Hugh Shearer banned him from re-entering the country. This action sparked widespread riots and revolts in Kingston in which several people were killed and injured by the police and security forces, and millions of dollars worth of property destroyed. Rodney's encounters with the Rastafarians were published in a pamphlet entitled "Grounding with My Brothers," that became a bible for the Caribbean Black Power Movement.

These riots triggered an increase in political awareness across the Caribbean. Rodney became a prominent Pan Africanist, and was important in the Black Power movement in the Caribbean. While living in Dar es Salaam he was influential in developing a new centre of African learning and discussion.

In 1974 Rodney returned to Guyana. He became increasingly active in politics, working for the Working People's Alliance. Rodney died in a car bomb assassination in 1980, widely blamed on the Guyanese government.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Specter of Walter Rodney, August 11, 2007

By	Roy Wilson (USA) - See all my reviews

Dr. Walter Rodney is the Leon Trotsky of the Afro-Caribbean. Apart from sharing the same fate, assassination, his intellectual works is standing up to the test of time and like Trotsky's own works, is now proving to be prophetic.

Rodney's "The Groundings with my Brothers," first published almost 40 years ago analyzed the historical development of the African Diaspora and that community's liberation struggles for independence under the "new conditions of oppression."

Rodney pointed out that the beneficiaries of neoliberal independence, in the African Diaspora, were a narrow group of elites drawn from the middle-class, yet despite their racial composition would continue to act as mere representatives for the big trading and financial bourgeois of the North.

With a few exceptions, in the areas of health, education, access to economic opportunities, employment and justice, very little has changed for the Black Diaspora's masses since Walter Rodney's writing in 1969.

As Rodney predicted, "The local lackeys of imperialism have long had to admit the existence of tremendous social injustice....the administration of the law has become more vicious and partisan".

He went on, "since `independence' the black police force...have demonstrated that they can be as savage in their approach to black brothers as the white police of New York, for ultimately they serve the same master."

This brilliant work, "The Groundings with my Brothers" is Walter Rodney's Specter haunting the African Diaspora's opportunist and elites.

See also:

Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (New Approaches to African History)

In-Dependence from Bondage: Claude McKay and Michael Manley: Defying the Ideological Clash and Policy Gaps in African Diaspora Relations

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa