ABSTRACT
The historian Walter Rodney worked within his own academic discipline to attack the distortions of imperialism and moved beyond that discipline to challenge the social myths that existed in imperial and post-colonial societies. As a “guerilla intellectual,” Rodney was influenced by the writings of Amílcar Cabral, the revolutionary mind behind the emancipation of Portugal’s African colonies. Since Cabral believed that any struggle for national liberation involved a unilateral declaration of culture, so Rodney insisted on a knowledge of African achievements to regain a cultural confidence that had been erased in the Greater Caribbean. Rodney’s Groundings with my Brothers, like Cabral’s Unity and Strength, is an aide de combat, in Kamau Brathwaite’s phrase, to “big-up” black people in their effort to free themselves by intellectual vigor and practical fortitude from the shackles of “Babylonian captivity.”
