Walter Rodney

Rodney was born into a working -class family in Guyana's capital, Georgetown . The country of Guyana, on the northern coast of South America, was then (until 1966) a British colony , called British Guiana . Rodney was a good student and obtained several scholarships , first to Queen's College, Guyana, and later to the University of the West Indies (UWI), Jamaica , where he graduated in 1963. He received his doctorate (PhD) in 1966 from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London , England . His dissertation was on the slave trade on the Upper Guinea Coast, titled 'A history of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800' . He traveled extensively outside Guyana during this period, but continued to follow developments in Guyana. Even before Guyana gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1966, local political parties emerged. Since the elections of 1964, the moderate politician Forbes Burnham was in power, who began to act dictatorially in the 1970s