Quotessence
Home / Authors / Walter Rodney
Walter Rodney

Walter Rodney Quotes

Historian

Filter quotes by topic

AllAfricaBlack PowerPeopleSlave TradeAfrican HistoryCapitalismHas BeensHistoryIfsParticularResponsibilityRevolutionary StruggleSuperstructureTheory And PracticeUsedAccuracyAfrican American HistoryAfrican ContinentAmericaAppearance

Famous Walter Rodney Quotes

“Many guilty consciences have been created by the slave trade. Europeans know that they carried on the slave trade, and Africans are aware that the trade would have been impossible if certain Africans did not cooperate with slave ships. To ease their guilty consciences, Europeans try to throw the major responsibility for the slave trade on to the Africans. One major author on the slave trade (appropriately titled Sins of Our Fathers) explained how many white people urged him to state that the trade was the responsibility of African chiefs, and that Europeans merely turned up to buy captives- as though without European demand there would have been captives sitting on the beach by the millions! Issues such as those are not the principal concern of this study, but they can be correctly approached only after understanding that Europe became the center of a world-wide system and that it was European capitalism which set slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in motion.”

ResponsibilityHistoryCapitalismDominationHegemonySlave Trade
Book:How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Create image

“In response to the demand for more black culture and history, the national bourgeoisie of the U.S.A. has adopted a technique different from that of their neo-colonialist puppets in the West Indies. Having that security which comes from the possession of capital, they feel confident in making certain concessions to black culture in their educational institutions and media of public communications. As always, they concede the lesser demand to maintain the total structure of white capitalist domination, hoping to siphon off young blacks into a preoccupation with African history and culture divorced from the raw reality of the American system as it operates on both the domestic and international fronts. That gambit must not work. Imagine the juicy contradictions — Rockefeller finances chair on African history from the profits of exploiting South African blacks and upholding apartheid! Black revolutionaries study African culture alongside of researchers into germ warfare against the Vietnamese people! We blacks in the Americas have missed the opportunity when a more leisurely appraisal of our past might have been possible.”

CapitalismAfricaWhite SupremacyBlack PowerAfrican American HistoryTheory And PracticeAfrican HistoryIdeological WarfareSuperstructureRevolutionary Struggle
Book:The Groundings with My Brothers
Create image