By Chinedu Chukwudinma
During my visit to the Atlanta Archive last autumn, I noticed some scribbled notes on the back of Walter Rodney’s draft syllabus for his 1970-71 course on the Russian Revolution at the University of Dar Es Salaam. “September 12th, 1970”, read his handwriting, “Hijackings – T.W.A Boeing + Swissair DC 8 to Jordan”. The Afro-Guyanese historian was keeping up to date with a world event that became known as the Dawson’s Field hijackings. A week earlier, on the 6 September 1970, members of the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked four airliners, including a TWA flight from Frankfurt and a Swissair flight from Zurich, landing three out of the four planes in Dawson’s Field a remote airstrip in Jordan.
I soon discovered that Rodney had been gathering information for a more substantial piece when exploring the newspaper archive at the East Africana Collection at the University of Dar es Salaam in early 2023. On the page of The Standard, Tanzania’s largest English-language newspaper, I discovered two controversial articles that revealed Rodney’s full breadth of his internationalism and his uncompromising support for Palestinian liberation. On 5 and 6 November 1970, The Standard published Rodney’s article in defence of kidnappings and hijacking by guerrilla groups in Latin America and Palestinian freedom fighters in the Middle East: Revolutionary violence: An answer to oppression and Revolutionary action– way to justice.
Frene Ginwala with President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania in the newsroom of The Standard in Dar es Salaam in 1970 (Picture: Adarsh Nayar).
The emergence of Ginwalla’s Standard as a platform for radical ideas
It was surprising that Rodney published articles in favour of revolutionary violence. Only a year earlier, Rodney “thought he was going to be expelled from Tanzania” as his wife, Patricia told me. On 13 December 1969, he read a soul-crushing tirade against him in the government newspaper, The Nationalist, written by President Julius Nyerere himself. He did not anticipate such a reaction to the speech he delivered three days earlier at the Second Seminar of East and Central African Youth, which was published in the same paper. Speaking on the Ideology of the African Revolution, Rodney had called for the violent overthrow of African governments run by the petty-bourgeois class, which colluded with imperialism and betrayed the national liberation struggle. The African youth had listened to him with shining eyes. But Nyerere’s tirade deemed this assault on independent nations to be “completely unacceptable”. He replied with a threat to Rodney, implying that those who insist on advocating violence “will suffer the consequence of their indulgence.”
Although Rodney was chastised by Nyerere for preaching violence and overstepping his boundaries as a guest in Tanzania, he was not expelled. He remained a Marxist lecturer at the University of Dar Es Salam, where he wrote his famous How Europe Underdeveloped Africa in 1972. He retained much of his confidence in the ability of Nyerere’s socialist regime to improve the living standard of workers and peasants. Nevertheless, Nyerere’s editorial signalled to Rodney and the radical staff and students at the University of Dar es Salaam that The Nationalist would no longer figure as a platform for discussing radical ideas. However, in February 1970, Rodney and radicals around him witnessed a new platform emerge before them, through the nationalisation of The Standard.
Founded in 1930, the Tanganyika Standard thrived as a quintessential colonial newspaper. Unsurprisingly, it opposed TANU’s mobilisation against colonialism and its Africanisation policy in the wake of independence. When its ownership fell to the British Lonrho multinational in 1967, The Standard adopted a more approving tone of Nyerere’s rule. Owned and edited by European men, this colonial relic grabbed 80 per cent of its coverage from the London-based Reuters news agency and therefore imposed a pro-Western viewpoint on African Affairs.
On 5 February 1970, the president announced the nationalisation of The Standard newspaperand its sister publication The Sunday News. His decision to nationalise the paper stemmed from his desire for a newspaper that accurately represented Tanzania’s non-aligned Pan-Africanism on the global stage.At the same time, Nyerere justified the acquisition in nationalist terms, responding TANU cadre who wanted more Africanisation to promote Tanzanians. “We want Tanzanians to have control of this newspaper, and we want those Tanzanians to be responsible to the people”, he wrote in the first editorial of the nationalised newspaper. In truth, Nyerere had long delayed the nationalisation of The Standard because his underdeveloped nation lacked trained local journalists and editors to operate major newspapers. One solution for this lack of expertise was to hire African freedom fighters and left-wing visitors posted in Dar es Salaam.
The lack of experts to run the nationalised companies explained Nyerere’s astonishing decision to hire Frene Ginwalla (1932-2023), a Marxist South African Indian woman in her mid-thirties, as managing editor of The Standard. Ginwalla was both a member of the African National Congress and of the South African Communist Party. Her Indian heritage and gender coupled with her bossy self-assurance elicited hatred and jealousy from her employees. Nearly everything about her clashed with the parochialisms of Tanzanian society; where men frowned on women’s rights, Africans resented Asians as tools of colonialism, and TANU members often paid lip service to socialism. Dressed in a sari, Ginwalla ran The Standard with an iron fist, making her employees work round the clock. Turning the newspaper into a socialist platform, she replaced many conservative European editors with left-wing ones. She hired Richard Gott, a British reporter who documented Che Guevara’s visit to Africa in the mid-1960s. Then, she hired Philip Ochieng, a Kenyan radical columnist, who would remember The Standard “as the freest newspaper I had ever worked on.” Every morning, she hosted a two-hour socialist workshop where her staff read and discussed the works of Marx, Lenin, and Frantz Fanon.
With Ginwalla’s leadership, The Standard emerged as a respected socialist and anti-Western newspaper in the eyes of the Tanzanian left. It showed support for Nyerere and TANU that was “by no means servile to the government,” remarked author Martin Sturmer in his work on the Tanzanian media. “Not even Nyerere himself was entirely free of criticism”, he wrote. The Standard could afford to be critical because it had different priorities than The Nationalists, though their coverage overlapped. It projected the TANU’s non-alignment in international affairs, giving the party an air of openness to foreign observers. while The Nationalists served as a nation-building instrument. Whereas Nyerere and TANU encouraged debates in The Standard, they censured them in The Nationalist as they could jeopardise national unity behind the party.
Author photograph from the East Africana Collection at University of Dar es Salaam
In defence of left-wing terrorism and Palestinian liberation
Published on 5 and 6 November 1970, Rodney’s articles in The Standard pioneered a Marxist analysis of left-wing terrorism. He refused to look at kidnapping and hijacking in the Global South as isolated, immoral acts as the Western media did. He examined them as powerful answers to historical injustices. These methods stemmed, as he explained, from regions in which the Western bourgeoisie with their Latin-American and Arab counterparts subjected natural and human resources to crudest exploitation. He defended hijacking and kidnappings as weapons of weakness required in times of revolutionary retreat. They acted as a counterweight to anti-guerrilla warfare tactics and crackdown upheavals, frustrating Western powers.
On kidnappings, he wrote: “When we exchange our currency for money from the developed countries the rate of exchange is always unfavourable because they set the terms. But when comrades in Latin America exchange kidnapped diplomats for prisoners the rate of exchange is good.” Through his creative and witty use of the lexicon of unequal exchange theory, Rodney underlines that kidnappings can briefly overturn the power relations between the Western capitalist and the toilers of the Global South. A few lines beforehand, Rodney informs us that the abduction of the Belgian ambassador in Brazil in September 1969 led to the release of 15 political prisoners. The rate of exchange was thus favourable because the kidnappings saved the best revolutionaries.
Rodney’s comments resonate strongly today. They help us understand the rationale behind the recent actions of the Palestinian liberation movement. Hamas decided to take over two hundred Israeli military personnel and civilians’ hostage during its attack on Israeli soil on 7 October, which killed 1,400 people. Hamas offered to exchange its Israeli captives for the thousands of Palestinians in Israel among whom 160 are children and 530 have been incarcerated without trial. However, the negotiation led to nothing as Israel continued its campaign’s largest ever indiscriminate bombing of the Gaza Strip killing over 9,000 including many thousands of children.
In his second article, Rodney defended the hijackings carried out by the PFLP as “armed propaganda”. He argued hijackings raised the morale of the oppressed and ensured that a particular cause grabbed the international community’s attention. Among other things, his piece contained a praise for the young guerrilla Leila Khaled who led the several hijackings on behalf of the Front. In the manner of a dedicated feminist, Rodney described the 24-year-old “as an example of a woman liberated through struggle.” Rodney understood hijacking as a means for Palestinian guerrillas to reinstate the demand for a one-state solution which was being ignored by the West and opposed by Israel.
Presumably, a two-state solution would only create a weak Palestinian state – dependent on Israeli resources and living under the threat of a more powerful army. The hijackers, as Rodney explained, were not demanding the exclusion of Jewish immigrants. On the contrary, their solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict rested in the creation of one united secular society “based on the principle of socialism and equality”, he wrote.
Rodney was right to follow the PFLP’s opposition to a two-state solution. Thirty years after the Oslo Agreement of 1992 and in light of today’s onslaught on Gaza, it is safe to say that the emergence Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one remains an impossibility. A two-state solution would shy away from challenging the illegal existence of the Israeli settler state, which was based on the ethnic cleansing of 850,000 Palestinians in 1948. It would allow the existence of a racist colonial-settler state whose military would continue to be funded by the United States and Western imperialist interests in the Middle East. It would allow the existence of a heavily armed Israeli state that would act as a permanent threat to Palestinian sovereignty. Aside from his insistence on socialism, Rodney’s stance in favour of a one-state solution matches the words of one of the founders of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS), Omar Barghouti:
“Accepting the colonial settlers as equal citizens and full partners in building and developing a new shared society, free from all colonial subjugation and discrimination, as called for in the democratic state model, is the most magnanimous offer any indigenous population, oppressed for decades, can present to its oppressors”.
Rodney had something to get off the chest. He was annoyed that Tanzanians around him repeated the anti-terrorism propaganda in Western media. Hijackings appeared on the front pages of Newsweek and Time magazine in September 1970. His justifications for left-wing terrorism essentially intended to persuade Tanzanians not to impose conditions on their international solidarity with Palestinians. He wrote: “If we call ourselves ‘revolutionary’ in Tanzania, we cannot be out of sympathy with those who, because their objective condition is different, define their revolution differently.” His words meant that revolutionaries operating in very oppressive conditions had no choice but to use violence.
Last but not least, Rodney was aware of Nyerere and TANU’s support for the UN General Assembly resolution against hijacking in October 1970. He certainly knew Nyerere placed much of his faith in the United Nations, seeing it as a platform for mobilising support for the anti-colonial struggle in southern Africa. But this made TANU capable of sacrificing its commitment to support Palestinian Liberation and other Third World movements to appease Western powers. That’s why Rodney’s article singled out the hypocrisy of the UN alongside Britain and the United States for ignoring the boycott of arms to the Apartheid state in South Africa but finding time to conduct an emergency session on hijacking.
A thorn in Nyerere’s foreign policy
Defending the seemingly indefensible, Rodney had dropped a bombshell that reverberated throughout Tanzania and beyond. In reference to the UN resolution against hijacking by Palestinian activists, the Jamaican governmental paper, Weekly Gleaner, accused Rodney of “embarrassing yet another government” adding to his reputation as a troublemaker since his expulsion from Jamaica in 1968 for his Black Power activism. While Rodney’s controversial article went against Tanzanian foreign policy, it did not trigger a public response from TANU. Even if TANU had planned a response, it would have been eclipsed by what followed the next day. The British High Commissioner to Tanzania, Horace Philips, with the imprudence of a coloniser who forgot he was now among liberated people, wrote a long diatribe against Rodney’s article to the minister of Foreign Affairs..
“I find it disquieting that such an article compounding Dr Rodney’s support yesterday for the kidnapping of diplomats should find a place in the Government newspaper”, Philips wrote. The commissioner then pointed to Rodney’s position as a foreigner intruding in the affairs of the sovereign state. Unbeknownst to him, he was making the same mistake. Philips reminded the Minister that Rodney’s speech Ideology of the African Revolution had been “officially denounced” last year before sharing his expectation for similar repudiation. But Philips was angry at the general left-wing and Pro-Palestinian turn The Standard had taken after becoming a government newspaper. Referring to Rodney’s arguments in defence of Palestinian terrorism, he told the minister: “It is little comfort to know that the editor might dissociate herself from these.”
Unfortunately for Philips, the letter he sent to the Minister was intercepted. Now, in the hands of Tanzanians, it ignited the largest anti-British public outcry in a decade. On 8 November, the letter was ridiculed on the front page of The Sunday News. In a bout of fury, Ginwala answered Philips in her editorial, accusing Philips of “gross interference” in the internal affairs of Tanzania. “His action comes ill from a citizen of a country that has not hesitated to proclaim freedom of the press”, she wrote determined to humiliate the diplomat. Five days later, Ginwala’s editorial was followed by a flurry of letters defending Rodney and criticising Philips and British imperialism. Published under the title “U.K envoy under fire from our readers”, one of four letters read: “On Dr Rodney’s ‘foreignness’ Mr Philips should be the last to utter a word. Dr Rodney is an African whose ancestor was shot out of their homes, kidnapped and carried away with bestial brutality by members of Philip’s race.” A schoolgirl called for Philips’s kidnapping as punishment: “Take him [ Philips], to an ujamaa village, and make him dig for 48 hours nonstop before releasing him”, she wrote.
Rodney’s defence of the methods used by Palestinian freedom fighters had provoked a representative of imperialism in Tanzania and awakened a profound anti-British backlash among the people. It jeopardised the cordial relationship Nyerere’s Tanzania rebuilt with Britain when he broke diplomatic ties with the British over their support for Rhodesia’s illegal declaration of independence in 1965. Through his article in Ginwalla’s Standard in defence of activities of Palestinian Freedom Fighters, Rodney proposed an internationalism that served as a radical alternative to the opportunistic foreign policy persued by the Tanzanian state. Alas, a year after the publication of Rodney’s article, Ginwalla was dismissed by Nyerere and replaced with a Tanzanian loyal to the president. In April 1972,The Standard merged with The Nationalists to create the heavily state-controlled Daily News. Rodney was never published in the governmental newspaper again.
Rodney’s international support for Palestine nevertheless contains a valuable lesson for us: Palestinian resistance against Israeli state terror is justified irrespective of the means that are used. The violence of the oppressed Palestinians fighting against 75 years of colonial occupation cannot be compared to that of the oppressor nation, which is backed by American imperialism. His unwavering dedication to fighting on the side of the oppressed serves as a powerful inspiration for activists engaged in the struggle to Free Palestine today.
Chinedu Chukwudinma is a socialist activist and writer based in London. He writes on African politics, popular struggles, and the history of working-class resistance on the continent. Chinedu is a member of ROAPE’s editorial board, and an editor of roape.net.
Please click here to read the Chukwudinma’s A Rebel’s Guide to Walter Rodney serialised on roape.net. To order Chinedu’s book, A Rebel’s Guide to Walter Rodney from the publisher, Bookmarks, click here.
