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In this episode Dr. Jesse Benjamin returns to the podcast.

Like our previous conversation with Jesse we’re connecting to talk about a recently released book by Walter Rodney, in this case it’s Decolonial Marxism: Essays From The Pan-African Revolution, which is a previously unpublished collection of Rodney’s essays on race, colonialism and Marxism. Jesse Benjamin is a scholar, activist, publisher, and board member for the Walter Rodney Foundation, and he is the co-editor of Decolonial Marxism.

We talk about how Decolonial Marxism showcases Rodney’s range as a theorist and a thinker, as an educator, and as an activist. This collection of essays across a range of topics really provides practical examples of what we think Rodney meant by the term “guerilla intellectual.” It also gives us a glimpse of how Rodney assessed some of the movements and key theorists and leaders of his lifetime, particularly with respect to anticolonial nationalists and socialists on the African continent. Jesse Benjamin offers insights into how he reads Rodney’s work in these pieces with respect to pedagogy and epistemology. We also talk about the title Decolonial Marxism and how Rodney takes up the questions of the relevance of Marxism to African peoples and other peoples of the so-called Third World. Jesse also talks about the significance of many of Rodney’s interventions in a range of areas and approaches that are really groundbreaking or, at the very least, would’ve been quite cutting edge during Rodney’s lifetime. And all of us marvel at how relevant and insightful Rodney’s contributions remain decades after his assassination.

We strongly recommend the book for anyone who appreciates Walter Rodney’s work and if you’re not familiar with Rodney’s work it’s really essential stuff and we highly recommend it. Verso Books has published this text and they also have editions of 3 other Rodney books all of which are authorized by the Walter Rodney Foundation and Rodney’s family. And everything is 40% off over there at Verso for the rest of September.

Make sure you get connected with the Walter Rodney Foundation every year they host a Walter Rodney Symposium which is an amazing event.

And if you like what we do here we hope you will consider joining up with all of our wonderful patrons in supporting the show. We currently have a drive to add 25 new patrons this month. We only need 10 more to hit our goal for this month, so head on over to patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism and become a patron if you can spare $1 a month or more. Also while you’re there we currently have a poll to determine our next study group book, so make sure you vote on that and be on the look out for updates because we will be reconvening our study group in October.

Our previous conversations that deal most directly with Walter Rodney's work and life (from most recent to oldest):

“Almost As If Their Spirits Are Still There” - David Austin on The 1968 Congress of Black Writers

"Our Enemies Know the Power of Books" - Louis Allday and Liberated Texts

"The Wealth of Europe is the (Stolen) Wealth of Africa" with Devyn Springer

Walter Rodney's Russian Revolution - A View From The Third World with Dr Jesse Benjamin

Devyn Springer Discusses Walter Rodney

In this episode we interview Marika Sherwood. As she mentions in the episode, Sherwood was born into a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary in 1937. After World War 2, the surviving members of her family emigrated with her to Australia, she was briefly employed in New Guinea, and eventually emigrated to England, finding employment as a teacher in London. She will discuss on the episode how she became dedicated to researching and publishing Black history. Along with Hakim Adi and others, Sherwood is one of the founders of the Black and Asian Studies Association in the UK.

For us, this conversation was primarily spurred by our reading of her book Kwame Nkrumah and the Dawn of the Cold War, The West African National Secretariat 1945-1948.

In this conversation Sherwood touches on some of the methods used by British government and the British press to suppress the organizing Kwame Nkrumah - along with others like George Padmore - was engaged in, during this crucial post-war period.

She also talks about areas where she sees a need for further research on anticolonial movements and counterintelligence operations against them. Sherwood also stresses the need for the UK to release more documentation on its own counterintelligence operations against Nkrumah, Padmore and others.

We encourage people to check out Sherwood’s other work as well. To give you an idea, she sent us a list of her publications and it was 8 pages long, including over 20 books. In addition to Kwame Nkrumah, her books include work on Pan-Africanism, Claudia Jones, and Malcolm X.

In many ways this is a conversation about dedication, for Sherwood we get some understanding of why she has dedicated so much of her life to studying African movements and Black History. It also hopefully give us some sense of the dedication that Kwame Nkrumah had to all the peoples of Africa. And it also highlights the dedication of British Empire to undermining the conditions for true self-determination on the African continent and their dedication to deliberately hiding that legacy out of public record. 

We hope you enjoy this episode. This is our fifth episode of August, we already have a bunch of really exciting conversations slated to come out in September and October as well. If you’d like to become a patron of the show, you can become one for as little as $1 a month. It is with the generous support of our listeners that we can continue to bring you these conversations every week.