Walter Rodney, born in Guyana on 22nd of march in 1942, Pan-African, Marxist intellectual who was assassinated by the Guyanese government in 1980 at 38 years old.
Rodney attended the University College of the West Indies in 1960 and was awarded a first class honors degree in History in 1963. He later earned a PhD in African History in 1966 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England, at the age of 24.
Rodney traveled extensively and became well-known as an activist, scholar, and formidable orator. He taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania from 1966-67 and 1969-1974, and in 1968 at his alma mater University of the West Indies.
On October 15th, 1968, the government of Jamaica declared Rodney a “persona non grata” and banned him from the country. Following his dismissal by the University of the West Indies, students and poor people in West Kingston protested, leading to the “Rodney Riots”, which caused six deaths and millions of dollars in damages.
In 1972, Rodney published “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”. Historian Melissa Turner describes the work this way: “A brutal critique of long-standing and persistent exploitation of Africa by Western powers, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a powerful, popular, and controversial work in which Rodney argued that the early period of African contact with Europe, including the slave trade, sowed the seeds for continued African economic underdevelopment and had dramatically negative social and political consequences as well. He argued that, while the roots of Africa’s ailments rested with intentional underdevelopment and exploitation under European capitalist and colonial systems, the only way for true liberation to take place was for Africans to become cognizant of their own complicity in this exploitation and to take back the power they gave up to the exploiters.”
On June 13th, 1980, Rodney was killed in Georgetown, Guyana via a bomb given to him by Gregory Smith, a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force, one month after returning Zimbabwe. In 2015, a “Commission of Inquiry” in Guyana that the country’s then president, Linden Forbes Burnham, was complicit in his murder.
“If there is to be any proving of our humanity it must be through revolutionary means.”
Walter Rodney
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Decolonial Marxism Essays From The Pan African Revolution
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Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):
Aid:
Theory:
Thinking about how in Star Wars and virtually every sci-fi setting I can think of, planets are never more than just “one place” each. One city, one forest, one town, one military base. But most importantly, one biome. Planets are really, really large and the only inhabitable planet we know of has many different biomes! If we’re talking about scale alone, you could reasonably have every event that happens in Star Wars take place in different spots on the same planet. Hell, they could all take place on Earth.
There was an okay sci fi book series I read when I was younger, “Alacrity Fitzhugh and Hobart Floyt”.
One thing I liked is there was a libertarian AF planet called Fool’s Gold/Blackguard. It has two colonies on opposite sides of the planet in different continents with different climates. Neither knows much about the other and calls the planet their name.
Fool’s Gold was a safari park where space elites hunt people. Blackguard was a city of paranoid fortified homesteading fortress with no laws.
The two genders of libertarian
I think that checks out though. Here on earth culture has been homogonized with the advent of travel and communications. I would expect a planet with globe spanning mass transit and communications to develop into a broadly homogeneous culture. Especially if you think of most planets being projects instead of natural developments.
It’s interesting that this has spread to a lot of games, too. Astroneer has a bit of diversity with different biomes in each planet, but they’re still basically a collage of 2 slightly different kinds of terrain. Dyson Sphere Program has only 1 biome per planet.
I’ve yet to play Outer Wilds or No Man’s Sky, not sure if those are any different.
NMS is a classic case of: sand planet, swamp planet, Green planet, etc. It’s super boring after a little while
KSP has different biomes on each planet and moon but the meaningful difference between biomes is less without any biological life to really differentiate stuff. Geological zones definitely would be different, like one ocean of Explodium (that’s what they’re apparently constituted of) vs a different one is gonna be at least a little different. The Mun like our Moon has some dark zones, some light zones, a bunch of fun craters. Duna like Mars has ice caps. Otherwise it’s all a bunch of dust and wind and void or atmosphere.
Yeah when I was typing my comment I realized KSP was a counterexample, but I’m not entirely sure what the vision of KSP with full planetary exploration would be like if it was fully realized. I think DSP captures its vibe despite the completely different genre, and it suffers from the lack of diversity in each planet, so I just kinda imagine if they made KSP2 for real they’d probably flatten it over in terms of how many meaningfully different alien environments there are per planet. If you have an idea for a different kind of environment it just makes more sense to make it its own planet than to add it to existing planets.
KSP2 is dead, the new hope is KSA now
There’s also the thing @PorkrollPosadist@hexbear.net has been working on for a couple years now IIRC. It’s pretty interesting.
One of my favorite parts of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy is the loving descriptions of the Martian landscape