Campus row brings out vandals

Marches, fires, thugs on rampage menace capital

THE PRIME minister, the Hon Hugh Shearer, said last night that the Government will neither change nor withdraw the order against Dr Walter Rodney, a University of the West Indies lecturer in African history, who was refused permission to re-enter Jamaica on Tuesday as an undesirable person.

In a statement broadcast over radio and television and issued generally, the prime minister said that there was very substantial justification for the decision of the Government that Rodney – a Guyanese – should not be permitted to reside in Jamaica and indicated that he would make a fuller statement on the issues when the House of Representatives meets this afternoon at Gordon House.

The prime minister’s statement came at the end of a day of continuous demonstrations in the city against the decision.

The demonstrations were begun by undergraduates of the university at Mona, who were later joined by other groups, mainly antisocial in motivation or political orientation according to observers.

Shearer emphasised in his statement that Rodney’s attendance at the black writers’ conference in Canada had nothing whatsoever to do with his exclusion from Jamaica and that, in fact, neither the Government nor Sir Philip Sherlock, the vicechancellor of the university, was aware that Rodney was off the island when the decision was taken to bar his re-entry. He said that the decision was taken as a result of Rodney’s destructive anti-Jamaican activities in Kingston, St Andrew, Clarendon, and St James.