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186 CHAPTER THIRTEEN COLONIES IN SEARCH OF A NATION Guiana is a country that hath her maiden head, never sacked, turned nor wrought. The face of the earth hath not been torn, nor the virtue and salt of the soil spent by manurance , the graves have not been opened for gold, the mines not broken with sledges. —WALTER RALEIGH, The Discovery of Guiana Nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love. The cultural products of nationalism—poetry, prose fiction, music, plastic arts—show this love very clearly in thousands of different forms and styles. —BENEDICT ANDERSON, Imagined Communities HAVING PARTED COMPANY WITH THE New Daily Chronicle rather unceremoniously , Webber returned to the Daily Chronicle, his old home as it were, to continue his literary pursuits. On October 19 the Daily Chronicle announced that its editorial staff would be strengthened “since the Hon. A. R. F. Webber, publicist and journalist, will be associated with the editorial department and contribute to the literary columns of the paper.” In that issue Webber “announced that pending the maturity of the agreement, my literary and journalistic activities will be, in the meantime, freely devoted to the interests of this paper.”1 He would spend the last two years of his life at the Daily Chronicle, the newspaper where he started his journalistic career. Always a man of action, Webber turned his attention to the celebration of the centenary of the union of Guyana’s three former colonies, Berbice, Demerara, and Essequebo, in 1831.2 The celebration was particularly important for the country. Having held together as a country for a century, it was fitting to celebrate that historic union. Webber proposed that the country mark its centenary with a special issue of stamps that “would serve the very useful purpose first of all of marking the great historical event and also of providing mementos for those who desired to keep them.”3 The governor supported the suggestion. “He thought the stamps would be useful not only in bringing revenue but also from the point of view COLONIES IN SEARCH OF A NATION 187 of advertising the colony.”4 Webber threw “all his weight behind the [centenary] movement as a whole.”5 It was a cause in which Webber could invest himself, an expression of an incipient nationalism that he welcomed. In light of his new interest, Webber was made a member of the Colonial Tourist Committee, which the governor empowered to make the necessary arrangements for the centenary celebrations that were scheduled initially for July 19–25, 1931, but were postponed to October 13–17 of that year. On January 15, 1931, Webber shared his thoughts about the celebrations with the press. Conscious of the economic depression that gripped the land, he was aware that some persons might see the celebrations as blasphemous acts “tempting Providence.” Yet he thought that nothing could be gained by “moaning and groaning and bewailing our fate and going about in sackcloth and ashes. Celebrations such as these may in themselves help to cure our industrial evils by bringing the Colony and its resources more to the forefront.”6 Like Keynes, he understood that “what was really necessary for prosperity was not public works projects and government budget deficits [alone], but hope and optimism on the part of capitalists [and the people].”7 At that juncture of their history, it was important to promote the psychology of hope. Webber was enthusiastic about the psychological uplift such an event would generate. As a student of Guyanese history, he was aware of the perilous journey that these three colonies had undertaken and the tenacity it took to keep them together. He could not have been unaware of the conclusion, drawn by the British Foreign Office, that there was “no other territory in the world where the settled inhabitants contained a greater variety of races divided from one another by history, tradition, and colour, all living side by side on terms of friendly co-operation, and without any of the bitterness or strife arising from class or caste distinctions.”8 To create a nation, the society had to tap into its inner domain (history, culture, religion , and so forth), which was outside the colonizer’s control. Webber recognized that the anticolonist struggle consisted in an endeavor to recover and to create a culture and selfhood that had been eroded systematically during colonialism and that “nations, like other communities, are not transhistorical in their contours or appeal, but are continually being re-imagined...

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