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3 INTRODUCTION Every acre at present in cultivation has been the scene of a struggle with the sea in front and the flood behind. As a result of this arduous labour during two centuries, a narrow strip of land along the coast has been rescued from the mangrove swamp and kept under cultivation by an elaborate system of dams and dykes. —JAMES RODWAY, History of British Guiana Each historical narrative renews a claim to truth. —MICHEL-ROLPH TROUILLOT, Silencing the Past ON THURSDAY, JUNE 30, 1932, the New Daily Chronicle shocked the consciousness of Guyanese people when it reported the sudden death of Albert Raymond Forbes Webber, one the country’s most brilliant statesmen. For a person who seemed to be in the best of health and relatively young (he was fifty-two years old at the time), and who enjoyed tremendous popularity among the people, his death came as a great shock to the community and represented the passing of an important symbol of his people’s resistance to colonial domination. A day later, in an apparent reference to the bravery and loyalty of Sir John Moore, the distinguished British soldier, to his nation, a poet who signed his name as Z called upon his fellow Guyanese to remember “the good points of his [Webber’s] life” and “the fame fight he made” on behalf of his people.1 Even as they were devastated by the New Daily Chronicle’s announcement, Webber’s death marked the end of one of the Caribbean’s most distinguished politicians, scholar, activists, and man of letters. Seventy-seven years after Webber’s death, a virtual silence envelops his name. His story needs to be told. Webber was born on New Year’s Day, 1880, in Scarborough, Tobago, and christened in the Wesleyan-Methodist Church by Rev. A. H. Aguilar on February 1, 1880.2 In 1899, after receiving the rudiments of an education, Webber immigrated to Guyana to join his father, James Frances Webber, and uncles, S. E. R. (Ernest) and Percival Forbes, partners in Crosby and Forbes, one of the largest traders in INTRODUCTION 4 the goldfields of Bartica.3 A prominent member of the colored middle class of Guyana, Ernest Forbes was held in such high esteem that he was asked to submit his views on the development of Bartica to the West India Royal Commission when its members visited Guyana to inquire into the sugar industry in 1897.4 One year after he arrived in Guyana, Webber married Beatrice Elizabeth Glassford, and from their marriage came two children: Ivy Emma Forbes Webber (1901– ) and Edith May Forbes Webber (1902–88). Ivy married Colin Whitehead; they had two children, Derek and Barbara. Edith married A. C. Dummett, with whom Anne and Jennifer were conceived. From 1903 and 1906, as he tried to settle down in his new environment, he sent his daughters to live with his aunts in Tobago. During this period, Webber’s brother, George, and his uncle-in-law, Edward Percival Ross, were overseers on the Davson plantation.5 Although Louis Ross, Webber’s first cousin, was not willing to confirm it, he hinted that Webber may have acted as an overseer on one of Davson’s sugar estate for a short period of time. If this is true, it would explain Webber’s intimate knowledge of East Indian life on the sugar estates, which he chronicled in Those That Be in Bondage (1917), and his dedication of the novel to the memory of T. Gordon Davson, an accomplished musical composer and a member of the Davsons, a prominent English family that settled in Guyana. By 1906 Crosby and Forbes had fallen on hard times. The gold bars it shipped to London were stolen and replaced by lead, and that led to the company’s ruin. In 1906 Webber became the secretary of British Guiana (Purini) Gold Concession. In 1907 he branched out into Water Street, Georgetown, the business center of Guyana, and became a clerk at J. J. Chapman, a post that he held for a short while. In 1908 he left J. J. Chapman and became the secretary to Peter’s Mine, an American-run gold-producing company that specialized in quartz mining but which ended its gold-mining operations when the boom in the balata and rubber industries led to the “ever-increasing cost of wood fuel” and, as a consequence, “a wane in the corporate activities in the gold industry.”6 In 1909 he joined...

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