THE ARTS FORUM

Jun 14, 2009 Features / Columnists, The Arts Forum

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THE ARTS FORUM is devoted to the nurturing of an emerging awareness of the history, literatures, arts and culture of Guyana, the Caribbean and their peoples, wherever they may be dispersed.As a platform THE ARTS FORUM accommodates multiple voices and perspectives that illuminate and interpret our material, aesthetic and spiritual heritage and our condition of survival and existence from then to now.

BOOK REVIEW
By Justice Donald Trotman

Caribbean Visionary: A.R.F. Webber
and the Making of the Guyanese Nation
by Professor Selwyn R. Cudjoe

Who is A.R.F Webber? Or who was he? Is he the same man who wrote something called Centenary History and Handbook of British Guiana which most of us have not read?
I venture to suggest that most living Guyanese have not heard or read about Webber; and that those who have, but lived after him, would have forgotten about him long before their own demise.
It is, therefore, with much gratitude that we welcome this publication authored by Professor Selwyn Cudjoe, who seeks to refresh our memory and to further our education, and of those who now have come to know of Webber; and to return him to the Guyanese society which he helped to develop and to which he so deservingly belongs.

Indeed, if I were fortunate enough to be, or to have been, a student of Professor Cudjoe, I would have dared prompting him to name or to subtitle this book, “The Resurrection of A.R.F. Webber”.
To the arrogant and self-opinionated politicians of today, the life and work of Webber must serve to instruct them that they are not doing it all for the first time – or for that matter, for all time. The efforts and achievements of Webber and some of his contemporaries and successors, must remind our present lot that others before them have laid much of the foundation on which Guyana has been built.

In this respect, it has to be recognized, as the author recognises in his work, that men like Patrick Dargan, Nelson Cannon, Alfred Crane, Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham cannot be relegated to the forgotten past. If History teaches us anything at all, it instructs us in the knowledge that nation building is achieved not by politicians and political parties alone, but by the sustained cooperative efforts of the people who support them, and that the motions of the present are powerless without the energies of the past.
This book faithfully portrays Webber’s mettle and character – a champion of people’s rights, a fearless advocate and crusader for the human rights and fundamental freedoms of expression and of the Press; a committed activist in the promotion of racial unity and harmony among diverse peoples, whose cultures and religions were transplanted with them from many foreign lands.

It is, of course, significant to notice that Webber himself was not born in Guyana, or British Guiana as it was then called. He had arrived here from his native island of Tobago, forged links with his relatives who were here before him, and soon established himself in the local society with such confidence and prominence that you would not have thought that he was a born foreigner.
In the areas of social, political and constitutional advancement and the improvement of labour conditions of the working class, Webber urged the two major races he found in his adopted home, Africans and East Indians, to ‘unite in common struggle”. His very personality drew others who might not have ordinarily agreed with his methods, to support his views and the causes he espoused both in Guyana and in the wider Caribbean.

Webber, champion and crusader, Quixotic tilter at windmills in some respects, knew only too well that he could not fight the battles alone; and while he might have won many of his fights in single style, he was sensibly aware of the need to enlist allies to the causes he espoused.
Accordingly, we see him taking full advantage of recruiting eminent persons from the class of which he most naturally belonged — the coloured middle class of his day – in his fight with the British colonial masters, with the white plantocracy and the big business companies – “the European Hegemony”, as Cudjoe calls them.

In this latter respect, he moved out of his class to seek support from, and to lend support to, persons who did not enjoy his own social and intellectual attributes, associating himself with them and identifying, as Cudjoe puts it “with their aspirations”.
This grounding with the brothers, to adopt a Walter Rodney expression, allowed him to affirm in public at a meeting establishing a Berbice Branch of the BGTU:
Gone are the days when our fellow creatures will accept with a calm stoicism
the severest buffets of an unkind fortune without murmuring. Thanks to this
union, the hitherto “disorderly rabble”, the prey of the plans of well-ordered
and mischievous minds, has now been converted into the semblance at least of
orderliness, and however feeble, their voices can now be heard.
This bringing the weak and helpless to realise that in unity there is strength; that victories could be won when divided elements come together to fight a common enemy or to pursue a common cause; that organised labour and collective protest of the people against oppression could overcome adversity and build a just society.

As the author makes us understand, Webber was the only social and political fighter in his time who cleverly combined mobilisation of the masses with effective projection of ideas in order to achieve required reform and remedy existing grievances. For the former he used the vehicle of the trade union. For the latter he used the Press, the newspaper, putting into practice the old adage that the pen is mightier than the sword.
This two-pronged attack against the entrenched establishment forces ushered in a new strategy in the struggle to gain and exercise two important and fundamental freedoms in a democratic society – freedom of expression and freedom of Press.

When, therefore, Webber invoked the aid of the latter weapon by writing a stinging editorial in the New Daily Chronicle on December 19, 1926, criticising a Court decision by a Justice Berkeley of the British Guiana Supreme Court which disqualified several members elected to the legislature, he was cited and convicted for contempt of Court and sentenced to pay a substantial fine or face imprisonment.
This defeat in the British Guiana judicial system gave impetus to the movement for freedom of the Press in other parts of the Caribbean that would draw in one of Webber’s ablest allies in the fight – Andre Paul Ambard of the Port of Spain Gazette, in the author’s home State of Trinidad and Tobago.

Some five years later, Ambard struck a more successful blow for the cause of his comrade-in-arms, when he, too, having been convicted by the same colonial forces using the colonial judicial system, won his fight on appeal in Her Majesty’s Privy Council in London, in the famous case of Ambard v. Attorney General for Trinidad and Tobago (1936), in which it was held that Judges have no general immunity from criticism of their judicial conduct, provided such criticism is made in good faith. “Justice” observed Lord Atkins, reading the leading judgment of the Privy Council, “is not a cloistered virtue, she must be allowed to suffer the scrutiny and respectful, though outspoken comments of ordinary men”.
Professor Cudjoe writes with a fervour fuelled by the burning spirit of his subject – Alfred Forbes Raymond Webber and, at times, with Webber’s poetic passion. We see this vividly in the penultimate chapter of the book – “Going Down with His Colors Flying” where he cites Webber’s echoes of Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar”:

No sunset and evening star for me
Nor twilight and vesper bell
Let me fall on the raging battlefield
With banners gaily flying.
Here was a man who had rubbed shoulders with the brightest and best of his time – with Manley and Bustamante of Jamaica; with Grantley Adams of Barbados; Marryshow of Grenada; Cipriani of Trinidad and Tobago; and with Nelson Cannon; Alfred Crane; Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow; Patrick Dargan and John Lucie Griffith of Guyana.
When next Professor Cudjoe visits the grave of this great man in the almost impenetrable jungle of the Le Repentir, he may yet, this time around, find the missing headstone engraved – “Albert Raymond Forbes Webber, whose life exemplified defiance without fear and who contemplated Death with courage, humility and dignity”.

Book Launch,
National Gallery of Art, Castellani Gallery, Georgetown, 20th May, 2009

Justice Donald Trotman is a legal luminary, President of the UN Association in Guyana, a Human Rights and Reconciliation advocate at regional and international levels, and has a more than keen interest in the history and literatures of Guyana and the Caribbean.

The Arts Forum may be reached on E-mail: [email protected] or Telephone: 592-227-6825 or Facsimile: 592-225-0712

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