History & Culture

Buxton

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St. Augustine’s Anglican Church

HISTORY

St. Augustine’s Anglican Church is situated at Friendship, ECD, though it is often referred to as Buxton Anglican Church.

In 1838, John Gardiner Austin, Esq., proprietor of Friendship and brother of Bishop Austin, gave for the erection of the church, school and vicarage this site of two acres at Friendship. A school was built and was used also as a ‘centre of Sunday School and the holding of services by the Cathecist-schoolmaster’ (Mr. Crawford). By 1841, a small church was erected and named after St. Augustine of Hippo.

It must be noted that St, Augustine’s Church was the only church in the post-slavery society to bear the name of an African saint-Augustine of Hippo, born in Tagaste, Algeria in 354, and who became bishop of Hippo on the same continent after a foremost thinker and writer on church doctrine.

In 1882, this Church was known as St. Augustine’s Chapel and was part of the parish of St. Paul’s which began at Cummings Lodge and ended at Nooten Zuil. Along with the renovation of 1882, Rev. T.J. Moulder was instrumental in raising the funds needed to make secure the St. Augustine’s churchyard. The familiar continuous iron fencing with its seven bars, so arranged as to exclude pigs and goats, was erected in 1884.

Another relic of the late 19th Century, and a magnificent gift, is the iron Alter rail. Two parishioners, Messrs. Moore and Louncke were the artificers. Their hearts were in their work so they produced a fine specimen of iron and brass work. Thanks for this gift were also due to Mr. Wolseley who gave the materials and permitted the work to be carried out in the foundry at Lusignan. The wrought iron pulpit was made by Messrs. Fox and King around this same time (1898-1899).

The Pulpit was designed by the Curate and constructed over a period of 18 months. Both the rails and pulpit are monuments of ‘earnest, self-denying, cheerful labour’, voluntary labour of honest servants of the Church.

Written by Sister Blanche E. Duke for the commemoration of St. Augustine’s Anglican Church 165th Anniversary in 2006.

PRESENT TIMES

St. Augustine’s, in the past, enjoyed the luxury of having its own resident priest. This luxury is no longer available to us since Rev. Father Elias is shared between St. Augustine’s and St. Mary-ye-Virgin at BV. This situation has, in some way, diminished the total involvement of Father Elias in administering some aspects of the traditional church programmes. Nevertheless, spiritual inspiration is imparted resolutely at Sunday Mass and mid-week service on Wednesdays. Over 100 lapsed members were restored from the time of Fr. Elias’ appointment in 1999.

The traditional Patronal Tea & Dance, proceeds from which the church depended on to meet its Diocesan obligation, came to an abrupt end in 2001. Notwithstanding, parishioners were taught and reminded the importance of direct giving to God.

In the interest of the development and welfare of parishioners, the Church, through the Vestry continues to assist necessitous families and children. Visits are also made to the sick and shut-ins. The spirit of caring is extended to senior citizens of the wider community.

June Allen,

Secretary to Vestry (2006)

History & Culture

On 1st August, 1838, slavery was officially abolished in Guyana. But for four years preceding this occurrence, the slaves served a period of apprenticeship through which they earned small amounts of compensation for their labour. From their meagre wages, they resolutely saved some of their earnings, which they later pooled to purchase abandoned plantations.

Following the first such purchase of what is now Victoria Village, in November 1839, by 83 former slaves, 128 of their fellow labourers from plantations between Lusignan and Non Pariel, East Coast Demerara, pooled their resources to acquire the 500-acre Plantation New Orange Nassau from its proprietor, James Archibald Holmes, for $50,000, in April 1840. The newly established village was renamed Buxton in honour of Thomas Fowell Buxton, a British Member of Parliament, who had campaigned tirelessly for the abolition of slavery in the British colonies.

It should be noted that although Victoria was purchased before Buxton, Buxton obtained its transport first-2nd January, 1841.

In 1841, another 168 former slaves came together and purchased Friendship, a 500-acre plantation adjacent east of Buxton for $80,000. They then merged the two communities to form the largest village in the country.

The founding fathers proceeded to lay out housing lots at the front of the village and corresponding farm lands at the back. They worked tirelessly building roads, digging drainage trenches and planting crops. They also created an administrative body, the Buxton-Friendship Village Council to oversee the maintenance of village infrastructure, collect property taxes, and to ensure residents adhered to a strict code of decency and morality by imposing fines on violators who committed such offences as public intoxication, use of profane language, gambling and fighting.

Religious worship and Education were also very important to villagers. Places for the establishment of Christian churches and schools were allocated to the Congregational, Methodist and Roman Catholic Churches. The Anglican Church had already planted roots in the community before it was acquired by the former slaves. According to Eusi Kwayana’s Buxton Friendship in Print & Memory (pp 27), “They made it clear that this was in gratitude for what God had done for them in relieving them from their captivity.” These institutions were later followed by the Seventh Day Adventist Church, the Church of God, The Lutheran Church, Brethren Church, the Jordanites, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, Assemblies of God, Full Gospel Church, and a number of small ‘Faithist’ groups.

Except for a small number of East Indians who reside around the northwestern border of the village, Buxton-Friendship has remained largely a village of African descendants. As a result, it boasts a culture deeply rooted in African and Christian traditions.

To be continued…..

[The Indo-Guyanese Contribution to the Development of]

Buxton-Friendship

By Harry Hergash

Harry Hergash, a graduate of the University of Guyana, taught at the Annandale Government Secondary from 1964 to 1969. He immigrated to Canada in 1974.

In this column I would like to share my recollections of the village of Buxton-Friendship, East Coast Demerara. Historically, after starting out as separate villages that were purchased and built by freed African slaves, they were amalgamated into one around 1841. By the beginning of the nineteen sixties, Buxton-Friendship was possibly the most progressive and prosperous village in Guyana. It was known for its highly educated sons and daughters, civic minded citizens, hard working farmers and fisherman, skilled tradesmen, and prosperous business people, where citizens of African and Indian origins lived together peacefully.

Indians, who started arriving in the village in the 1890s, emulated the Africans in striving for education and social betterment in the country. By the 1950s they were scattered throughout the village with concentrated enclaves in the area along the seashore, referred to as Buxton Front, where there were some of the most renowned sea-fishermen in the country; on both sides of the railway embankment around the railway station where they worked as pawnbrokers and jewellers, and operated clothing and hardware stores; and in the area along Brush dam where they raised cattle and grew rice in adjoining estate lands. Most if not all of them adhered to Indian cultural traditions, and Buxton could boast of having some of the most educated and finest Indian musicians and singers of Chowtaals, Ramayan and Bhajans.

I remember Saturdays and Mondays as prime market days at the municipal market next to the Post Office, just off Company Road, a stone’s throw from the railway station. The interaction and relationships between Africans and Indians were based on mutual respect and trust, befitting two peoples who depended on the fruits of each other’s labour. Indians from the estate areas of Lusignan Pasture and Annandale Sand Reef to the West and Vigilance to the East would bring their produce of garden vegetables (ochro, bora, calaloo, etc.) to sell to the African villagers who would sell them fruits, plantains and ground provisions (cassava, eddoes, sweet potatoes, etc.). Both groups would then patronise the fishermen and the butchers who operated their stalls in a corner of the market where the odour was quite distinct. Before noon, the efficient Mr. Brown would have already completed his rounds and collected from vendors all market fees.

During my childhood in the 1950s, I traversed every street and cross street in the combined village in the company of my grandparents and uncles who sold feed to the many self-employed villagers who farmed the back-lands and raised chicken and pigs in their yards. Every Sunday morning we travelled around the village in a dray cart hauled by three donkeys laden with paddy, broken rice and bhoosi (pulverized rice shells produced during milling) which was sold to customers to be used as chicken and pig feed. By midday, with our task completed after serving the last customer along Friendship Middle Walk, we would stop at the Esso station, the first petrol station to be built on the East Coast of Demerara, where I would get a treat of Brown Betty ice-cream or Fudgsicle while the elders collected the “wet-cell” battery that had been left the week before for recharging.. In those days, radio sets of that period with names such as KB, Grundig, Phillips and Pye, were operated in the rural areas with current from a battery similar to a motor-car’s battery that had to be recharged periodically at a gas station.

Regrettably, the madness of racial discord and intolerance raised its ugly head in the country in 1963 and by 1964 Buxton-Friendship, like other parts of the country, was consumed. As Indians hurriedly relocated from the predominantly African villages to the safety of predominantly Indian areas, Africans did the same in the reverse. Even then, many good people on both sides risked their lives and property to help those on the other side, but it was not enough to stem the mass migration from villages and the formation of segregated communities. This was the beginning of squatting areas or shantytowns in Guyana. Overnight pastures and swamplands were cramped with makeshift houses and places like Lusignan East and West, Haslington, Logwood, etc. came into being.

Sadly, Buxton-Friendship never recovered from this restructuring. With Independence coming shortly thereafter and government jobs becoming readily available, many African villagers deserted the self- sufficiency of independent occupations – carpentry, cabinet making, blacksmith, guttersmith, farming and the raising of livestock, opting instead for the apparent security of salaried occupations. As the village tax base deteriorated, critical infrastructural work on roads, drainage and irrigation was neglected, and by the time the oil crisis and world-wide economic downturn hit us, both citizens and the village as a whole found it difficult to cope which resulted in the serious political repercussions of later years.

Buxton-Friendship’s loss of Indian fishermen and business people was the gain of Annandale and Lusignan. Almost overnight, in the midst of the turmoil and agony of 1964, a market developed in Annandale North’s Centre Street, rechristened “Market Street”. It quickly replaced Buxton’s municipal market as the commercial centre for the surrounding areas, and by 1965, African Buxtonians were also patronizing the vendors in Annandale. Likewise many of the hardware and clothing stores relocated to Annandale. And the fishermen formerly of Buxton Front became the enterprising fishermen of Lusignan East where the fishing industry was taken to new heights as the importation of salted cod and canned fish was banned during the period of economic hardship of the 1980s.

Now more than four decades later, as I reflect on the deaths and destruction of 1964 and the havoc wreaked on the communities of Buxton and Annandale, I cannot help but recall that it was the ordinary citizens, not the external forces that combined to destabilise the country, and certainly not those individual politicians of both major parties in whose names the so many horrendous acts were perpetrated, who were the victims and losers in all the madness and mayhem. It was these ordinary folks who became homeless, and it was their children who became motherless, fatherless or orphans. And when it came to healing and restoring some semblance of peace and harmony, it was community leaders who had to pick up the pieces. It was Eusi Kwayana as the respected leader of Buxton, and Pandit Ramsahai Doobay as the respected leader of Annandale, who met with then British Colonial Secretary, Duncan Sandys, on the Annandale Side-line dam (then referred to as the Maginot line, a term used by the French in the Second World War) to discuss and work out arrangements that played their own part in establishing an uneasy peace in the villages.

I am now an emigrant from the land of my birth. As I follow developments of recent years in the communities of Buxton-Friendship and neighbouring areas, I am saddened that lessons of the past seem to have been forgotten. Ordinary citizens of these communities have once again been the victims and they are the ones who once again have to start rebuilding the good inter-personal relationships and trust, sorely damaged by needless strife and violence. The time has surely come for people to realize that while politicians remain unscathed and continue to enjoy the perquisites of office, it is they the poor folks who will always have to bear the consequences of actions by their “representatives”. It is they who have to live side by side as neighbours and interact with each other. As we look to the future, let us be guided by the actions and teachings of the elders of our communities. Let us remember a time not so very long ago, when an African grandmother would give a special bath of blue water to an Indian child to protect that child from the mythical “old-higue”, and an Indian mother would pay a penny to nominally “buy” an African child so that child could grow up to be healthy and strong. Let us remember our history.

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