All is not well in the Owl House
Have you heard of the OWL HOUSE? The amazing artistic property that that “crazy old white artist and her coloured groundsman (SIES!) ” built and decorated by hand? The OWL HOUSE is an incredible artistic feat built by Helen Martins – it’s a must-see tourist puller in the town of Nieu Bethesda – not too far from Grahamstown if you’re wondering where Nieu Bethesda is.
This arti…
cle from the UK Guardian by journalist Rory Carroll tells us that not all is well in the artists haven of NIeu Bethesda…sound familiar?
11 years on, battles of apartheid still rage
For the white South Africans who trickled to this valley idyll in the Karoo desert, an oasis of willow trees and picket fences, the village of Nieu Bethesda promised a good life. Potters, painters and writers snapped up handsome century-old houses and made the village an artists’ retreat, a tiny community free from crime and pollution, with a night skyscape of gleaming stars.
The Owl House of the late Helen Martins, an avant garde artist who filled her home with mosaics and sculptures, became a national heritage site. The playwright Athol Fugard immortalised her in a celebrated play, The Road to Mecca.
With a population of just 70, Nieu Bethesda seemed to embody the imagination and creativity of a South Africa reborn after apartheid. But now another South Africa, one of poverty and inequality, has crashed into it, exposing segregation, racial tension and government neglect.
Black families from Pienaarsig, a nearby township of 1,000 people, are abandoning their overcrowded settlement and moving down the valley in donkey carts to build a new township beside the village. The self-styled “invaders” are erecting tin shacks on the municipal land that fringes Nieu Bethesda. Six families have moved in recent weeks and dozens more are expected.
“We are fed up being poked around. We need space to live,” said Isaac Kasper, 63, as he lined the floor and walls of his new home with cardboard.
The migration has shattered the illusion of tolerance. At ill-tempered public meetings the prospect of hundreds of shack dwellers on the doorstep of a nearly all-white village has been rejected as an eyesore that will bring social problems. Some white residents want the site turned into a conservation area for flora and fauna, citing the “possibility that the [endangered] riverine rabbit has been sighted in this area”. They say medicinal plants such as Sutherlandia, which can be used to treat HIV-related illnesses, flourish locally.
The black community has responded angrily, claiming conservation is a pretext to perpetuate segregation and turn a blind eye to inequality. The dispute, touching nerves still raw 11 years after apartheid officially ended, is mirrored across South Africa where millions lack access to proper housing, water and other basic services.
Townships outside Johannesburg, Cape Town and other cities sprawl ever closer to well-heeled suburbs. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has warned of a backlash from those enduring dehumanising poverty. “We are sitting on a powder keg,” he said.
Stirred by a spate of riots across the country over a lack of basic services, the ruling African National Congress has promised to do better. “Everything that government does will stand or fall, succeed or fail, depending on what happens at local government level,” President Thabo Mbeki said earlier this month.
Nieu Bethesda is a microcosm of South Africa, said Alf James, 49, one of the few white residents to welcome the settlers. “That is why it’s so important it works here, that whites and blacks accept each other as members of the same community.”
There have not been riots in the village but some whites felt menaced when hundreds of township dwellers marched to demand housing and to proclaim their intention to occupy a 350-hectare (875-acre) site of municipal scrubland called Koeikamp.
The contrast between village and township, the result of apartheid-era planning, is vast. The former, shaded by poplars, willows and oaks, hosts families on plots of about 1,000 square metres. They have a sports club, swimming pools, gardens and flushing toilets.
In the barren, sunbaked township, less than a mile up the hill, a similar size plot hosts seven low-cost bungalows, some with three or four families each. Long-drop toilets in outhouses smell, and attract flies.
According to Dorah Oliphant, 53, a creche supervisor, seven out of 10 households have cases of tuberculosis, the result of overcrowding and HIV. The primary school barely functions, jobs are scarce and alcoholism is rampant – the staple drink is a harvest wine that costs 22p a litre. “People drink to forget,” said Ms Oliphant.
During apartheid the whites who inhabited this backwater in the Sneeuberg mountains north of Port Elizabeth tended to be conservative Afrikaner farmers. As their number dwindled they were replaced by city-born middle-class whites, many of them English speakers with artistic backgrounds.
They hired gardeners and maids from the township but there was virtually no integration. Whites worshipped at their own church, were buried in their own graveyard and socialised in their own pubs. Only three white children attended the township creche despite a consensus that it was well run.
“Supposedly liberal and sophisticated individuals arrived and attempted to uphold antiquated ideals with attitudes of intolerance,” said Mandy Smith, 29, a disillusioned white resident.
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FOR MORE ON NIEU BETHESDA and THE OWL HOUSE CLICK HERE
PICTURE COURTESY OF OWL HOUSE.CO.ZA and are copyrighted to Arnold Erasmus or Tracy Gander
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