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One of South Africa's favourite dorps, Nieu Bethesda, is in a state of flux - but, as Peter Frost discovered, the more it changes, the more it stays the same.
Since the death last year of Egbert, Nieu Bethesda's idiosyncratic, irascible unofficial mayor who spurned such niceties as surnames, things haven't been quite the same in the tiny Eastern Cape village. But like so much of what makes it unique, putting your finger on how it's different is difficult.
Certainly that which made it famous is still there. The Owl House and Helen Martins's otherworldly, faintly macabre Camel Yard continues to attract thousands of visitors a year. Outsider Art has become big global business and her concrete owls, quasireligious nativity scenes wrought in concrete, as well as her glass-encrusted house, are as compelling today as they ever were.
In 2007, 31 years after her suicide by taking caustic soda, the battle for the soul of Miss Helen's creations goes on. Renovations to the property continue, with more adjoining cottages being taken over by well-meaning foundations talking community, laden down with the complexities of politically sensitive management.
Much else has changed too. Mark Wilby has closed the Ibis Gallery, Egbert's last coffee shop next to it has shut and the Brigadier is very ill, which means his gruff presence at the trading store is rare (which might be a relief to some who've incurred his displeasure over the years). On Martin Street, two removal vans filled their innards with the paraphernalia of rural family life, heading no doubt for a place where roads are tarred, petrol stations exist, vegetables are more than a weekly occurrence and street lights are sodium filled, not Sirius and the Galactic Halo. Rural life on the inside isn't always as idyllic as it looks.
But maybe it is still the same. Villages such as Nieu Bethesda are always in flux. It's the way they stay the same, to paraphrase Bernard Shaw. As Egbert's coffee and Christine Dixie's arresting art fade into memory, so Andrè Cilliers's goats' milk cheese and homebrewed beer at The Brewery take over. And there's even a hairdresser's salon now. It's a while since the traditionally hirsute locals had the benefit of their own professionally trained locks-smith. Michelle Cilliers has taken over a room in the Craft Art Gallery in New Street and does a brisk trade in gossip and split-end remedies as she snips.
So you get the picture - by the time your wagon rides into town, the Bethesda bebop will have been danced once again and everything and nothing will have changed. Is that a problem? Not really. If you want to find something or someone, the easy solution is simply to ask. Anybody. For anything. Nieu Bethesda is so small (between 50 and 100 white residents and fewer than 1 000 Coloured folk) that one five-minute conversation with a local will glean all the information you need on accommodation, art, restaurants, crafts, who's sleeping with who (if you must know), the latest engineering blunder (bridges, sewerage) and the update on the to-tar-ornot- to-tar debate (still no consensus after six years). And they're happy to chat.
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