Nieu Bethesda – part 3!
After all the excitement with the Owl House, we took a look around in hopes of locating some beer. The main intersection boasted a pub and trading post that were both closed. We heard of a great brewery and cheesery (?) but when we tried to go, that was closed too. There’s a café in the post office, but that was closed too. There was another small café across the street, but it didn’t serve alcohol. Finally we located a pub, which was a small, whitewashed one-room building with a fireplace, a bar, and a small fridge. Spirits were clustered on the edge of the bar, along with various kinds of dried jerky. Beer sat in boxes piled up behind the bar. We ordered our beer and ended up with a quart each, and settled down to watch the rugby before dinner.
Woohoo!
It ended up being a real cultural experience, and we got involved in a disturbing if not eye opening conversation. At first the men chatted about rugby in Afrikaans, and I stared into space, catching only a few words that sounded enough like Dutch, or the few that were dropped in English. A younger friend of the bar man came in, and started to involve us in the conversation by dropping into English. Rugby commentary turned to a grilling on the debt-ceiling situation when they found we were from the States. Then taxes in South Africa. How hardworking people have to pay an arm and a leg so “they” can sit back and collect. There are only 46 white people, he tells us, and a few thousand blacks and coloreds (colored = a term for people of mixed racial background in South Africa) in Nieu Bethesda, according to the census six or seven years ago. Then how “they” stole two of the men’s sheep, and when he finds out who took them, “they” will be sorry. The other man cautioned him, “You’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to be careful,” he repeats, hinting at how you can’t get away with those things these days. The subtext was clear. Even a tiny town like Nieu Bethesda has its own township, a mix of tiny one room brick houses and shanties, where the poor black people live clustered together a “reasonable” distance away. Even this beautiful little village nestled between the mountains of the Karoo, there was hatred, fear, divides. It goes deeper than I can imagine as a foreigner, as someone who has only been here a few days. Luckily it was seven, and our lamb dinner was ready, so we snuck away.
