Maverick: Extraordinary Women from South Africa's Past, by Lauren Beukes

Maverick: Extraordinary Women from South Africa's Past, by Lauren Beukes. Struik Publishers Oshun Books. Cape Town, South Africa 2005. ISBN 9781770070509 / ISBN 978-1-77007-050-9

In Maverick: Extraordinary Women from South Africa's Past, Lauren Beukes introduces us to some of the most spectacular, often rather eccentric, women of the last 350 years of South African history. Not even the worst chauvinist will be able to put this book down unread.

Lauren Beukes  

The Fabulist: Helen Martins

Bethesda is the very archetype of a dreamily rustic Karoo dorpie, the kind of place city dwellers would rush to buy holiday homes if it weren't so damn far away. Set in an unusually verdant valley amidst the dusty scrublands of the Eastern Cape, the town comes complete with a white-washed church, dirt roads still traversed by the occasional donkey carts and unadorned Victorian homesteads that are big on overhanging stoeps. But as pretty as it is in that stark Karoo way, Nieu Bethesda never really had much going for it until a tiny wizened bird of an old lady with no baby toes turned her house into a hazardous palace of luminous colour and broken glass. Helen Martins, or Miss Helen as she was known, was considered positively potty in her lifetime. While there may have been truth to the rumours at the end (when she became ever more reclusive and paranoid, fluttering around nude between the statuary) at the time she first conceptualised the Owl House with its bespangled interiors and menagerie of fantastical beasts, her mind was as sharp as the twinkling shards that coated her walls. When she died a gruesome death in 1976, some of the residents wanted to have the place razed to the ground. Instead, her private paradise has become a National Monument. The properly that once attracted sneers from two-faced neighbours (inspiring the double-headed owls mounted on the gates), now draws frantically clicking cliques of tourists and academics armed with art theory and guides to symbolism. A hoard of mystifying things awaits the hordes who come to admire and analyse. Almost every surface (including much of the furniture) is coated with a menacing glitter of glass. Kitsch trinkets, gewgaws and lanterns are arranged on every horizontal plane, lining shelves and recessed alcoves or dangling off the outstretched arms of sculpted ladies holding candles. Giant gaudy grinning suns beam down from ceilings and windows. Mirrors cut in hearts and stars, moons and suns, and the silhouettes of enlarged hand-mirrors, open up unexpected perspectives on a slice of bright-striped ceiling, or glimpse of limber-grey figures in the Camel Yard outside, or endlessly refracting other reflections. All art tells a story about its creator, even if some of the pages are missing, but Helen's work is complicated in that she had co-conspirators. She was always the visionary, but her fantasies were given concrete form over the 30 plus years of evolution by a series of untrained craftsmen: Jonas Adams, Piet van der Merwe and the finest of all, Koos Malgas, who worked with her for 12 years. In the end though, the place is the fable of her life and Helen claimed it and proclaimed it in wire words twisted on the fence, 'This is my world.' As you'd expect, there are owls aplenty among the 520 sculptures crowded ramshackle in the Camel Yard, with eyes made from broken glass or concave hollows, perched serenely on the ground or with wings flared, but there are also Mona Lisas and mermaids, and sphinxes and beckoning bottle-skirted meisies. [...]

This is an excerpt from the book: Maverick: Extraordinary Women from South Africa's Past, by Lauren Beukes.

Title: Maverick: Extraordinary Women from South Africa's Past
Author: Lauren Beukes
Publisher: Struik Publishers
Imprint: Oshun Books
Cape Town, South Africa 2005
ISBN 9781770070509 / ISBN 978-1-77007-050-9
Softcover, 15 x 23 cm, 256 pages