As one of South Africa’s major outsider artists faces the loss of his unique Clarens homestead, Matthew Krouse and Alex Dodd journey to the source of a town’s painful conflict
A Kafkaesque man in a black suit and tie flees across a surreal red landscape populated by creatures that could come from land or sea, blue trees and old women, young women, bird-women. This is the scene depicted in an oil painting on the wall of an old white-washed school house in the small eastern Free State town of Clarens.
It is also, eerily, an almost psychic reflection on real life events that are happening in the life of renegade artist Martin Wessels who this week faces eviction from his beloved Clarens homestead, Holkrans, due to his failure to meet his rate payments.
Last week we received a call from Melinda Bekker, manager of cultural affairs at the Basotho Cultural Village where Wessels works. Her call was a plea to do something to prevent a man she described as being in the order of a Helen Martins from losing everything he’s devoted his life to in the past two decades. He lives in a cave, she tells us, and he’s about to lose it.
Sunday morning. After a three-hour journey and four mustard steaks beneath a stuffed zebra head we are directed by the eager-to-please proprietors of Clarens’ Buffalo Inn to the home of the artist/musician who, we’re told, had, just nights before, sat here drinking and laughing into the wee hours.
“He looks like a bit of a tramp,” they tell us decribing the Clarens caveman. Even the fresh blonde waiter smiles sheepishly in recognition of the myth behind the name Martin Wessels.
Calling her humble gardener, the Buffalo Inn owner instructs him to, “Vat hulle Holkrans toe.” Minutes later we are bundled into the company car, whizzing up a dusty, steep incline, to the top of the sleepy town. Here, below a sheer sandstone cliff, we come upon the jagged rooftops of the mud dwellings that are causing such a stir.
Legal representatives of the Clarens town council claim that two months ago Wessels’ tax arrears stood in excess of R70 000, a sum he is unable to pay. Hence the impending auction, scheduled for midday on Friday, August 7.
It’s an eery feeling, as we traipse through the obligatory Free State fence, coming face to face with the cherubic smile of Naomi, Wessels’s 21- year-old daughter. To our horror, Wessels is not at home. With no electricity and no telephone he’s a tough man to pin down. But, in a throwaway fashion, Naomi grants us permission to explore while she gets the coffee together.
Mad Max meets the Owl House: thatched roofs top tumbledown sandstone and mud structures harbouring what could loosely be called a kitchen, a lounge, a bedroom with no walls that open to the vast expanse of blue African sky. Existing walls, even cupboards, are adorned with the strange autobiographical reflections of a man who begins to fill the persona of a wayward seer.
We stumble into one mud room which seems like a kind of chanting den or vestibule. In a ray of light stands an effigy of the same elusive figure in the paintings wearing his signature: spectacles, jacket and tie. Another talisman has a snake skin coiled around its neck. A microphone stand evokes the energies and echoes of frenzied music trance sessions that must once have happened here. Then Naomi tells us the story.
Fifty-year-old Martin Wessels was born in Harrismith in 1948. His father died when he was a child. However the sweet Afrikaans love stories of his mother, 85-year-old musician Ria Bester, are still being published today.
In his youth, Wessels studied art and travelled to exotic lands like Turkey and Afganistan. Friends relate how, in about 1977, Wessels lived on his mother’s farm in a cave without modern amenities in very much the same manner as he lives today.
In 1979,Wessels moved to the town of Clarens, and, by 1980, had purchased his smallholding, Holkrans, for R26 000. Situated on the outskirts of the town, it was geographically ideal for Wessels’s unorthodox country lifestyle with its sandstone grotto, rock pools and a historical schoolhouse believed to have once been a settler cottage.
At Holkrans, Wessels built his strange clay and sandstone houses, of his own design, and converted the schoolhouse into an art gallery. For five years, he became the eccentric driving force behind the town’s annual bash – the Clarens arts festival, that brought to the town an influx of travellers, with money.
On his own property Wessels hosted a number of music concerts. In an upper portion of the land, in the cradle of the grotto, where the settlers once held their church services, he built a stage, with some mud dwellings. Artists who performed on his property in the late Eighties included the cream of local white alternatives, like Jennifer Ferguson and James Phillips – who appeared in a celebration of new Afrikaner music, tactlessly called Volvry 2.
With the focus of this one event, a small but steady stream of artists and craftworkers migrated to Clarens. In its latter heyday, Clarens boasted three jewellers, two potters, about 12 painters and eight sculptors. Today all have left the town, apart from Wessels himself and painter Kay Barnes.
Inevitably, what replaced the conglomerate of wayward artists leaving Clarens was a new breed of rural entrepreneur – the budding face of Clarens, referred to by Naomi as the “bed and breakfast mentality”.
These sharp business brains have bought, “most of the town”, converting its main drag into a minitown of neo- Victorian coffee and curio shops.
While the Clarens yuppies manufacture the town’s newest boom, on the horizon sits the black spot. Called Kgubetswana, which is the Sotho feminine for “small red spot”, it’s a dusty little township on a hill, overlooking a soccer field.
When we arrive in Kgubetswana the Brazils are playing Blackpool. We’ve come here because Naomi has told us that her father is not the only one being threatened with eviction.
“We’re lucky because we’ve got friends and access to lawyers, but these people are poor and illiterate,” she’d said.
A friendly local shares his unhappiness. The people are desperate here, he says. There is no factory, no work. Those that do have jobs work in gardens or restaurants on the white side of town. Most couldn’t afford to pay the rates when they were still R22,50 a month. But when the newly appointed mayor, David Lengoabala, doubled the rates last year payment became an impossibility for most.
Unexpectedly, a lawyer arrived one day and went from house to house telling people that if they did not pay their rates they would be expelled from their homes, he says.
“She told us they were going to take our furniture to sell it to make up the missing money from rates.”
We spoke to Ludwig Diener Snr, lawyer for the Clarens town council. “It’s up to each individual to work out the issue. The government has made certain concessions and written off arrears until 1994, but that is only in the black community,” he said.
Regarding Wessels, Diener was emphatic: “His [Wessels’s] point is that because he’s brought artists to Clarens he’s entitled to a reduction in rates and taxes. I think his knowledge about finances is not up to standard.”
The crucial difference between the issue of rates payment in Kgubetswana and that of the arrears of Wessels is inherent in the vastly differing values of the respective lands.
Wessels’s tumbledown mud shacks are sitting on a potential goldmine. Given the current yuppie onslaught in Clarens, the property is prime – enough cause for eager bidders to be salivating in anticipation of Friday’s auction.
As we leave Clarens, with its haunting sandstone rockfaces, glowing red in the setting Free State sun, Wessels has still not arrived home. The next day he calls the office. “Basically they’re trying to get rid of me,” he says. “And I’m starting to give up hope.”
It’s a story with many sides. The dwindling hopes of Wessels, who lives an archaic existence in these times, are in sharp contrast to the aspirations of those who see Clarens as a potentially popular tourist destination.
It’s a painful moment in which Wessels’s art has come to reflect his reality.