Pat Hopkins A nude reclines on a palm-fringed beach. Another plays the sax for leering men. A lap dance. A blow job. A village orgy. In each of these murals is a khuwana a beer-pot. The N1 the Great North Road from Cape to Cairo winds through the affluent eastern suburbs of Pretoria before straightening into the African hinterland. Littering its west, just before the Carousel hotel and casino, is Mandela Village an informal, sprawling jigsaw of settlements, tribal communities and locations. The engineers of apartheid intended the boundary of the old Bophuthatswana homeland to be drawn along a road that runs a kilometre to the west of the N1. The planners, by mistake, drew the boundary along the highway, but only transferred what was intended to the nominally independent state leaving a strip of”no man’s land” that quickly attracted wide-awake activists who established a”free” settlement filled with chutzpah. Women in multicoloured cottons strolled the streets, ancient jalopies were washed at the Death Row Car-Wash, Mama sold chickens from a roadside coop and hair was trimmed at the Cool Sexy Lovers Paradise Hairdresser. It was the perfect spot for Wilson Vuma, a subsistence farmer fleeing the turmoil in Mozambique, to lose himself in. Vuma, a portly Don King lookalike, started rebuilding his life by doing odd jobs for Portuguese market gardeners by day, and slaving in a fish’n chips outlet by night. Within a few years he had saved enough money to buy a truck to deliver vegetables to Pretoria and return with beer for the shebeens that flourished in the township. One truck led to another and as money flowed in he opened a tuckshop in a tin shack then, tearing it down, built a general dealer store with a shebeen at the back. The fortunes of shebeens, however, began to decline after 1990 as political change swept South Africa. “Trendy blacks, freed from restrictions, flocked to upmarket spots in Pretoria and that left shebeens with only the cheapest clientele,” explains Vuma, sitting beneath a scene of two men carrying their friend home from a party.
“The choice was simple: I could either close my tavern or reinvent it as a place my original patrons would still want to come to and that was an establishment that offered good food, great atmosphere, dancing and flushing toilets. It’s about realising that life is work in progress that we continually need to adapt to changing circumstances or get wiped out by tides we can’t stop or control.” Vuma tore down his old shebeen and built the Khuwana Tavern, which was decorated by his cousin Vasco. Not only did this brilliant spot buck the trend, it is so successful that it has become the country’s biggest single outlet for beer allowing Vuma to acquire three farms, expand his transport business and plan another tavern in Kanana Village about 5km away. The Khuwana cooks, particularly over weekends, with the thumping rhythms that blast from the disco or live acts that perform there. Under a thatch gazebo, next to a naked singer writhing on the wall, a dancer thrusts his mobile pelvis back and forth. Sizzling on barbecues nearby are the best Mozambican peri-peri prawns and chicken available anywhere in South Africa the smoke and aromas weaving a magic web through the throbbing crowds. There is simply no better place to have fun with your clothes on. Extracted from Eccentric South Africa (Zebra Press)