They are not particularly happy in Bethulie. Since the 1994 elections things have gone from bad to worse. Now there is no funding for this and that and the streets are full of potholes and they are never swept.
The townsfolk used to try their best to get the tourists there — and they succeeded — but now “they” have caused squabbling on the committees, taken the funds for projects of “their own” and there is “simply nothing that can be done .”
Besides, what’s the use of doing anything; “they” will just ruin it as they always do. No, it’s no use, no use at all. And isn’t it a shame that things have got this bad.”
Bethulie is on the banks of the Gariep Dam, this side of Bloemfontein just off the N1. Up the road, near Colesburg, “they” make wire windmills and sell them for profit to the passing trade. These are the miniature windmills which became a national icon thanks to an early Yebo Gogo ad.
Meanwhile in Bethulie they sit and they wait and they moan as the town becomes more derelict day-by-day. And they wait year after year, through parched summers and frost-bitten winters for someone to do something to save them from their desolation.
At the Pellissier House Museum, in the suburban centre of the town Mrs Ronelle Botha, treasures the collection she has gathered over the years of Boer War memorabilia. One of the most poignant items is a tiny doll. Its head, which is about the size of a small bird’s egg, is porcelain. Attached to the head is a threadbare once-white tiny cotton dress. The doll was found in small rectangular tin box when the graves of the concentration camp dead were moved to avoid the creeping flood waters of the dam.
The tin —supplied to British Soldiers to keep buttons of compressed tea — was found buried alongside a child who was one of more than 1 700 children and women who died in 1902 at the Bethulie Concentration Camp.
Not far away is a stern stone monument to Chief Commandant Louw Wepener, a hero of historic proportions for his heroism in wars in the late 1800’s against the Basotho and kilometres down the road is the longest span bridge in the southern hemisphere.
Tourist attractions each one and well marketed they would bring droves of tourists to the region. The Boer War alone is particularly big with the Brits and recently the Australians who want to see where their forefathers fought — and died — like Breaker Morant did.
Tourists would provide the cash to fix things that are broken. But the tourists don’t know about the place, because no-one is doing anything to tell them about it. Those who have the most to gain are all waiting for someone else to do something, while “they” do nothing. In the meantime they have withdrawn from the committees and the structures so they can’t to anything to change anything anyway. So they sit and they moan.
“To succeed we have to learn to be entrepreneurial and do ourselves what needs to be done without waiting for someone else to do it,” said former UCT Vice chancellor, World Bank director and author, Mamphele Ramphele in a public talk this week.
Of course she’s right. But we also have to break the mould and get everyone who wants something to happen to do something about it. At Bethulie, for instance, they might want to begin by concentrating on what they have gained rather than at what they might have lost. Telling the story of the procelian doll might be a place to begin…..after all look what cement owls did for Nieu Bethesda….