The Museum
That's what people call it - the most extraordinary collection of Afrikaner political kitsch in the world. It started in the late 1970s when Pieter-Dirk Uys would come across familiar spine-chilling, stomach-turning images. The Battle of Blood River, the death of Piet Retief at Ungungungluvu at the hands of the Zulus — pictures that had been on the walls of his school classroom during his childhood. The heritage of Afrikanerdom. The Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria.
Maybe it was the snow-shaker in the shape of that erection on the hill that did it: shake it and the snow falls on the panorama! And so Pieter-Dirk Uys started collecting these things that no one wanted, few cared for and everyone laughed at.
Occasionally there would be prints of the Karoo or Drakensberg in heavy black frames and so he collected these cheaply, mainly for the frames. When the Perron cabaret venue was ready for colonization, there were enough of these framed prints to line the walls. By now it was obvious that most of them harkened back to the days of the Afrikaner Renaissance and the discovery of his culture and his roots. The fact that most of them were fabrications didn't remove their appeal.
Today they can be seen on the walls of EVITA SE PERRON, not just as decoration but as a statement of existence. They attract great attention and familiar gasps from the audience.
The old station building, still with the impression on the ceiling where a wall separated whites from blacks, now houses the MUSEUM. During his former life as an Afrikaner Seun, related to Dr DF Malan, the first Afrikaner Prime Minister, Uys had corresponded with many of the politicians of the time. In those days as an innocent choirboy, he had sung to them in the NG Kerk in Rondebosch where his father was organist. He then discovered Sophia Loren and the fact that her legs were better than Dr Hendrik Verwoerd's. When in the 1980s Uys started his one-man satirical onslaught against the regime in Pretoria — basically throwing back at them what they had written for him through the structures of the laws of apartheid — more letters arrived.
Today they make up the core of the collection. There are the letters from the first State President CR Swart during his reign and much later in the last year of his life; faxes from Pik Botha, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Evita's boss, undisguised in his passion for this glamorous member of his diplomatic corps; notes from Winnie Mandela when she was the Virgin Mary of the Struggle, passing on regards from the faceless man in a cell on the Island. (”Dear Mr Uys, the day you do me, please look like this, Winnie Mandela”)
As the collection grew, people donated items: busts of Hendrik Verwoerd that became lamps (”Let he who gave us darkness now give us light”) and official portraits of all the fuehrers of the Boer Empire. Many images from the various Afrikaner parliaments, all ruled by a National Party that stayed dour and unsmiling, dominate.
Then the familiar mantras of patriotism: images of the Voortrekker Monument lovingly painted on glass and backed with crinkled silver paper, quite eastern in their gaudiness, western in their simplicity and just ghastly in their gorgeous bad taste.
Older Afrikaners walk through the old station in tears. Their lives pass before them. They remember these symbols of a time when no one dared question their seriousness and importance. They are followed by their children, laughing at the recognition of these awful things they were subjected to as kids. And then a black family come through who want to be photographed under a familiar WHITES ONLY sign. (”Eish! Let's be photographed in front of apartheid!”)
Everyone takes it as they see it. Some with humour, some with memories, most with a sense of relief that these things that frightened a nation into silence for over forty years are now meaningless and without threat, but still there to see and recall.
“Let us remember the past, so we can celebrate the future”, says Evita Bezuidenhout. “One does not need a crystal ball to see what will happen to South Africa tomorrow. The future of our country is certain. It's just the past that is unpredictable”
Highlights in the NAUSEUM are the official portrait of the 1983 Tricameral Parliamentary wives all lined up in rows. Note an Indian woman and a coloured matron, ethnic tokens in a white sea of chiffon, wobbly chins and strained smiles. Evita is not seen in the picture, as she is with the photographer advising Lord Snowdon how to compose this portrait. There is also the chilling line-up in front of Parliament of the Synod of the NG Kerk in 1957. Row upon row of clones in dark suites and hats like penguins from a horror film. It is also obvious by the positioning and the angle of the portrait who was actually in charge of the morale and political structures of the land.