Copyright 1998 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday (New York)
April 30, 1998, Thursday
POSTMARK NIEU BETHESDA: A FREE SPIRIT IS HONORED IN HINDSIGHT
By Tina Susman. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT
Nieu Bethesda, South Africa - If this were anywhere but South Africa, the Owl House might never have created such a stir. But this is a country where free thinking was tantamount to treason until a few years ago, and this is a dusty, desolate outpost 25 miles from the nearest tarred road, where electricity didn't arrive until 1992 and where you still can't buy a daily paper or a tank of gas.
So imagine the residents' shock in the 1950s when Helen Martins, the quiet divorcee living alone at the end of a dirt road, began buying colored bottles from the township children, crushing them in her coffee grinder and gluing the sparkling pieces across the walls, ceilings and windows of her home. After she had transformed the inside, Martins began working on the outside, creating a ghostly garden of crudely fashioned concrete-and-glass sculptures that reflected her fascination with owls and eastern religions and convinced townspeople she was a hedonistic madwoman.
"Most of the people thought Helen was not right," says Georgina Skota, who as a child would cart colored bottles to Martins' doorstep and who now shows visitors the monument to eccentricity called the Owl House, which has created a thriving tourist industry in this otherwise forgettable dot in the Karoo desert. "I won't say she was mad, but there was something wrong. She was lonely and longing for something. I think she was lonely for love and light."
By almost any standards, Martins, whose life is portrayed in Athol Fugard's play "The Road to Mecca," led a wretched existence. Raised in this quiet hamlet and doomed, as the youngest daughter, to forfeit a life of independence for one of servitude to her ailing parents, she rarely saw much beyond the cacti and tumbleweed surrounding the drab family home. So late one particularly bleak night, following the deaths of her parents and the failure of her second marriage, Martins lay in the dark in her narrow childhood bed, pondered the gray monotony of her life, and decided to fill it forever with color and light.
"At the beginning she only had an idea to brighten up the one bedroom, but I think she liked the results so much that she just kept going," said Skota, who recalls being frightened at first of the dirty, ill-kempt woman with the wild hair who would open the door to the dark house and trade candies for bottles to crush.
As time passed, Martins became more comfortable with the township children, and as arthritis and failing eyesight began hampering her ability to create new work, she hired black laborers from the nearby township to help. The result was even more isolation from the few hundred white villagers, living as they did in a time of staunch apartheid and ruled by the dictates of the fundamentalist Dutch Reformed Church, whose spire towers over the town.
For them, Martins' sculpture garden of concrete camels, nude sun worshipers, mermaids, kings, buddhas, and countless other figures, most facing east toward Mecca, was tantamount to heresy. "They would say, Don't go near Helen's house. She's a hex!' " recalls Skota, who remembers Martins in fact as a friendly but shy woman who liked children though she never had any of her own.
As the townspeople shunned her, Martins became more reclusive. She only opened her door to people who knew a secret knock. Her eyesight began failing and her hands were mangled by glass cuts and gnarled by arthritis, but she refused to see a doctor. As her physical condition deteriorated, so too did her mental state, until one cold winter's day in 1976 she stood in the kitchen beside the window overlooking the sculpture garden and swallowed a bottle of poison. Her body was cremated and the ashes scattered over the sculpture garden.
The past disdain for Martins is nowhere to be found nowadays in Nieu Bethesda, which is reached by way of a winding gravel road that snakes through the Sneeuberg Mountains, past desert monoliths reminiscent of the American West and through valleys shaded by giant weeping willows.
The town itself is barely a town. Life revolves around the six-room Owl House, where a steady stream of visitors wanders around the sculpture garden and peers into the glass-covered bedrooms, kitchen and larder, whose shelves are stacked with dozens of mason jars filled with crushed glass that Martins never got around to using. A tea room-cum-souvenir shop across the road sells small concrete owls with amber glass eyes.
Women more than men seem to appreciate the Owl House, says Skota, speculating that they can better empathize with the plight of a woman hemmed in by conservatism and condemned rather than appreciated for her free spirit. The evidence of visitors' mixed feelings about Martins is clear in the visitor's book. "She was nuts," wrote one visitor, amid other lofty commentaries on the Owl House's artistic merits.
Whether it's art or not, the Owl House and its odd resident are the best thing that ever happened to Nieu Bethesda, something Skota laments was never appreciated until long after Martins' death. "We feel very ashamed now that when she was alive, the people didn't want to know her. Now we want to give her praise and respect," she said. "She gave our town life."
