November 2008 | Vol 1 | Issue 47
Bitter and disillusioned Liewe Heksie packing for Perth
BLOMMELAND. They call her Liewe Heksie but Lavinia is her name. She's the cleverest witch she knows, and she's even been to the moon. But for Liewe Heksie, 56, these words ring hollow. "It sounded much better in Afrikaans," she says. "Now everything is in English or Xhosa." Middle-aged, bitter and disillusioned with the new South Africa, Heksie is emigrating to Australia.
Lavinia is the first to admit that the years have been unkind to her. The dirty blonde fringe is streaked with grey and the black velvet dress is pockmarked with cigarette burns.
"It's been a real struggle since they canned the show," she says, lighting one of the Lucky Strikes that have left her with severe emphysema.
"If I still had the show, flip, oke, I wouldn't be eating pilchards off a Tupperware lid now, genuine."
But, she says, the loss of stardom and wealth has paled into insignificance next to the loss of her dearest friends. Her eyes fill with tears as she recalls her beloved cat, Matewis.
"We put him to sleep in 1997," she says. "He got cancer in his brain and stomach, and on his nose, and in one ear, plus his tail went sort of vrot."
She blames the asbestos in the walls and ceiling of the council flat she's called home since her television show went off air in the late 1980s.
"It's also why Blommie doesn't come here any more," she adds. "He visited a few times in about 1991, but he said it was giving him migraines, and then he stopped coming."
She says she finally lost touch with her oldest friend after the elf announced his homosexuality in 1999.
"It still makes me very heartsore when I think about how we parted," she says, lighting another Lucky Strike.
"I'm not homophobic. It just came as a surprise. So when he said, 'Heksie, ek is 'n gay stoute kabouter!' I said 'Haai oe, Blommie, di's nie mooi nie'.
"He totally took it up the wrong way. Ag nee, wait, that also sounds homophobic. But you know what I mean."
She says she will always love Blommie, and hopes he can forgive her in time.
However she believes Australia will provide fresh opportunities and a chance to start again.
"I still love South Africa, and it's great that we've got democracy now," she says. "Even if it did kill my show."
But, she adds, the advent of affirmative action has been a "bitter pill to sluk".
"I used to be the only good witch in the whole Gauteng-Blommeland region," she says.
"But after 1994 there were suddenly spell-quotas and magical Sotho snakes and tokkeloshes and fokken Liewe Swart Heksies wherever you looked.
"Skuus dat ek so vloek," she adds hastily. She is also quick to insist that she is not a racist, adding that she enjoyed working with many black actors such as Karel Kraai on 'Wielie Walie'.
She dusts off a yellowing photograph of her with Matewis and carefully packs it into her small suitcase, before heading for the door for the last time.
"I think South Africa is a wonderful country with a great future," she says.
"Just not for white 56-year-old Afrikaans-speaking practitioners of the occult."
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