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The Peperbus (Afrikaans for "pepper pot") is an unusual, hexagonal building on Meyburgh Street, Fraserburg, in the Karoo of South Africa. Along with the Old Parsonage Museum and the Afrikaner Protestant church, earlier an Anglican church designed by Sophy Gray, the Peperbus is one of three national heritage sites the province maintains in the town.
Fraserburg is a town in the Karoo region of South Africa's Northern Cape province. It is located in the Karoo Hoogland Local Municipality. The town has some of the coldest winters in South Africa.
The Karoo is a semi desert natural region of South Africa. No exact definition of what constitutes the Karoo is available, so its extent is also not precisely defined. The Karoo is partly defined by its topography, geology and climate, and above all, its low rainfall, arid air, cloudless skies, and extremes of heat and cold. The Karoo also hosted a well-preserved ecosystem hundreds of million years ago which is now represented by many fossils.
South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by 2,798 kilometres (1,739 mi) of coastline of Southern Africa stretching along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring countries of Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe; and to the east and northeast by Mozambique and Eswatini (Swaziland); and it surrounds the enclaved country of Lesotho. South Africa is the largest country in Southern Africa and the 25th-largest country in the world by land area and, with over 57 million people, is the world's 24th-most populous nation. It is the southernmost country on the mainland of the Old World or the Eastern Hemisphere. About 80 percent of South Africans are of Bantu ancestry, divided among a variety of ethnic groups speaking different African languages, nine of which have official status. The remaining population consists of Africa's largest communities of European, Asian (Indian), and multiracial (Coloured) ancestry.
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A Baster, Adam Jacobs, built the Peperbus in 1861 according to plans drawn up by the Rev. Carl Arnoldus Bamberger, first pastor of the Fraserburg Reformed Church. D.A. Scholtz described it as a shack resembling an 18th-century Baroque pavilion with its curved lines and geometric design. A line drawing holds the building as 10 m from foundation to ceiling, but the building itself is around 8 m. [1] It was originally intended to be the market house, whose bell would open the market. The local market gradually declined in importance, but the Peperbus went on to serve as the town's first library and an office or study for the magistrate, the town clerk, and the curate. It became a municipal election site and provided a place for the AACV to store their hospital furniture. Around 1951, it was the school board office. In the 1960s, the city council established a committee to promote it as a museum, but it would be empty for many years, and in April 2016, long-needed restoration work began.
The Basters are a Namibian and South African ethnic group descended from Boer men and their concubines, usually Bushmen women or Khoekhoe, but occasionally also slave women from the Cape, who resided in the Dutch Cape Colony in the 18th century. Since the second half of the 19th century, the Rehoboth Baster community has been concentrated in central Namibia, in and around the town of Rehoboth. Basters are closely related to Afrikaners, Cape Coloured and Griqua peoples of South Africa with whom they share a language and culture.
