Peperbus is Afrikaans for pepper pot, and the building earns the name. A hexagonal stone structure standing in the marketplace on a widened foundation, it tapers from walls to a hexagonal dome to a hexagonal tower, each section stepping inward like a stack of geometric shapes. Long, narrow arched windows pierce the tower on each side. A cockpit window 2.5 meters in diameter, divided into six equal glass panes, sits above the main door. At the top, a black-and-white weathercock turns against the blue Karoo sky. The Reverend Carl Arnoldus Bamberger, Fraserburg's first Dutch Reformed pastor, drew the plans. A Baster craftsman named Adam Jacobs built it in 1861. D.A. Scholtz described the result as a shack resembling an 18th-century Baroque pavilion, and that unlikely combination -- humble materials shaped by formal ambition -- gives the Peperbus its character.

The Peperbus was originally intended as the market house, its bell calling the town to trade. But as the local market declined, the building reinvented itself. It became Fraserburg's first library. Then a study for the magistrate, an office for the town clerk, and a workspace for the curate. It served as the municipal election site, provided storage for hospital furniture, and by 1951 housed the school board office. In the 1960s, the city council formed a committee to turn it into a museum, but the plan stalled and the building sat empty for years. Restoration work finally began in April 2016, addressing long-deferred maintenance on a structure that had been absorbing Karoo summers and winters for over 150 years. Each role the Peperbus played reflected a different phase of Fraserburg's civic life, making it less a single building than a palimpsest of small-town governance.

In the tower, a large bell once hung from a beam that is still visible today. It rang each evening at nine o'clock -- not merely to mark the time, but to enforce a curfew after which Cape Coloured residents were no longer permitted on the streets. When constables stopped enforcing the law, the bell was moved to hang between two pillars beside the building. The legislation became what legal scholars call a dead letter, but the bell continued to ring at the same hour each night. Kotze, writing in 1951, framed this persistence as heritage preservation, but the bell's history carries a darker weight: it was an instrument of racial control, a reminder that the institutions shaping daily life in the Karoo were not neutral. The Peperbus itself, designed by a pastor and built by a Baster craftsman -- a person of mixed Khoikhoi and European descent -- embodies the complex social layering of a frontier town where different communities built alongside and for each other, even as the law kept them apart.

The Peperbus nearly disappeared. At one point, talk of demolition circulated through Fraserburg's council chambers -- the building was too difficult to repair, the argument went, and the town had other needs. The community pushed back fiercely. The council relented, agreeing not only to preserve the structure but to install electric night lighting to deter vandalism. It is a small-town story, the kind that plays out in municipal meetings across the world: a building that has outlived its original purpose is either demolished for convenience or defended for meaning. Fraserburg chose meaning. Along with the Old Parsonage Museum and the Afrikaner Protestant church -- originally an Anglican church designed by Sophy Gray -- the Peperbus is one of three national heritage sites maintained in the town. Together they form an unlikely concentration of protected architecture in a remote Karoo settlement, evidence that communities shape their own monuments and that heritage, in the end, is a choice.