This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

14th March 2009

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Earlier this month, after Evita Bezuidenhout’s Jacob Zuma doll splashed water on members of the press from its Zapiro-style showerhead within minutes of ANC spokesperson Jesse Duarte leaving the room – and after photographs of South Africa’s most famous woman posing with her new companion appeared in various newspapers following the launch of Evita’s People’s Party – Pieter-Dirk Uys received a complaint from the ANC.

“They called it disappointing, offensive,” he tells me. “So I sent an email to them pointing out that a candidate for the presidency of South Africa, who should protect the constitution and the right to free speech, is in no position to sue a cartoonist! I want to say to Zuma, ‘You’ve got it wrong, my friend, you can’t sit on the moral high-ground’.”

Indeed, opposing authoritarian (and hypocritical) moralising has always been Uys’s stock-in-trade: from the first appearance of his famous alter-ego Bezuidenhout in 1978, through his haranguing of PW and Pik and other National Party leaders in the 1980s, to his critique of almost every major politician except Nelson Mandela in the 1990s and his strong line against the failures of the Mbeki government in the twenty-first century.

His latest show, Elections & Erections, even contains a sketch on the “absent presence” of interim president Kgalema Motlanthe. But Uys doesn’t take advantage of the recent fracas over Motlanthe’s personal problems. “We see so little of him, but even so, his private life is completely irrelevant. Actually, Zuma’s private life is also irrelevant – his many wives and so on. Although it suits Evita, because she wants to be the next one (and Zuma has written to her saying he’s looking forward to it)!”

I’m intrigued by this defence of politicians’ privacy from someone who has relentlessly poked fun at public figures and their foibles. Where does he draw the line? What about ‘personal’ matters like financial bungling and dangerous liaisons?

“That stuff is important; like the rape trial, which belongs in the public domain. But the fact that he’s got five or six wives, well – what’s problematic is that, for example, it’s difficult for me to talk to kids about the importance of responsible sexual behaviour when they have Zuma’s promiscuity in their minds. He still hasn’t come clean on that. If he just appeared in public with a showerhead, used his sense of humour, laughed at himself, and then said, ‘Okay, I made a balls-up, I’m sorry’, it would make such a difference! But he won’t.”

Still, Uys insists, “Zuma’s not a buffoon. He’s the herdboy who becomes a national leader. You’ve got to be careful not to fall into the satirical trap of thinking, ‘He’s just a poephol.’ He’s not a poephol. He’s not stupid; don’t underestimate him.”

Reciprocally, the aim of Evita’s mock-serious campaign for president is to generate enthusiasm for democratic processes and the power these should give to citizens – and, consequently, to remind SA’s politicians: “Never underestimate voters or take them for granted. There’s a whole generation out there who don’t feel any obligation because of the struggle. Their struggle is for a job.”

Other ramifications of the public-private divide emerge in our discussion. In Elections & Erections, Evita is joined by a range of characters created by Uys over the years. Old favourite Nowell Fine, the ‘liberal’ kugel, is no longer having an illicit affair with her gardener but nowadays makes illicit bribes to get her passport and ID book out of Home Affairs. Even this light-hearted sketch, Uys insists, is “based in anger”: “I’m angry at Home Affairs for different reasons to Nowell. Like the fact that Somalian and Zimbabwean refugees have to go to Nyanga, where they fear for their safety, to queue up at 6:30 in the morning so that if they’re lucky – and can pay up – they might get in before the doors are closed in their faces. It’s unacceptable. The government knows about xenophobia; all South Africans know it’s happening. We mustn’t let it become like Europe in the 1930s, when everyone knew what was happening to the Jews, but did nothing.”

There’s also Karin van Zyl, who started life in Brakpan but now (after a brief career as a Sarah Palin lookalike) works as a maid for the Obamas in the White House. For Uys, “Karin’s important because she’s a reminder that, in a globalised society, everyone’s connected. What happens there affects us here. And we are seen as an example to the world – they are looking at us.”

Then there’s Mrs Petersen, the Woodstock junkshop proprietor whose outbursts are as politically savvy as they are entertaining (“She doesn’t use bad language, she uses descriptive language,” argues Uys; “She says ‘kak’, but it’s not swearing if it’s in Afrikaans, it’s poetry!”).

But these characters – and even Evita herself – take a back seat to what Uys describes as “the most important part of the whole show, which anchors everything. Other elements can be trivial, because that is the core.” He is referring to the intimate moment when he narrates to his audience how he, Pieter-Dirk Uys, “discovered politics” when, as a young gay man, he had to face the ramifications of having sex ‘across the colour bar’ and with another man – a doubly illegal act.

Uys has recounted similar experiences in his memoirs (before Elections & Erections was a show, it was the title of a book in 2002) and, of course, he has frequently emphasised the need to talk about sex openly so that we can prevent the spread of HIV. Yet he has not previously discussed his own sexuality on stage: “I’ve never done it before, but I feel I’ve got to be honest; if I can’t speak about myself, why should others listen to me when I speak about them?”

I wonder, then, how Uys feels about parties – such as the ACDP – who express homophobic sentiments. Complementing his long-standing objective of “breaking the fourth wall” and his method of “reacting rather than acting” (“I’ve always felt that theatre could be more live,” he notes), one of the drawcards of Elections & Erections is a brief appearance in each performance by a politician whom Evita interviews as part of her entertainment/education of SA’s voters. Evita may want to give everyone a platform, but doesn’t Uys find it difficult to host a party whose principles he disagrees with?

“Absolutely, but I can’t interfere with it. I’m just the truck-driver; the show is the vehicle. Obviously there are parties I don’t necessarily want to talk to, but the point is, Evita does! I make up my mind very quickly about what sort of approach she would take, and focus completely on that. If Pieter Mulder from the Freedom Front came on, she’d be very warm to him, because he’s old Connie Mulder’s son and she made him a birthday cake when he was 5 years old, when the Nats were still in power! And if Julius Malema came on, she’d talk to him like a schoolteacher to a naughty child.”

Uys has be careful not to let Evita sound “too intelligent or insightful”. But she does have a serious side, “When she speaks as a grandmother. Evita thinks, ‘My grandchildren will be living in this country’s future, and therefore it’s important that the elections are a success’. That’s the key to the 22nd April – a sense of parental responsibility, a concern for what this country will be like for subsequent generations.”

What, then, about the great ‘non-white’ hope for opposition politics in SA? Evita jests about COPE, but Uys is more earnest: “An important question, to Shilowa and Lekota and to Smuts [Ngonyama], is – where the hell was your voice during the Mbeki years? 300 000 people are dead from AIDS. That was genocide. And where were you? Now you want me to believe in this new energy you’re claiming; not good enough, boykies! It sounds like people saying, ‘You know, I never voted for the Nats. All those years, I didn’t like apartheid, but what could we do?’ Oh, f*** off! I mean, hell!”

If Lekota were interviewed by Evita, “She wouldn’t paint him into a corner. You have to have some respect and realise that you have such power when you’re holding a stage. But I’d like to ask him why he tip-toed around Mbeki. There are tons of people who want to know the answer. If COPE leaders stood up in front of the country and said, we apologise that we didn’t do anything sooner, they’d win the election!”

Uys’s antagonism towards Mbeki is well-documented. Nevertheless, although the “little coup d’état” at Polokwane reminded him “that SA’s democracy is not just 15 years old, it’s also quite sophisticated”, he does feel that Mbeki’s dismissal was “bad-mannered”: “It was dictatorship politics. That’s why Evita says, no matter what, we should treat Mr Mbeki with some respect” (a statement that, most nights, garners audience applause).

Uys is nothing if not even-handed. Even those political figures who are clearly favourites of both Evita and Pieter, like Helen Zille and Patricia de Lille, come in for some gentle chastisement: “I said to Helen the other day, ‘You’ve had botox, but what about the Cape Town City Hall? It’s falling into disrepair!’ She replied that there are plans, including private financing, to sort it out.”

Our conversation turns to urban regeneration and the example set by burgeoning spaces in Johannesburg such as Braamfontein and Newtown. Uys is currently straddling these two areas in his daily routine – performing at the Joburg (Civic) Theatre by night and rehearsing his new play, MacBeki, at the Market Theatre by day. He’s clearly very excited by the latter production, which he wrote and is directing but in which he will not be appearing.

“It’s twenty years since I last directed a show. I’ve said to the cast, look, pretend the writer isn’t here. I’m just the director, the traffic cop. We’ve got a roadmap and each one of you is bringing your own car. It surprises me every day. We’ve changed the script quite a bit in rehearsal. One cannot be sentimental about writing. We have to keep up with political developments too.”

What can audiences expect from MacBeki apart from political parody? “It’s got a wonderful, oddball sense. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive from Hamlet ‘in full Shakespearean’ and a character called MacTrev tells them, you’re in the wrong play! There are additions from The Simpsons, Puccini’s opera Tosca, Wagner – you name it. But it’s not a revue.”

Allusions to Shakespeare’s Scottish Play are, I assume, plentiful? “It will also be great for those who know Macbeth – ‘Out, out, damned beetroot spot!’ and all that. There’s Polokwane forest instead of Birnam Wood. And Liz Meiring is playing the porter at the castle gate, singing Celine Dion. We’ve got a lovely set – like a boma, with reeds, so eerie shadows move behind it and enhance the feeling of paranoia. The three witches are journalists.”

And, of course, there’s that showerhead again (Uys is “so grateful for the gift of that icon by Zapiro, whose cartoons are like a visual philosophy – full of opinion, and brave”). In Macbeth, the tyrant is duped by a prophecy which declares him invulnerable to all who are “of woman born”; but he is brought to justice by the hero Macduff, who fulfils the prophecy on a technicality because he was born by Caesarean section. In MacBeki, there is a certain MacZum, who was delivered in similar fashion – he had to be, because of the curious growth attached to his head.

Does this equation, I wonder, indicate an endorsement of Zuma’s legitimacy as president-to-be? Uys isn’t saying. But it does seem that MacBeki represents the beginning of a new phase in his career. “A new generation is coming into power. I’m 63, I can’t be a drag queen or a moffie up a tree for the rest of my life – they’ll have to shoot me down! There are so many other things I want to do.”