This article first appeared in THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT 

17th November 2007

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When we meet to discuss the presidential ambitions of Evita Bezuidenhout, Pieter-Dirk Uys reminds me how this remarkable woman came to attain such a high profile in South Africa’s public life. In 1978, Uys couldn’t find his way onto a stage: “The plays I’d performed were banned, the new ones weren’t passing the censor board, and my theatre friends didn’t have the money to fight it. I thought, ‘What am I gonna do?’ And then Koos Viviers, editor of the Sunday Express, said ‘We’d like you to do a column.’ It was during the information scandal (in those days it actually was a scandal when politicians lied!) and PW Botha was coming out of the shadows like Dark Vader.” 

Uys invented a woman who was the wife of a National Party MP in Pretoria and whose gossip offered a thinly veiled lampoon of apartheid folly. The ruse worked. “After a few months, Koos said to me, ‘How do you get away with it? Our lawyers tell us not to write about this stuff. But nobody complains about her, this “Evita” of Pretoria’ – it was the time of the Lloyd-Weber musical, you see.” In 1982, he did a one-man show (Adapt or Dye) featuring Evita; she survived, Uys says, “even though drag was against the law. Of course, everything was against the law! She came at the right time. The media wanted relief, and she made it onto the front page.”

Thirty years later, she’s still on the front page – but now she’s set her sights higher. Uys’s latest one-man show, Evita for President, has run in Johannesburg, Durban and Grahamstown and is now at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town for the duration of November. It has old favourites such as Pik Botha (whose long-standing love affair with Evita is well documented) and Nowell Fine (the not-so-progressive kugel ‘liberal’); there are some new characters, including a Big Issue salesman who went to school with Trevor Manual and a politically astute junkshop owner in Woodstock. Kader Asmal also makes an appearance and, at the end of the show, the current president – clad in Springbok jersey, nogal – says a few ventriloquised words.

The acrimony of Evita’s creator and real life alter-ego towards Thabo Mbeki is well documented. Not long ago, Uys proposed in all seriousness to have Mbeki tried in The Hague for crimes against humanity. He is deeply suspicious of what he calls “Mbekivellian intrigue”, which he first identified when “the AIDS denialism started. I was so disappointed. He seemed such an ideal leader. I met him when he was deputy president, while Mandela was at the White House helping Bill Clinton pull up his zip, and Mbeki used to invite me to ANC functions to ‘make us laugh at ourselves’. He was the first person to applaud, he wore the red ribbon ... what went wrong? Once he and Manto are out of the safe zone of their jobs, they are going to end up in court for genocide, if it’s the last thing I do in my life. Don’t tell me they didn’t know what they were doing.”

I ask him about the difficulty of satirising politicians who are, effectively, self-mocking: after all, the garlic, beetroot and African potato jokes are getting old, as are the liver jokes. “I’ve cut back on my Manto references now,” he tells me. “We’re laughing about her to the extent that we’ve forgotten how terribly angry we should be.” What about the shower jokes? After all, Evita’s chief rival is probably Jacob Zuma. “The whole Zuma issue is exaggerated. You could get Mickey Mouse, he couldn’t be worse than Mbeki. I’m not at all nervous about the future. When you talk to people in the ANC, they tell you – the ANC has always investigated every cul de sac before they choose the freeway. There are some damn good people in the ANC; we wouldn’t be here today if there wasn’t an enormous amount of compassion, and passion for democracy.”

The other reason that he doesn’t mind ANC politicians is that, when they come to see his shows, “Nobody has to be worried about their cars outside – there are twenty bodyguards with AK-47s!” The upper-middle class concerns of most of his audiences do, however, hint at a more troubling undercurrent. On the night that I went to see Evita for President, Uys made a wry comment about bringing back the death penalty. “Yes!” cheered a few audience members. Is he worried that Evita, who for so long undermined the apartheid regime, seems to attract a more conservative following now that she opposes the ANC government?

“I have had some disturbing responses. The other day I got an email with a terribly racist joke and I thought, do I unleash the racism in some people? But maybe that’s not a bad thing, because then they expose themselves. It’s the comedy of prejudice. With an audience, you’re not just acting, you’re reacting. When you realise that you’re playing into people’s prejudices, you’ve got to prod those difficult spots. Many of the expats in the UK (Uys has performed on numerous occasions at the Tricycle Theatre in London) only want hear about crime, crime, crime. A lot of white kids are there because they don’t like blacks – they are bitter. But if they come to a show, you can respond to that; it’s good, it keeps it tense, and it keeps it interesting.”

Uys’s relationship to South African politicians has always been A Part Hate, A Part Love (the title of his 1990 book). In Evita for President, Pik Botha’s new ANC leaf is turned over once more, and Uys demonstrates his remarkable skill in taking off the ageing career politician. But is he worried, I wonder, about the decreasing number of people who are able to recognise the gestures, facial expressions and mannerisms that – as with his celebrated ‘Groot Krokodil’ impression – he mimicks so well? Or is it a good thing that apartheid politicians are forgotten?

“I think back to when I was fifteen; my parents were always talking about World War Two, but I didn’t want to know. It was boring! I totally understand that the younger generation haven’t got time to look back, because they’ll fall over a dead body in front of them. But with humour, you make them interested in history. When I go to schools, I can show them why the PW Botha impersonation is funny: they laugh at the stupidity of the cartoon. And even with Pik – the fact that there is a minister of the apartheid government in the ANC – kids know, they think ‘Hey, that’s a bit stinky!’”

Uys relates the story of a young coloured girl who was staring at the collection of apartheid miscellania and Nationalist kitsch on display at Evita se Perron. He had to explain to her what the sign on a whites-only bench meant. “She looked at me and said, ‘You people were mad!’ That’s right, we were. But we were also scared. And there are people in the country now who are playing with fear in the same way, playing with the black-white thing in the same way. Politicians know that an uninformed public is easy to control. It’s brain genocide. Most of us don’t even know what the constitution says.”

Uys has taken his educational shows to almost 1,6 million schoolchildren. He is trying to counteract ignorance not just about HIV/AIDS, but also about tik, which he says is “destroying the Western Cape”: “It’s the ease of the drug and the lack of facilities for other forms of entertainment. Kids want to dance, but there are no dance halls. There are no places to exercise. In Darling, we have 3,000 kids, but not all of them want to do art at Evita se Perron for 2 years!”

New technologies are also changing the way that both young and old interact. There are four new characters in Evita for President, but Uys is aware that staying ‘relevant’ is not just about content – it’s about the medium. “I want to get into your house. I don’t think people should come to me all the time.” He has a new TV show with Loyiso Gola. He’s also bringing out some of his older material on DVD: “In my repertoire, I have to bring that baggage from the 70s and the 80s with me. The old chorus line is gone – Koornhof, PW – Evita’s the only one left! But she’s got to remind us where we’ve come from so we know where we’re going. I want to make it available to the younger generation and to the older generation, who’ve forgotten.” He’s even toying with web-based content: “I don’t want to be like my granny, who was scared of the phone in case it gave her an electric shock. I’ve got 7,000 hours of material that I want to put out there. But live theatre is still important; I have a hidden agenda with the ‘Facebook generation’. I want to promote theatricality, telling a story. They still enjoy that.”

So where to for Evita? Uys admits, “I don’t know what to do after (the ANC conference in) Polokwane. Depending on the new crowned pretender to the thrown of Tshwane, Evita may not carry on her campaign to be President in 2009. If not, well ... the homelands policy ended, and I ended Bapetikosweti. If Evita is appointed as the ambassador to Mongolia, she’s got to go! But that’s what’s great about her. She lives in the real world, and she’s got to keep up with events.”