GADFLY.(satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys, his character Evita Bezuidenhout, and South African politics)

Pieter-Dirk Uys often refers to Evita Bezuidenhout as "the most famous white woman in South Africa." Not long ago, I happened to be visiting Uys, the country's leading satirist, on a day when Mrs. Bezuidenhout's name had appeared in the newspaper yet again. "There are some people one cannot say no to," an article in the Cape Argus began. "Nelson Mandela is one and Evita Bezuidenhout is another." It occurred to me that the writer could have gone further; apparently, even Nelson Mandela can't say no to Evita Bezuidenhout. Not long after Mandela became the President of South Africa, in 1994, he granted her a thirty-minute television interview--a smiling Mandela in one of his trademark African print shirts, a gushing Mrs. Bezuidenhout in the sort of flowery frock that your Aunt Hilda made a serious mistake wearing to the Fourth of July garden party. The Argus item was referring to an event the previous day at a Cape Town hotel--a press conference called by Evita Bezuidenhout to encourage voter registration for this spring's election, the third national election in the ten years that South Africa has had universal suffrage. Mrs. Bezuidenhout, promising to furnish coffee and the sticky pastries South Africans call koeksisters, had invited the dozen or so leading political parties to send a representative, and nearly all of them had. A spokesman for the ruling African National Congress was there, and so was the leader of the official opposition, the Democratic Alliance, and so was a young woman from the New National Party, which evolved from the party that had run South Africa for nearly half a century under apartheid. Pieter-Dirk Uys told me how remarkable he found it that someone like Evita Bezuidenhout could command the presence of politicians across the spectrum. When Uys discusses her, it is sometimes difficult to keep in mind that he himself is Evita Bezuidenhout. She is his invention. Those are his frocks.

Particularly in public, Uys tends to speak of Evita Bezuidenhout from a distance, and with great respect. She rarely deigns to talk about him in public--his name was not mentioned by anybody at the voter-registration event--and when she does she is not complimentary. In "The Essential Evita Bezuidenhout," a small book in a series whose other offerings collected the sayings of heroes of the struggle like Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the entry for "Uys, P-D" begins, "A third-rate comedian who couldn't make it as a playwright and then found out how susceptible our society is to obscene language, and to men wearing women's clothing."

Pieter-Dirk Uys (pronounced Peter-Dirk Ace) ostensibly has little in common with Evita Bezuidenhout (pronounced, more or less, b'ZAY-dun-hote). Uys customarily wears black, offstage and on. The wardrobe of Mrs. Bezuidenhout is, well, colorful. He speaks English in a Gielgudesque accent that may come from having attended theatre school--he graduated in theatre from the University of Cape Town, where he was informed by the doyenne of the South African stage that he had no talent whatsoever--and she speaks English with the pinched vowels of someone who might be more comfortable in Afrikaans. Uys is an animated man who often follows a zinger from the stage with a knowing little smile; he is among the few people I've encountered who can be fairly described as having a twinkle in their eye. Even in offstage conversations, he accompanies his words with the appropriate sounds and gestures--so if he says the cat was sleeping on the piano he suddenly folds his arms and cocks his head and closes his eyes to become a cat sleeping on a piano, and if he mentions the noise from a horde of little kids chattering in front of the stage he somehow becomes a horde of chattering little kids. Evita Bezuidenhout--who is said to be sixty-nine, precisely ten years older than Uys--moves like someone acutely conscious of the limitations imposed by her corset. She is free of irony. When people laugh at one of her lines, she sometimes looks vaguely puzzled, if she notices the laughter at all.

Uys does indeed use graphic language, whether straightforwardly in discussing South Africa's aids pandemic or sneakily in his stage performances. His newest revue is called "The End Is Naai," which sounds O.K. out loud in English unless you know Afrikaans slang well enough to understand that it's the equivalent of saying "The end is screwing." (In the late seventies, one of his shows was banned for what amounted to salacious use of the name Nigel.) He has always made a minor specialty of tossing in a word here and there that sounds obscene but turns out to be a total invention, or perhaps a small town in the Transvaal. Mrs. Bezuidenhout would never use coarse language, and, as for H.I.V./aids, when one of her sons worked up the nerve to tell her that he was positive she said that it's always good to have confidence in one's opinions.

In the decade before Nelson Mandela emerged from the prison on Robben Island to lead what South Africans often call "the transformation," Pieter-Dirk Uys was best known for one-man revues ridiculing the Nationalist government. He did a wicked impression of Prime Minister P. W. Botha, for instance, and a sendup of censors as clodhoppers who would ban a play for having such obscene phrases as "the crack of dawn." Evita Bezuidenhout, on the other hand, was very much a part of the apartheid regime. Her husband was a Nationalist M.P. She herself became the South African Ambassador to Bapetikosweti--a fictitious addition to the apartheid system's supposedly independent (and often unpronounceable) black homelands, which were, of course, pretty fictitious to begin with. (In an early-eighties newspaper interview, Uys said that the homelands, which tolerated the mingling of the races, existed partly "so that people can cross borders to go and pinch black bottoms.") During apartheid, Mrs. Bezuidenhout's statements seemed on their face supportive of the government. Describing the glories of a country that did not permit the vast majority of its population to vote, she would smile, put her chin up, and say, "Democracy is too good to share with just anyone."

Pieter-Dirk Uys and Evita Bezuidenhout do have in common the Afrikaans language, which both have a tendency to revert to for asides, even when speaking from the stage in English. The two of them are steeped in Boer culture, although the Uys family is Cape Afrikaner, traditionally suspected of being a bit wet by Afrikaners whose ancestors left the Cape on the Great Trek inland, and Evita Bezuidenhout was born in the Voortrekker stronghold of the Orange Free State--"in the little town of Bethlehem," Uys says in one show, "but not in the stables, because that was for blacks only." It's easy to get the impression that the only other thing that Pieter-Dirk Uys and Evita Bezuidenhout have in common is, as Uys often reminds the audience, "great legs." But then, in some revues, Evita Bezuidenhout, with a quick shedding of eyelashes and wig and shawl, becomes Pieter-Dirk Uys right onstage. "It's only me," Uys is likely to say at that point. "A middle-aged, fat, bald, Afrikaner-Jewish drag queen from Cape Town."

Uys and I were having ...