Of Love and Penises

I am not alone in viewing comedian Pieter-Dirk Uys and his alter-ego Evita Bezuidenhout as one of the unofficial patron saints of South African life. Having been a thorn in the side of the National Party government in apartheid South Africa, Uys and Bezuidenhout have continued to poke critical and well-intentioned fun at the ANC government. I spoke to him about his relationship with power.

“Don’t prove anything. Go for a walk in the snow. Don’t climb things. Don’t step off the path because you might fall through a crevice. Sit down. And listen to silence you’ve never heard before.”

Pieter-Dirk Uys is talking about a recent trip he made to Antarctica – which he says he needed to see before it melted away. And such silence sounds delicious, particularly in relation to the noisy, ranty political landscape with which Uys will shortly be engaging in his stage show Elections and Erections, his latest attempt at consciousness raising (“If I irritate people enough, eventually they start thinking for themselves”). Antarctica. Just think. No Julius Malema. No Karl Niehaus. No Tokyo Sexwale mouthing off about how Cope are a bunch of witchdoctors – which is as dangerous as anything Malema has said. Just silence and Pieter-Dirk Uys. Doesn’t it sound lovely?

But Uys also knows how to make a noise, metaphorically speaking, and there’s little doubt that his alter ego Evita Bezuidenhout, who shares the role of mother of the nation with Winnie Mandela, has, in the course of her career, mouthed many more inflammatory remarks than young Julius. But the fictional former ambassador to a fictional former homeland always has that knowing looking in her eye, even when she is pretending not to. Malema, on the other hand, is devoid of the particular awareness needed for irony. And the two will no doubt be squared off against each other somewhere amid the madness and hysteria of Elections and Erections which opened in Durban on Tuesday night.

It’s one of the sadnesses of life in contemporary South Africa that the multiple voices of Pieter-Dirk Uys, like the singular voice of Desmond Tutu, remain urgently relevant. Uys has spoken many times about how he and the rest of the country’s comedians got a great big fright when apartheid ended because their core subject matter had disappeared overnight. But the absurd tragicomedy of the National Party was very quickly replaced by that of the new ruling party. And the laughs, as it turns out, did not deviate fundamentally. What, after all, is the difference between an apartheid-built house and an RDP house? (There probably is a difference. Answers on a postcard to Pieter-Dirk Uys, Darling. And I’m not being a theatre queen. That’s his address.)

The Winnie Mandela reference above is cogent. For Uys strongly believes that it is she who should be president. The middle classes are always a little shocked by this but it’s not a laugh line. Because if you look past the intense penchant for shoes and can truly handle the concept of a female revolutionary in a dehumanising war, which for many South Africans continues as you read these words, you’ll recognise the resonance of the term “mother of the nation”. Like Jacob Zuma, Mandela has always acknowledged the poor of South Africa. Unlike Zuma, who merely courts the poor but has done little for them, she has always held their interests close to her heart. Of course, she’s a little cooked from years of fighting. But then we put up with Thabo Mbeki and his strangely slanted reality for nearly a decade. And at least Mandela’s idiosyncrasies come from her closeness to the ground, not her distance from it.

While Mandela is almost certainly not spent as a major political force, she is not connected to this year’s election ballot. Evita Bezuidenhout is, however, having launched Evita’s People’s Party in 2008. Except she’s not really going the full political hog. Instead, Bezuidenhout will be using Evita’s People’s Party as a voter education mechanism. Which is great but also unfortunate. For many years, people have been calling for Evita Bezuidenhout/Pieter-Dirk Uys to run for president and I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that I’d vote for him/her in half a second, something I can’t comfortably say about a single contemporary South African politician.

“But why doesn’t she run?” I say to Uys, aware of the pleading in my voice. “Well”, he says, “the party who want to be government or opposition have to put down a R350 000 deposit. But the money’s not the issue. For me the issue is the vote. I don’t know if I want to fuck around with the seriousness of the vote. If I’m going to spend so much time telling people to be serious about the vote, am I now going to put Evita, who doesn’t exist, into a position where people will vote for her? Then there’s me. I take the buck. I registered the party”.

But he’s skirting the issue and he knows it. Why doesn’t he take it to the max and use Evita to get inside the political system? The answer is simple. “Because I don’t want to go to fucking parliament and sit there like an arsehole, listening to these third rate people with fourth rate problems. They work for me. I don’t work for them”.

And that’s one of the problem with politics. Those whose skills and compassions we could really use in our political processes tend to find the whole thing anathema, not the least because they recognise the extreme difficulty of institutional change and the hugely bureaucratic nature of such things. And in South African politics, as in so many other countries, there are many, many things that need changing. It’s a monolithic challenge that many prefer to challenge from other angles. And its fully possible that Uys, who, realistically, wouldn’t automatically be president if he were to enter the electoral system, might make more difference on-stage than in parliament.

But there remains a slim possibility that Evita will join the 2009 election ballot. Uys, says he can afford it, and that he is going to wait and see what the feeling is in the next few months. “But”, he says, “what she would say to voters is this: ‘Find the party you want as your government and the party you want as your opposition. And that vote – because it’s your vote, because you’re committed to it – will be a vote for me. You will be voting for Tannie because Tannie doesn’t need your vote because Tannie is in charge anyway’.”