It’s a blazingly hot day in Nylstroom. The blue northern sky glares relentlessly overhead. Outside the town hall a powdered tannie comes up and, pointing to the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) banner, asks if this is … She hesitates. Yes, it’s Evita’s election roadshow. And it’s free? Yes.
She grips her silent husband’s elbow and, glancing at a cheerful IEC rent-a-crowd in identical T-shirts coming across the lawn toward the Boer War monument, drops her voice. “It’s not dangerous, is it?”
In the tannie’s old South Africa of quiet white dorps and invisible black servants, nothing was more dangerous than the truth. Now that strange phoenix of comedic truth, Evita Bezuidenhout, is coming to town.
Later, when Evita walks up the aisle, handing out election pamphlets and shaking outstretched hands as graciously as a visiting queen, an odd expression flits across the faces of the country folk, especially the whites. It’s not that they don’t really believe in her as a character. She’s just too real. They can’t believe that she, a kind of Afrikaans Sophia Loren, is here among them.
Evita’s similarity in sheer presence to Loren is no coincidence, explains Pieter-Dirk Uys, a few days into the tour, as he is transforming himself into his alter ego – “the most famous white woman in South Africa” – in a bare side room of the Komatipoort town hall.
He adores the Italian actress, known for her portrayals of strong, sensuous women. As a young man, visiting Rome, he left an admirer’s letter at her door that led to a correspondence and friendship.
A few years ago, he says, applying false eyelashes the size of little butterflies, he was performing in Los Angeles. Loren was in the audience with her family. “I heard young Eduardo say, as I came on stage, `Oh my Gaad, it’s mother!'”
Evita is a tall, upright Afrikaans matron with a sing-song voice and a powerful physical presence that has a noticeably uncertain-making effect on men, especially Afrikaner men.
Interestingly, Uys has green-brown eyes, while Evita has bright blue eyes. This is partly due to heavy eye-shadow, but it’s not only the make-up. “Of course Evita has blue eyes,” Uys says. “It’s her personality.”
Uys’s reasons for doing this gruelling month- long trek through the country – to encourage people to register and vote – have to do with his career-long interest in the country’s politics. His interest has a deeply moral basis, rather than a party-political one.
“I was aware from a young age that there were things wrong in this country. I mean, for one thing, as a moffie in those days you couldn’t avoid that conclusion. And then, most of the people I was attracted to happened not to be white.”
Evita’s reasons for doing the tour are rather different. Opening her show she says she asked Desmond Tutu what she should do to get amnesty for having supported apartheid.
He asked her to bake him 27 chocolate cakes and to go out to inform people about the rights and duties involved in voting. This she does with her famously irrepressible style. Acerbic jokes and comments flow thick and fast for an hour.
To show her new commitment to non-racial democracy, Evita allows herself to be assisted by a coloured chap called Brainwave, “an affirmative white”.
Brainwave, played by Basil Appollis, tells a number of jokes about Evita, coloured attitudes, and attitudes to coloured attitudes, while she goes off with a revolver to negotiate with a striking driver. “She thinks she’s so liberal,” says Brainwave, “And she is – with the facts.”
Returning to the stage, Evita demonstrates this with what is perhaps the best skit of the whole show, a pseudo-PC reinterpretation of the battle of Blood River.
“It wasn’t a battle,” says Evita firmly. “That was Nationalist propaganda. It was really a braaivleis. The men were shooting springboks for the braai, the women were cooking, and the Zulu warriors were swimming in the river – some face up, some face down. And tannie Sannie spilled her tomato sauce in the river, which is why it was red.”
“Evita doesn’t have a sense of humour,” Uys says, “And she has absolutely no sense of irony.” This is rather surprising, after a show crammed with jokes and laughter. Mostly, anyway: in Komatipoort the small, hostile audience gives a single reluctant laugh; Evita, practised trouper that she is, cuts the show to functional half-hour.
But Uys, of course, knows Evita inside out. What’s funny about her in the end is not her jokes but the jokes that are being made through her. Her earnestness, her blatant need for approval and her ruthless competitiveness do the rest.
“Look at this dress – I had it made by a wonderfully talented young affirmative down in Cape Town. I look better than Patricia de Lille, don’t I?”
Evita, beloved and unlikely tannie of a divided nation, is setting about her Ballot Bus programme with zest and determination. In the seven shows I saw the audiences were about evenly black and white. The blacks laughed as much, and sometimes more than the whites.
“If someone tries to intimidate you into voting for their party, say yes, yes! Lie! Die Here sal vergewe [The Lord will forgive].”
Interestingly, there was more black prissiness in the Johannesburg city hall than in Pieterburg or Nelspruit about her half-reconstructed racial attitudes.
“My daughter, Billy-Jeanne, married a black man. You don’t mind do you? I – choke – don’t mind.” Black Joburgers: Sies! “She’s given me three lovely black grandchildren – three charming little black kaboutertjies.” Sies!
Uys says that this Evita show represents for him a rounding-off in many ways. “Evita has been around so long, and I’ve been involved with the political events of this country for so long. But I’ve always been interested in overseas politics too, you know.
Particularly what’s happening in America. What else is there these days but America?” He plans a tour of cities in the States with large South African communities next year.