Satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys, whose alter ego is Evita Bezuidenhout, has sent a Christmas message to South Africa and President Thabo Mbeki.
He has played on the words of the Lord’s Prayer in what he described as a festive-season message of good hope for South Africa:
“Our Comrade President, who art in Parliament or in transit;
democratically elected is your government;
its Constitution rules;
development shall be done in our rural earth;
as it is being enjoyed in our urban heavens;
give us this day our anti-retrovirals, and forgive us wanting to live;
as we did; in spite of those racists who so discriminated against us;
and lead us not into denials and hypocrisies;
but deliver us from this terrible impending genocide;
because in your hands alone lies the power;
to prevent Aids from succeeding where apartheid failed;
for ever and ever; amandla!”
Uys — whose Bezuidenhout sends up the apartheid era as ambassador to the imaginary apartheid homeland of Bapetikosweti — has been a long-standing critic of Mbeki’s alternative views on Aids.
Uys lives in Darling in the Western Cape where a boulevard was recently named in Evita Bezuidenhout’s honour. — I-Net Bridge