Pieter-Dirk Uys, Satirist HARDtalk

Now on BBC News it is time for HARDtalk. Welcome to HARDtalk.

Leaders who routinely abused their power can't stand to be laughed at.

Satire is a potent political weapon. That is a truth that my guest today

has exploited for 40 years. Pieter-Dirk Uys starve himself as

the most famous white woman in South Africa, thank to his character

Evita. He uses her to lampoon Jacob Zuma and the ANC. Are there dangers

in playing South Africa's recent history for laughs?

Pieter-Dirk, welcome. You have made a career and a life out of humour.

Subversive humour. Would you say you are fundamentally driven by anger or

is it something else? I think anger is a very important motivation after

all these years and especially in the beginning when I was very quiet

and very scared of opinion because most of it was illegal. The balance

of 49% anger and 51% entertainment. Another word, sympathy. When you

target people, and we will talk about the targets you have picked

upon whether it be wiped or more recently black, the leaders of your

country, is there any sympathy at all with the new? There has to be

some compassion, even if they are not on my side. There are some I'd

don't. I just find them offensive. They become one line gags. Like that

neo-Nazi leader, he deserves just one line. Are there some people you

won't laugh at because it is not funny or too serious? I find things

for people to laugh out by commenting on them by doing them as

characters. I sometimes find it... For example, the Minister of health,

during the time when we'd were in denials about AIDS. That was absurd

and as obscene but to do her with one of her weeds and to talk like

that, I feel uncomfortable. I do not feel right doing that. You come from

It seems to me something important must have happened to you to turn

you into that young subversive, a young man who actually wanted

to mock the system that you were actually, that your family

One of your cousins had been a National Party prime minister...

The first National Party prime minister, Dr DF Malan, yeah.

It was the theatre - it was eventually going

to university, having been through the white education,

white school, Afrikaans Calvinist Church - God was white.

My mother, she committed suicide, which I think was a very important

You ended up in theatre, acting and working alongside

Which must have been another way in which you started questioning

Yes, this definitely happened at the UCT drama department,

The UCT was allowed token people of colour.

That is the University of Cape Town?

We had two - a black man and a young mixed-race coloured man,

And there we did scenes together, as brothers, scenes together

as all these dramas, and touched, and shouted, and called names.

And it was Ibsen, and Brecht, and when we left the drama school

we couldn't go anywhere together - it was against the law.

We couldn't have a drink, we couldn't go and drink tea,

Now, sex made a big difference for me, because I broke the law

of actually having sex with somebody who was not only a male but also

somebody who was not white, so I broke the law in two places.

And I think through that instinctive survival,

It took me many years to be able to answer that question.

Well, that is a fundamental question and it leads me then

to the discussion of this wonderful creation of yours,

which has in a sense defined your career,

and that is this marvellous lady, Evita Bezuidenhout.

And I even managed to pronounce it almost correctly.

She is this sort of wonderful Afrikaans woman, obviously creation

I think one of the things I enjoyed doing at drama school was make-up,

Then, when I started writing plays, the plays were banned

by the censor board, and I had to find another

way of earning money, so my cat could be fed,

and then I thought PW Botha, who gave me the first title

to my one-man show - "South Africa, you must adapt

or die," and Adapt Or Die was the first show.

Six months before that I had a little column

in a Sunday newspaper, which a friend of mine gave me,

"Give us a hundred words every week on your look at where

we are in the politics," and I thought one of the things

I wanted to do is I wanted to have a female voice.

I'm going to create this Afrikaans lady, who at a party

in Pretoria can say, "Scotty, have you heard what's happening?"

During the information scandal - this was during the late

Then when I did my first one-man show, Adapt Or Die,

I thought I would do this woman called Evita.

In fact, the editor said to me, "Why is it possible that you can say

things in your column through her mouth that

I'm not allowed to put on the front page?"

She had a husband who was a National Party MP.

I think she took a bizarre job as the sort of ambassador to one

Yes, the black homeland of Bapetikosweti -

And all of this was in essence poking fun at this horrible -

but also in some ways laughable - system of organised racism

Yes, but knowing that my white audience didn't actually

think that they were doing anything wrong -

They were so frightened of the black terror,

of being massacred by black people, that they thought apartheid

was the only way to survive, so the hypocrisy behind

the Christian, relatively well-educated and probably quite

decent society that were allowing these things to happen,

that was the basis to Evita, because Evita would condemn

Did you, even from those early days in the 80s,

find that you were building a black audience for Evita?

Yes, we were building a black audience illegally,

because it wasn't allowed to have black and white people

The first place I worked in was the Space Theatre

in Cape Town, which was an unracial theatre, meaning we had broke

the laws - many laws - and then the Market Theatre

in Johannesburg, where eventually the government eventually gave up

on that law and allowed black and white people to sit

White people would be sitting there when the lights were on,

and then as the lights went down the black people,

Not in the foyer, they would slip in.

And I would just say to them, "Don't laugh, don't smile,

because we will see the whites of your teeth, and you'll be

arrested," so the sense of humour was terribly important

against the reality of me as a white Afrikaner making fun of apartheid,

knowing that if I had been a black South African I would not be alive.

We know that some very prominent leaders of the anti-apartheid

movement were watching those videos, because it later turned out that

Nelson Mandela himself, in Robben Island, had been

And let's get our first look now at Evita herself,

and in the most iconic circumstances - perhaps one of the most memorable

times of your life - actually interviewing Mandela just

months after he was released in 1994.

Let's play this little video clip, and give everybody an idea

We were very scared in the old days, as you'll probably remember.

Afrikaners like me were frightened that when black South Africans

would take control of South Africa, all the old symbols,

the old paintings, the old Stinkwood furniture, would be removed,

and we are so happy to see that everything is still here.

Minorities are entitled to be concerned about the type of changes

that have taken place in our country.

The task of the government and the ANC leadership would be

to assure the whites that change would not mean a reversal

of the position where blacks will now oppress the white minority

and the other minorities, and I think that we have

succeeded, we are succeeding, in addressing their fears.

I mean, what is beautiful about that is that Mandela

appears to be taking you so seriously as Evita.

When we sat down, I was ready with everything,

which is frightening when a film crew waits.

It is like waiting for the death warrant, the death

sentence, to happen, and we could hear his voice

He walked in, he came round, he saw Evita, and he said,

He sat down, and I just said to him, "President Mandela, thank

you so much for allowing us this 30 minutes to do

He said, "No, Pieter, I want to be on Evita's show

because I've got important things to say and nobody watches the news."

and he actually used this programme to give a New Year message

to the people of South Africa in which he said, "I want to talk

to the police, and say to you, I am on your side."

three or four policemen were dying every day,

because three armies had to become one, so he used this nonsense

programme to actually reach the policemen who didn't watch

the news because their colleagues died on the news.

But the thing is even as we are talking about Mandela

You clearly loved the man, and revered him, to a certain

extent, and I just wonder whether that was sort of the moment,

the liberation moment, when Mandela walked out of prison

and, you know, the ANC triumph in the election

and liberation has happened, the moment your satire really

died because, you know, you had been poking fun

at the oppressors, and the oppressors were finished?

I was bereft of Bothas - I had no more Bothas left -

Eventually, the ANC found me, after two years of really truly

celebrating the fact that the party I had voted for was the government,

and I suddenly realised, hang on, things are going wrong here.

There is an arrogant happening and it became very similar

It took me a long time to find his voice.

You know, it is a cross between Donald Duck and a

But Evita would say, with this wonderful audience at some

of his fundraisers for his foundation -

And she would say," Oh, President Mandela, so wonderful

to see you here, and, oh, my goodness, I never knew

why you were in jail - I thought you'd stolen a car!"

He was a great audience, and a few years before he really

left the world I had coffee with him, and it was the most

I sat and entertained him for half an hour, and he just needed popcorn.

The biggest criticism of you actually I think probably

comes from people inside the white community, leftists -

committed leftists, anti-apartheid strugglers - who look

at your work and can say, "You know what, yeah,

he sort of gently mocked the leadership of the National Party,

and the Afrikaner elite, but he didn't ever

I agree with that criticism, and that is why I say to many people

I am not a satirist, because I do not kill,

I do not destroy, and we had a very brilliant satirist called

I think in fact Robert Kirby was one of those people.

And he criticised me with such brilliance that it

I loved his venom, but he was brutal.

It didn't fit in with the need to keep the balance.

Again, let me just say that I also made fun of the white

liberals, and they also found that uncomfortable.

I'm just actually looking at a quote from Kirby, who said, you know,

the problem is that you turn these guys like Botha into

something avuncular, a bit lovable, instead of -

and this is the key point of his - instead of the horrible lethal

I did not turn them into the Hitlers, I didn't turn

I turned them into the idiots that they were.

The obscenity of what we took for granted - the Group Areas Act,

the Population Registration Act, where every year Helen Suzman

would ask the question, how many South Africans were reclassified?

So every time that came out 125 coloureds became white,

seven whites became Indian, three Indians became Malay,

four Malay became Chinese - the obscenity of that

nonsense made people laugh, but then they would stop

laughing when they realise that this was not a joke.

Here is something sensitive, and you have alluded to it

in this interview already - how you as a white Afrikaner man,

albeit playing a woman, begin to be really quite sharp

with the black post-liberation leadership without opening yourself

Very interesting question, and very difficult to answer it

just with one answer because there are four or five.

But I'll tell you the most important thing for me is my total discomfort

I did fight it without actually realising that I was fighting it.

Evita is now a member of the African National Congress.

I have to put her into the armpit of power.

She did join, because her black grandchildren - her daughter married

Do white South Africans like this rubbish that you are creating?

They do, and now this is the important thing -

rubbish is a very important word here, because Evita represents

so much of the white South African prejudice and fear.

She is - Evita - she is the Queen Mother,

who is suddenly now speaking Xhosa with her grandchildren.

And she says, "They're not black, they're not white -

What is she going to do protect democracy?

Well, let's look at modern-day Evita then.

We've got a rather wonderful clip here of Evita's free speech.

She does a thing every Sunday - she addresses the nation having

This one, she is actually considering the mindset of Afrikaner

whites in South Africa today, so let's have a listen...

Are we whites never going to realise that we actually got

There was no Nuremberg trial, none of us was hung like Saddam Hussein

for crimes against humanity, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela came out

of 27 years in darkness and gave us light, and Eskom gave up.

I mean it is absolutely ridiculous - everybody is always

Stop complaining - we are the luckiest

You know how blessed we whites are in the 21st

I love lots of things about that, not least the caption -

the most famous white woman in South Africa.

Evita doesn't sort of hide her light under a bushel, does she?

No, because Winnie Mandela is the most famous black woman

Let's stick with this idea about the sophisticated way

in which you're playing with the space you've

The space you've got today in the country may well be

I mean, there are lots of people concerned about the degree

to which the current leadership - Jacob Zuma and the people around him

- are compressing freedom of speech, making a free media more difficult.

And you have taken on Zuma, but Zuma fights back.

He accuses those who mock him of racism.

How comfortable are you with your attacks on Zuma?

Well, my attack of Zuma is a puppet - I have a little Zuma puppet based

on a Zapiro cartoon, which is wonderful, with a shower

head with the thing that you press and all the water comes out because,

you know, he said famously that after unprotected sex with a woman

who was HIV positive he had a shower, and he didn't use condoms.

I do remember that, and in fact it raises the point that one

of the subject upon which you have been fiercest in your critique

of the post-liberation black leadership is on this issue

of their response to HIV AIDS in South Africa.

You really went after Thabo Mbeki when he said he didn't believe HIV

AIDS could be spread by sexual intercourse, and he also

was extremely slow to believe in the power of anti-retroviral drugs.

Then I called apartheid the first virus, and HIV the second virus.

I said, we got away with the first virus.

But the second virus, really and truly, in the days

when I started and I used to go to schools, as many schools

as I could, because I had this fantasy that children had not been

That's not true - they have sex at the age of ten.

And the denials, because of my fear - it was purely selfish,

Because, frankly, you could have contracted it yourself.

Absolutely, and I had buried some of my best friends who died of it.

Again, I am interested in the way in which this became so personal

and so important to you that you sort of suspended satire

and just went for plain outright profound critique.

You said, "Once upon a time, not so long ago, we had an apartheid

regime in South Africa that killed people.

Now we have a democratic government that simply lets them die."

They did not need to die if they have the information.

You're saying in essence that people like Mbeki had the blood

I do, and I hope everybody will remember it for a long time.

My hope was also that he and his minister of health would go

to The Hague, because genocide will never happen like we remember

it through Auschwitz, or even through Rwanda and Burundi,

but frankly if you don't tell people how to save their lives

they will die, and it is the same thing.

I mean this in the most non-flippant manner,

What I mean is you don't just see yourself as a satirist and a comic -

sometimes things are too serious for that.

I think the satire is my weapon of mass distraction.

People don't expect to remember what they laughed at.

When I am confronting families and people who haven't got

the information to understand what I'm saying, I have

to simplify my attack and my humour, but when it comes to the fact

that in a democracy we have a democratically elected

government, as we have today, of great history -

and I use the word careless, which I think is the most terrible

word to use for a democratically elected government.

They knew what to do but they thought, "To hell with it -

Let's introduce a final clip, when we are now talking

about the democratically elected government that South Africa has

today, and this is you - and we have talked about the fine

line you tread - this is you taking on Zuma and the inadequacies,

as Auntie Evita sees it, of Zuma's political performance.

This is Auntie Evita talking about Zuma responding to opposition

questions in the South African parliament.

I don't know if Jacob Zuma was laughing at the EFF,

but every time he giggled every MP in the ANC laughed.

Of course they have to laugh - if they don't laugh

Now, I don't know why the president was laughing.

He actually said, "I don't know how to stop this laughter," and then

And I thought, laughter isn't hurtful.

Although I must say drugs and corruption, rape,

murder and the economy are not actually funny.

So serious they are not actually funny.

I just want to end this interview by having you reflect your personal

journey and the country's journey over a generation and more.

You say, and this is something that really struck me,

apartheid won't come back under its own name,

It won't be any more the segregation of colour because we've done that,

but it might be the segregation of education, the segregation

of language or the segregation of tradition.

Is South Africa reverting back to a society of segregation?

The danger of an uneducated society following a leader who says black

is more important than coloured, mixed-race coloured,

It started with Mbeki - he started calling black people

Africans, but the rest of us where coloured, Indian or white,

and I thought that was a very subtle way of dividing to rule.

And I just feel it's very important for us

to realise that, yes, apartheid, which I think

was horrendous in every single way, won't come back as it was then,

but I look at Europe today with the Muslim problem,

and Evita's next onslaught is to come to the United Kingdom

and to Europe and to say, "Look, I've got some laws here that you can

buy from me - you just take out black and white and put in Muslim

And we controlled people for 46 years, but Mandela saved our lives.

I never thought we'd get away with that.

I thought we would end up in the most terrible bloody

revolution, and that is why today I keep on saying to people,

I think we have a very badly structured government,

very weak leadership, but an extraordinary society.

Still a majority of black people who could have put me

against a wall and shot me for what I was responsible for -

which I was, as a white - but didn't.

Desmond Tutu to this day, staying with us,

and I keep saying to him, "Don't fly away - we need you."

I give constant reminders to my audience to just

Google Weimar Republic, then google Adolf Hitler in 1929.

Pieter-Dirk Uys, thank you so much for being on HARDtalk.

It is a fairly unusual weather pattern for