PIETER-DIRK UYS -The Hero

I WROTE THIS IN 2002.

ON HIS 2002 TOUR MR UYS CAME OUT DURING INTERVAL TO SELL BEADWORK MADE BY SOUTH AFRICAN WOMEN WITH HIV. A SOUTH AFRICAN  EXPAT COUPLE IN SYDNEY TOOK THIS OPPORTUNITY TO BERATE HIM - THEY HAD COME TO HEAR WHAT SOUTH AFRICA WAS LIKE NOW,  NOT TO HAVE ALL THIS AIDS BUSINESS THRUST AT THEM. THEN THEY STORMED OFF.

HIS SHOW WAS AS HILARIOUS AS IT COULD BE ABOUT 'ALL THIS AIDS BUSINESS' AND INTENSELY INTERESTING (HIS ARCHBISHOP TUTU WAS A MARVEL).

AUSTRALIANS COULD NOT HELP COMPARING PIETER-DIRK UYS/MRS BEZHUIDENHOUT TO BARRY HUMPHREYS/DAME EDNA. UYS HAS PUT HIS LIFE ON THE LINE FOR THE ONES AT THE BOTTOM; HUMPHREYS,  RAVENOUS TO BE OF THE ESTABLISHMENT, WAFTS IN SOME ETIOLATED STRATOSPHERE AS FAR FROM THE DISTRESSES OF OPPRESSION AS HE CAN FLOAT.

THE HERO'S JOURNEY

It is the early sixties. After another day at school our hero sits at home in Cape Town. The sound of a rather badly played Chopin Ballade comes from the next room where his father, a civil servant, is earning extra money teaching a not very gifted student. Every afternoon he comes home from school he is greeted with similar sounds as his mother's afternoon piano students more or less stumble over the keys. He sighs and returns his scissors to the photograph of Sophia Loren he is lovingly excising from the woman's magazine.

He doesn't know it yet but he is suffused by the dark power, apartheid.

He must journey from his native land into the light to see the darkness.

The light is film school in London near the end of the sixties. Our hero turns an appalled gaze back home - what people think of South Africans!

He loves South Africa. He is South African.

He must return.

Our hero, Pieter-Dirk Uys, needs associates in his quest to bring light to his darkened homeland. He finds them in Cape Town's Space Theatre and the Johannesburg Market Theatre. Like all allies in the hero's quest, at first they seem unlikely. They are black and white and 'coloured'. They have what seem like unpromising competencies. They teach him how to sweep a stage, to work a sound box, to rig lights, to make up, to sew a dress, to vanish. Which is a most useful skill when the police appear. As they do.

In between performing in banned plays, writing banned plays and novels, our hero gets a gig working for the Johannesburg Sunday Express. He lives in interesting times. The Information Scandal brings about the fall of Prime Minister Vorster and the rise of P W Botha. The land is agog with scandals - embezzlement, outright theft and murder - stewing in the high pressure caused by the regime's censorship policies.

Our hero now moves beyond what he learned from his associates, beyond the art of disguise, to acquire the magic of transformation.

About once a month a figure begins to appear in his column in the Express. She is Evita Bezuidenhout (Mrs) and she utters all the outlandish truths the regime won't tolerate. She is Pieter-Dirk Uys's familiar, channel, accomplice, Other, anima ... whatever.

Utterly unlike him, she is stupidly incapable of self-reflection, of irony, of self deprecation. But let us not underestimate her, she is still with us and she has grown, or at least moved with the times. She has more than a genius for survival - she also has one for denial.

Under pressure from interviewers, Pieter-Dirk breathed life into his monster. She stood down from the page and bestrid the stage. Gradually she reveals all - that her husband was the well known Dr J J Bezuidenhout, M P for Laagerfontein, Minister for Black Housing and Water Affairs. She had a pioneering mother (now 102) Ouma Ossenwania Kakebenia Poggenpoel born in an English concentration camp in the Orange Free State. Ouma Poggenpoel has never forgiven the English.

Ouma is grandmother to Evita's three children who have tested everyone's capacity for denial. Daughter Billie-Jeanne has a Black husband with whom she has had three children. Evita's twin sons, Izan and De Kock, have found solace in White Supremacy and gay liberation, respectively. If she were capable of embarrassment, the reappearance of Evita's sister, Bambi Kellerman, after all of these years, with reminiscences of how satisfying life was with an S S husband (he reminded her of people she knew 'back home'), would give Evita pause. But such is not the case.

Pieter-Dirk may suffer; that is not in Evita's nature.

After all, she is a Star. Always has been. In the fifties she was repeatedly given top billing in South Africa's legendarily kitsch Killarney films. Having been an intimate of the leaders of the Apartheid regimes and then Chief Liaison Person for Afrikaans Cultural Affairs in President Mandela's office, she now finds herself residing alongside Mr Uys amongst many Blacks in a veldt railway stop town called Darling. There Mrs Bezuidenhout runs a restaurant, two theatres and a shop.

She sees that President Mbeki has blundered hideously on HIV/Aids and wonders why he had not called for her years ago. After all, in 2000 the Woman's International Centre made her a Living Legacy. Other Living Legacies have been Mother Teresa and Hilary Clinton. When Pieter-Dirk Uys heard his Creature was to honoured in this way, he contacted the Centre in San Diego and asked if they realised that ... she didn't 'exist'? 'Of course,' they replied, 'it's not necessary for a legend to exist, just to be.'

Our hero has completed a phase of his journey. His quest to bring light to his beloved country has been achieved. But he finds that the dark spirits, though disturbed and set back, have regrouped, reconfigured, found new methods of attack. Similar things could be said of Mrs Bezuidenhout. She now says she always loved the Blacks and never knew any racists, did you?

With the help of his associates (Sophia Loren sent him a pair of her glasses to help Mrs B to see) Pieter-Dirk Uys continues in his quest.

Ian MacNeill