About Tannie Evita
The most famous white woman in South Africa!
Tannie Evita
Evita Bezuidenhout, still regarded as the most famous white woman in South Africa, was born Evangelie Poggenpoel of humble Boer origins in the dusty Orange Free State town of Bethlehem on 28th September 1935.
Illegitimate, imaginative, pretty and ambitious, she dreamt of Hollywood fame and fortune, tasting stardom in such 50s Afrikaner film classics as Boggel en die Akkedis (Hunchback and the Lizard), Meisie van my Drome (Girl of my Dreams) and Duiwelsvallei (Devil’s Valley). She married into the political Bezuidenhout Dynasty and became the demure wife of NP Member of Parliament Dr JJ De V Bezuidenhout and the proud mother of de Kock, Izan and Billie‑Jeanne.
Power became her addiction. She wielded it in the boardroom, the kitchen and round the dinner table, becoming confidante to the flawed gods on the Boer Olympus and so shaping the course of history with her close and often unbeliveable relationships with the grim‑faced leaders of the day: Dr HF Verwoerd, BJ Vorster, PW Botha and FW de Klerk. Hand in hand with the glamourous Evita of Pretoria was the Tallyrand of Africa, Pik Botha, her ageing Romeo and constant friend, while watching her from afar as she watched him was Nelson R Mandela, alive today thanks to her timely interventions (see Pieter-Dirk Uys’s biography of Mrs Bezuidenhout, A Part Hate A Part Love).
Mrs Bezuidenhout’s ten years as the South African ambassador to the independent black homeland Republic of Bapetikosweti left an indelible mark on the blueprint of change, and today her recipe for bobotie is internationally regarded as the basis for reconciliation. ‘Sit down, eat and talk’ has been her slogan and many troublespots in the world owe their future to her kitchen skills. As the former barefoot meisie from Bethlehem majestically sailed into the stormy seas of her marriage and maturity, dazzling friend and foe alike with her Calvinist authority and dreaded lack of irony, like any other educated, brainwashed white South African, she constantly passed by the terrible aftermath of the apartheid system she helped to spawn, and having seen, looked away at her smiling reflection in the family silver.
In 2001, the Woman’s International Centre in San Diego (California) presented Evita Bezuidenhout with the Living Legacy 2000 Award for “her contribution to the place of women in the last century” and the laughter and positive energy that her presence evokes. Past honourees include such other legends as Hillary Roddam Clinton, Bette Davis, Mother Theresa, Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher.
Evita Bezuidenhout today divides her time between the Bezuidenhout family home in Laagerfontein, where her husband Oom Hasie lives, and the West Coast village of Darling, where her mother Ouma Ossewania Kakebenia Poggenpoel resides. Now in her 80s, this glamorous eternal flame of boere chutzpah holds court at the former Darling Station, now famous as Evita se Perron, where she entertains and dazzles awestruck visitors while also bravely following in the slipstream of Jacob Zuma’s presidential jet(s) to make sure that kos is on his tafel. As one of the few Afrikaner icons who did not lose their heads on the tumbrils of democracy, Gogo Evita is grandmother to her three ABarack Obama beige@ treasures: Winnie‑Jeanne, Nelson‑Ignatius and La Toya‑Ossewania. She has embraced the new democracy with an alarming passion, underlining her commitment to a nonracial future by her support that cuts across racial lines.
On 1 April 2012, Mrs Bezuidenhout joined the African National Congress in an attempt to help them on their long and rocky road to a corruption‑free future. Her own political team, also known as Evita´s People´s Party (www.epp.org.za), remains in waiting to deliver voter education for the next election. Evita’s optimism is simple: ‘You don’t need a crystal ball to see where we are going. The future of South Africa is certain; it is just the past that is unpredictable.’ Her weekly comment on the news of the day can now be seen on the Evita se Perron channel on You Tube (www.youtube.com/user/EvitaSePerron). Evita’s Free Speech is refreshed with a new episode every Sunday and has added Evita’s voice to the breaking news for over a year.
Pieter‑Dirk Uys on Evita
Towards the end of the 1970s, I was writing a weekly column for the Sunday Express in Johannesburg. It was during the time of the Information Scandal, which led to the eventual fall of John Vorster and the rise of PW Botha. The land was abuzz with rumours of embezzlements, thefts, even murder C but because of the ever‑increasing paranoia about press control and censorship, it was not possible to write about these things.
So I created a character in my column out of whose mouth these rumours / facts dripped like warm honey. She was the wife of a Nationalist MP, someone on the fringes of power but elbow‑deep in the catering, so she knew all the ins and outs. For three years she appeared about once a month, informing the nation of the stench under the cloak of respectability and no one stopped her (me). Someone even gave her a name: “The Evita of Pretoria”.
When I created my one‑man show Adapt or Dye in April 1982, I gave this creature a physical reality C eyelashes, high heels and handbag C and she has never looked back! Right from the start “Tannie Evita” stepped out of the chorus line and took off into folklore, leaving behind the many other characters I did in my shows.
The public wanted more of her all the time, so I created more around her C her husband Hasie and her three children. I played them all on stage in Farce about Uys and on film in Skating on thin Uys.
The absurdity of the homeland system cried out for attention and so she became its most famous ambassador. Even during the two years when I stopped performing her C fearing that she would swamp me with her forcefulness C the public didn’t notice. Mrs Evita Bezuidenhout was alive and living among them, in spite of me!
I introduced her to audiences in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Holland, Germany and Scandinavia. She became as confident on foreign soil as she was in her own backyard. People wrote to her, promising to support her in her legal efforts to control that “third‑rate satirist Pieter‑Dirk Uys” who was so cruelly making fun of her.
Politicians wrote too. Minister Pik Botha faxed her, Archbishop Desmond Tutu kissed her on the cheek and danced the toyi‑toyi with her in his garden. President Nelson Mandela often used her as his entertainment of choice at his legendary fundraising dinners. Designers designed for her. I dieted because of her.
Originally the idea for a biography of Evita centred around a few recipes and funny pictures, but once five years of research into the fascinating detail of South African politics had passed, I realised that Evita’s biography (A Part Hate A Part Love) was not just the story of a woman, or the story of a nation. It was, in many cases, the story of our lives. Her recipes have found their way into the kitchens of the nation with her two cookbooks: Evita’s Kossie Sikelela and Evita’s Bossie Sikelela. Thanks to Linda Vicquery, who collected and tested all the recipes, Tannie Evita is cooking for reconciliation. If it was left to me, an open tin of sardines and a few Provitas would have to do the trick!
Pieter-Dirk Uys
Pieter-Dirk Uys was born in Cape Town in 1945 and has been in the theatre since the mid-1960s.
Closely associated with both the Space Theatre in Cape Town and Johannesburg’s Market Theatre during the 1970s and 1980s, he has written and performed 20 plays and over 30 revues and one-man shows throughout South Africa and abroad.
His plays Paradise is Closing Down, Panorama, God’s Forgotten, Auditioning Angels, Faces in the Wall and Just Like Home have been performed internationally, and his one-man shows Adapt or Dye, One Man One Volt, You ANC Nothing Yet, Truth Omissions, Live from Boerassic Park, Dekaffirnated, Foreign Aids, Evita for President, Elections & Erections and Desperate First Ladies have been presented in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, Australia, the USA and Canada. His performance of Foreign Aids at La Mama received the Obie Award in New York in 2004.
Pieter-Dirk Uys has been doing this sort of thing for so long that people now refer to it as a career. Officially unemployed since the early 1970s, he writes, directs, acts, produces and does everything else, including the making of dresses and the wearing of them! Having survived the mediocrity of apartheid kultuur, it is his therapy and his joy to expose the bones of that dinosaur for the entertainment of democratic audiences worldwide. He is delighted to still have a government that on a daily basis writes his best material!
Most of Uys’s satirical work was available in South Africa on video (and still is, on DVD) and so, in spite of government censorship during apartheid, he built up a very large multiracial audience. Members of the present democratic parliament remember seeing his videos while in exile and in prison! He has been seen on SABC since the late 1970s in a variety of programmes, including An Uys up my Sleeve; One Man One Volt, which was to be screened prior to the 1994 election, but was held back for ten months; You ANC Nothing Yet in 1996; and The Great Comedy Trek in 2004. The series Going Down Gorgeous, featuring Nowell Fine in a saga from 1976 to 2004, was screened towards the end of the last century. Foreign Aids has been broadcast for Aids Day, 1 December, and in 2007 SABC2 presented Dinner with the President, a 13-part talk show hosted by Evita Bezuidenhout. Ten of Uys’s shows are currently available on DVD.
A prolific writer in many genres, his novel, Trekking to Teema, was South Africa’s first internet book in 2000, before being published in tree-format. He has also written Evita Bezuidenhout’s biography, A Part Hate A Part Love, as well as a book based on his12-part 1994 MNET television series, Funigalore, in which Evita Bezuidenhout, his most famous creation, interviewed the new democratic government’s leaders, including Nelson Mandela. In 2003, Uys premiered a new play, Auditioning Angels, and published his first volume of memoirs, Elections and Erections. A second volume of memoirs, Between the Devil and the Deep, became a bestseller throughout South Africa in 2005.
Both of Uys’s memoirs are now available as eBooks, as is his ‘autobiography’ of Evita’s younger sister, Bambi Kellermann, Never too Naked. Uys’s biography of Evita Bezuidenhout, A Part Hate A Part Love, long out of print, was released as an eBook in 2012. His novel, Panorama, published by Missing Ink in 2013, is also available as an eBook.
Pieter-Dirk Uys was awarded South Africa’s prestigious Truth and Reconciliation Award in 2001. He has received honorary degrees from Rhodes University (D.Litt.Hon. 1997), the University of Cape Town (D.Litt.Hon. 2003), the University of the Western Cape (D.Edu.Hon. 2003), the University of the Witwatersrand (D.Litt.Hon. 2004) and University of Kwazulu Natal (Doctor of Literature honoris causa 2014). As well, Pieter-Dirk Uys’s celebrated alter-ego, Evita Bezuidenhout, proudly received the Living Legacy 2000 Award in San Diego, USA. In 2011 Uys was honoured with a lifetime achievement Teddy award at the Berlin International Film Festival, and in 2012 he received both the FW de Klerk Goodwill Award and the German-Africa Award.
Since 2000 Pieter-Dirk Uys has been travelling around South Africa, visiting over 1.5 million school children, as well as prisons and reformatories, with a free AIDS-awareness entertainment called For Facts Sake!. He has also released a corporate AIDS-information video, Having Sex with Pieter-Dirk Uys, as well as the family-friendly video, Survival Aids, and Just a Small Prick!, a treatment of the fears surrounding testing for HIV.
Recent successes include Evita for President, Elections & Erections, Desperate First Ladies, and F.A.K. Songs and Other Struggle Anthems, a cabaret revue featuring Bambi Kellermann with her Bokkie Band. During 2012 Uys launched his latest one-man onslaught, Adapt or Fly, throughout South Africa, with extended seasons in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town, and later toured it to Namibia, while in 2013 he added An Audience with Pieter-Dirk EISH! to his repertoire, and premiered a new Bambi Kellermann cabaret, 50 Shades of Bambi, at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town. Highlights of 2014 included sold-out seasons of Adapt or Fly in Cape Town and Johannesburg and a two-week run of An Audience with Pieter-Dirk Uys at London’s Soho Theatre.
In April 2009, Uys directed Macbeki, his first new play since 2003, at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg. His next new play, The Merry Wives of Zuma, was premiered in late 2012.
In 2010 Uys published a cookbook, Evita’s Kossie Sikelela, which was followed in 2011 by Evita’s Blackbessie, her diary-journal and back-up for cellphone information, as well as the autobiography of Evita’s younger sister, Bambi Kellermann, Never too Naked. A second cookbook, Evita’s Bossie Sikelela, appeared in 2012, and Uys’s novel, Panorama, was published in 2013.
Darling! The Pieter-Dirk Uys Story, a documentary about Uys’s Aids-awareness presentations, directed by New Zealander Julian Shaw, is being shown worldwide. This DVD, as well as a wide range of Pieter-Dirk Uys’s books, plays and other DVDs, is sold in Evita’s A and C at the Perron.
In 2015, Pieter-Dirk Uys turned 70. To celebrate, a new collection of his Afrikaans plays, Stukke Teater, was published by Human & Rousseau; his newest play, African Times, had its premiere at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown; and Die van Aardes van Grootoor: The Musical – a reworking of Uys’s epic boeredrama, with music composed by Godfrey Johnson – received its world premiere at Theatre on the Bay in Cape Town. Chosen as the National Arts Festival’s first Arts Icon, Uys performed three special solo shows during the 2015 festival: A Part Hate A Part Love (featuring Evita Bezuidenhout); Never Too Naked (featuring Bambi Kellermann); and The Echo of a Noise. In honour of Evita Bezuidenhout’s 80th birthday, Kyknet presented a birthday special, Kyknet vir Tannie, produced by Evita’s former secretary, Bokkie Bam (Lizz Meiring), with greetings from Evita’s far-flung family, and interviews hosted by Coenie de Villiers.
In 2016, EVITA SE PERRON, Pieter-Dirk Uys’s cabaret theatre and restaurant in Darling, where he lives, will celebrate its 20th anniversary. The venue, which Uys converted from the old Darling railway station, is famous for its satirical garden, Boerassic Park, and is the domain of Evita Bezuidenhout, the ‘most famous white woman in South Africa’. The unique museum/nauseum of apartheid artifacts there, reflecting the madness of the past, is arguably the only satirical exhibition of South Africa’s recent past. The Evita se Perron channel on YouTube which hosts Evita’s Free Speech, a weekly feature on the state of the nation and the world.
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