Who is evita bezuidenhout

The cabaret theatre and restaurant created by Pieter-Dirk Uys in , is the home of Tannie Evita Bezuidenhout, the most famous white woman in South Africa.

It is a place where the tongue is permanently in the cheek. Pieter is an actor, producer, writer, director, costume designer, seamstress, comedian, recipe developer, author and AIDS Awareness activist. He took a very wrong turn and arrived in Darling, a slightly bigger rural town 80km North of Cape Town. He stopped for lunch and then bought a house.

He moved to Darling and a few months later the derelict Darling railway station building became available, so he bought that too. At the time Pieter was writing a column for a South African paper but could not write freely due to harsh censorship laws and the total control of the media by the Nationalist government.

He was brave and outrageous and incredibly clever. He cloaked his scathing commentary of the nationalist government in wit and humour. He poked fun at everyone, said what many were thinking but were too afraid to vocalize, and taught South Africans how to laugh at themselves.

It is also a museum which reflects the madness of the apartheid regime and celebrates everything kitsch, quirky and uniquely South African. But what makes the town really unique is its most flamboyant bloom: Evita. The Perron gives the town a glint of glamour, as though the circus has come to town, permanently. And the air of theatricality, of something larger than life, infects the people.

The Perron itself is a monument to kitsch and apartheid-era memorabilia. There are Piet Koornhof garden gnomes, plastic chickens and some delightful sculptures, like an ox wagon being pulled by a jet with a satellite in the shape of a potjie, and wine bottle with the label: Jou Ma se Oes grown and bottled on the estate Dronkverdriet.

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.

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. 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.

The future of South Africa is certain; it is just the past that is unpredictable. Towards the end of the s, I was writing a weekly column for the Sunday Express in Johannesburg. 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.

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.

Mrs Evita Bezuidenhout was alive and living among them, in spite of me! She became as confident on foreign soil as she was in her own backyard. Politicians wrote too. President Nelson Mandela often used her as his entertainment of choice at his legendary fundraising dinners.