South Africa's version of RuPaul shakes up South African politics in 1999 elections
By Suzanne Pardington

(Note: This article appeared in the San Francisco Examiner in May of 1999.)

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In the months leading up to South Africa's first all-race elections five years ago, voter education specialists came from all over the world to teach first-time black voters -- many of them illiterate -- how to put a mark next to the face of the candidate of their choice. Now, just two months before a presidential and legislative election many experts say is more important than the first, South Africa's best hope to get out the vote may be Evita Bezuidenhout, a nationally-celebrated drag queen.

The flamboyant Afrikaner matron recently concluded a three-week tour of 39 South African towns, performing 60 free stand-up comedy shows that also informed audiences on how, when and why to vote. The tour was so popular, speakers broadcast the show to overflow crowds outside the theaters. The rest of the nation could follow Evita on her tour via early morning radio broadcasts from each town, and those who missed her performances will be able to see them this month on South African TV.

"It was to put across very simple things," said Evita's creator and alter ego Pieter-Dirk Uys. "That the vote is secret, that the vote is sacred, that if we don't have a good second election we won't have a third one, that children are terribly important in this election because they will be the next election, that there are many choices and that choice is one of the great things of a democracy."

As President Nelson Mandela prepares to hand over power to a new president (expected to be Deputy President Thabo Mbeki), many South African voters, especially the younger generation, seem disillusioned with what government can accomplish.

Five years ago, Mandela's party, the African National Congress, campaigned with promises of bringing jobs, housing, water, electricity, roads and economic development to communities forgotten in the half-century of Apartheid.

While progress has been made in many areas, crime and unemployment are worse than ever, opposition parties seem more focused on criticizing the ANC than creating their own policies, and new registration requirements have led to lower voter registration numbers. In 1994, 86.9 percent of eligible voters turned out at the polls, but the Independent Electoral Commission estimates that 65 percent of eligible voters will cast their ballots this year.

Some analysts say a low voter turnout on June 2 could give the ANC a two-thirds majority in Parliament and the power to change the constitution. While Mandela and Mbeki have denied charges that the ANC wants to rewrite the constitution, there is fear in some quarters that South Africa might follow the path of many African countries, such as Zimbabwe, that are ruled by increasingly oppressive parties with an ultra-majority over the opposition.

Other analysts are confident that South Africans of all stripes are prepared to defend their nascent democracy.

"There are only three to four percent (of votes) that separate us from a country where the government could rewrite the constitution," said Tom Lodge, research director at the Electoral Institute of South Africa. "But even if they got that two-thirds, there is still the one-third and a substantial civil society. This isn't Zimbabwe."

With her bouffant hair, sugary smile, long red nails, and love of sequins, Evita may seem an unlikely spokesperson for multiparty politics. But South Africans have been swallowing Evita's sugar-coated pill of political awareness for 20 years. Uys said Evita has been around so long, people think of her as a real person.

After a show at his dinner theater an hour outside of Cape Town recently, Uys removed Evita's wig, heavy makeup and tent-shaped dress, put on a tank top and shorts and sat down at a table to talk about Evita, the upcoming elections and the future of democracy in South Africa.

Uys, 54, is the gay son of an Afrikaner father and Jewish mother. He has written 44 plays, as well as books, newspaper articles and TV and radio projects, many of them taking satirical and critical look at South African politicians and policies.

His alter ego was born in the late '70s, when he found most of his work banned by the Apartheid government. He was writing a weekly newspaper column, but the government censors wouldn't allow him to say anything critical of Apartheid. So he created Evita as a fictional character in his newspaper column to say those things for him.

She started out as the gossipy wife of a National Party insider. Uys would write that he ran into her a party, and she would say, "Darling, have you heard?" She would then recount stories of corruption and mismanagement in the government ranks. To his surprise, Uys got away with it, and he brought Evita to life in the theater in 1981.

Since then, Evita's life has transformed with the nation. Before the end of Apartheid, she was the ambassador to a fictional black homeland Bapetikosweti. Her commentary pointed out the hypocrisy of the homeland system, according to which black people (75 percent of the population) were forced to live on designated tribal land (13 percent of the country's total land area). Now, she's President Nelson Mandela's unofficial Afrikaner hostess at state banquets, and she says she was secretly part of the struggle against Apartheid.

Over the years, Uys's critics have spied on him, tried to poison his pets and threatened to kill him. But Evita was undeterred.

"Nothing is beyond a joke," Uys said. "The more dangerous, the more important."

Uys said he got very nervous when he read about voter apathy in the papers this year. He decided it was time for Evita to step in, despite the apparent danger of talking politics in areas where political discord had erupted in violence in the past year.

In Richmond, where some 80 people were killed in political violence last year, members of the opposing parties sat side by side in the audience, while Evita wagged her finger at them and said, "Stop this nonsense!"

"There were some moments before I said things when I thought, 'Must I say this? Am I going to be killed now because of what I am saying?' But they were the best moments in the whole evening, because people out there realized it took courage to say," Uys said.

Although Evita's show usually attracts white, urban audiences, Uys found black audiences to be more appreciative of the show.

"Black people fell out of their chairs and lay on the floor, screaming with delight. God, it was marvelous! And the white people were clutching their pearls."

Many whites did not come, Uys said with amusement, "because it was a free show and they were worried they'd have to sit next to a drunk, black liberator."

Uys paid for the traveling show himself with some help from donors. While the National Democracy Institute, the Electoral Institute of South Africa and other non-governmental organizations have sponsored voter education sessions in the past month, international attention and funding has moved to the continent's other fledgling democracies, such as Nigeria and Rwanda. Most of the voter education sessions in South Africa are aimed at young, first-time voters, only 31 percent of whom are registered.

"The most difficult part of the population to reach is the young urban voters, people who were 13 during the last elections," said Patricia Keefer, director of the National Democratic Institute. "They haven't seen anything change. They aren't even disillusioned, because they never had a chance to have illusions."

At a voter education session last Monday in Soweto, it was easy to see why voters respond to Evita more than traditional voter education trainers. In the front yard of a modest three-room brick house in Meadowlands, one of the oldest townships in Soweto, Electoral Institute of South Africa trainer Ralebone Matshitse, 29, lectured a dozen members of the Ikageng (which means "build yourself" in the Twala language) Youth Group on the meaning of democracy and the importance of their vote. While Mtshitse chastised them for being uninterested in politics, they seemed so bored they were about to fall asleep.

But these young adults are not lazy or apathetic. They had just organized an impromptu two-hour variety show, including a beauty pageant for 7-year-olds and lip-synch and dance contests. In the past year, the youth group has also cleaned up a local dump, formed a neighborhood crime watch and planned an AIDS education workshop. Unlike their parents, they have no memory of the Apartheid era.

Noah Kekana, 66, a messenger for an advertising agency who has lived in the same house in Meadowlands for forty years, said he was the first in line to register to vote. He said he can't understand why his children are not interested in politics.

"Children don't think for tomorrow," he said. "They think backward. We think forward. Before, the white government didn't care about poor people. If you were black, you had nothing to say. Today you've got the right to talk about what you like and they will listen."

Lodge, a political researcher, said it's not surprising that young voters are not interested in voting.

"Politics is fairly boring," he said. "It's about putting crosses on paper. If you're going to sell it to young people, you've got to do it in a way that's more interesting to young people."

Lodge said Evita has captured the public's imagination.

"It's fun," he said. "It's made a lot of people who feel less involved more involved."

Uys said the tour was a life-changing experience.

"All of us (on the tour) have radically changed our prejudice of South Africa," he said. "Everybody talks about the bad news, but there is more good news than bad news. There are huge passions out there."

But he said he did find disillusionment with the government. Uys said people were angry that politicians ignored them for five years, only taking an interest in them right before the elections.

"People said, 'Why do I have to vote Mbeki into a job when I haven't got a job? I voted for freedom, and all I got was democracy.'"