Skattie, have you heard?

‘Boerassic Park has apartheid signs and a gravy train with Thabo Mbeki on the engine’

Destroy a statue and another will take its place, says actor – which is why we need humour.

Pieter-Dirk Uys is the man behind one of South African’s most loved and recognised characters, tannie Evita Bezuidenhout. She developed after a friend introduced Uys to an editor at the Sunday Express in the late seventies.

“He said: ‘Would you like a column of a 100 words, at R1 a word?’ I don’t think that’s changed, I think they still pay R1 a word,” he laughs.

“Suddenly, I had 100 words in which to say funny things about our lives. And it was obvious it had to be political. Once a month I would create a woman in this column who, at a party in Pretoria, would say: ‘Skattie, have you heard?’ She would come up with all the scandals. About a year into this thing, the editor said to me: ‘Who is this woman?’ I said: ‘She is just a character – she’s the real Evita of Pretoria.’”

“And suddenly there she was,” he tells me at a charming coffee shop in Melville, Johannesburg.

Former president Nelson Mandela was fond of calling Uys to ask him to “do Evita”.

“Oh, Pieter, where’s Evita? She must make Oprah laugh,” says Uys, giggling after an impressive imitation of Madiba’s voice. “And yes we did! She was like ‘ohhh my God’.”

Uys, 70, is an opinionated, humorous and gentle person whose messages for a better South Africa are conveyed by the various characters he embodies. It’s hard to believe his age, given the amount of energy he exudes.

“I’ve been unemployed since 1975,” says Uys. Not being able to find a job anywhere, he had to make his own living, he says. “If I do nothing, nothing happens. If I do something, everything happens.

“So I thought: ‘Let me do a one-man show and make fun of PW Botha and white liberals.’ People wanted something to make them feel reassured.”

Uys describes himself as a “Cape Town kid who rebelled in the ’60s”.

“There was always this fear of authority. I grew up with that fear and I think one of the liberations was to start making fun of authority and laughing at the fear of it.”

At drama school in the sixties, Uys remembers the “token” black man who was in his class.

“I never thought of him like that, he was just such a fabulous friend – who plays my brother in this play and we are touching each other and arguing with each other.

“But when we left that room we couldn’t go anywhere. We couldn’t have tea together or a drink together or sleep together, we couldn’t do anything like that. Suddenly he was not of my tribe, class or my humanity.”

Race is something that does not go away, says Uys, pointing to xenophobia, which blames foreigners for the suffering of others in the country.

To turn the tide, he says, we must “turn the negative into the fashionable”.

His biggest concern is that every discussion about this country turns on race. “Like an alcoholic, we must start every day saying: ‘I will not be an alcoholic, I will not.’”

Uys says he agrees with the removal of colonial statues, but adds: “The moment you destroy [one], a new statue will take its place. That’s why Evita says: ‘I have a place in Darling, its called Boerassic Park and it’s a little museum. We have apartheid signs in there and we have a gravy train with Thabo Mbeki on the engine.” See www.citizen.co.za

The saying is that everybody is born equal. Man is born equal. I don’t believe that. I think we are born to become equal in what we make of ourselves. Equal in intellect, education, tolerance

Pieter Dirk Uys