Word: bezuidenhout
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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During South Africa's long night of apartheid, white playwright and social commentator Pieter-Dirk Uys felt unable to speak out. So he invented a character who could: Evita Bezuidenhout, the wife of a fictional Afrikaner nationalist figure. In the late 1970s and early '80s, "Evita" lampooned the establishment in a series of satirical diaries. Later, with the help of a wig, heels and a handbag, she became real. Black and white alike loved the subversion. Then, in 1996, Uys took over a derelict railway station in Darling, a semidesert town an hour's drive north of Cape Town...
When Evita Bezuidenhout, South Africa's first lady of satire and sequins, decided to buy the old train station in the Afrikaner town of Darling and transform it into a dinner theater to perform her political cabarets, the residents were a little concerned. Since 1981 Evita Bezuidenhout (pronounced Bezaydenhote) had kept the nation crying - with laughter - as she used her sharp tongue to rip to shreds the apartheid government and all those who stood by it on TV, in South African theaters and on the London stage. Ten years on, however, Evita se Perron (Evita's Platform in Afrikaans...
...legend that raping a virgin cures the disease. The son of a German-Jewish mother and an Afrikaans father, Uys, 56, began his career as a playwright in the early 1970s but found his work banned. Undeterred, he donned a frowzy dress and created his famous alter ego, Evita Bezuidenhout, the saccharine-sweet wife of a conservative politician - and used her character to lampoon apartheid's absurdities in farces like Adapt or Dye and Skating on Thin Uys. His Evita not only escaped the censors - she soon had the nation eating out of her well-manicured hand. After...