JOHANNESBURG (AP) β A cross-dressing South African satirist who lampooned the leaders of white racist rule decades ago says there is plenty to laugh at 20 years after the end of apartheid.
Pieter-Dirk Uys spoke to journalists Tuesday at Johannesburg’s Market Theatre, where he is launching a four-week run of “Adapt or Fly,” a one-man show in which he pokes fun at political figures of the past and present.
They include P.W. Botha, an apartheid president; Nelson Mandela, who became South Africa’s first black president in 1994; and Julius Malema, an opposition leader who fiercely criticizes today’s government.
Uys, 69, will play his signature character Evita Bezuidenhout, a flamboyant white woman and stalwart of the apartheid era. Uys has reinvented the character as a member of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress.
