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articles from 2011

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Speaking Truth to Power

– George Heymont, The Huffington Post, 4 March 2011

One of the most entertaining and decidedly in-your-face documentary about AIDS prevention focuses on the safe sex education efforts of Pieter-Dirk Uys, a South African entertainer who has made it his business to teach children about the dangers of the HIV virus using language they can understand while shaping the experience in a way that educates them without boring them or talking down to them. Most amazing is the fact that the film was the inspiration of a 15-year-old Australian boy who heard Uys speak to a school group and decided to make this documentary. For a teenager, it's quite a remarkable piece of work.

Uys's mother had fled to Capetown from Germany in the 1930s. Although she subsequently committed suicide, Pieter-Dirk and his sister were encouraged to develop their artistic talents from a very young age. Growing up as a half-Jewish, half-Afrikaaner anti-apartheid activist, Uys focused his wit and growing anger on becoming a political satirist.

Imagine someone with the bluntness of George Carlin, the wardrobe of the Kinsey Sicks, and the following of Dame Edna and you'll get an idea of what kind of social catalyst this man became for South Africans.

The film has surprising charms, including watching Archbishop Desmond Tutu doubled over in laughter as he watches Uys impersonate him. Pieter's devastating characterization of South Africa's former pro-Apartheid President, P.W. Botha, draws easy laughs from adults and children alike.

What lit the fire in Uys to make AIDS education his personal cause was South African President Thabo Mbeki's total cluelessness about the disease — especially after Mbeki announced that he didn't know any people who had died of AIDS. On top of that, there was the medical ignorance of Mbeki's minister of health, Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang (who was eventually forced to resign after claiming that AIDS could be treated with a combination of garlic, lemon, beetroot, and African potatoes).

Considering the political massacres in Darfur and Rwanda, many South Africans were shocked when Uys used the "G" word — genocide — to describe the South African government's reaction to the AIDS crisis. In short: "If we don't do anything, then the situation will take care of itself."

Some of the racist attitudes expressed by pro-Apartheid South Africans will remind Americans of the treatment of African Americans in the United States. Those whose lives have been touched by the AIDS crisis will well remember how the United States Government tried to avoid even mentioning the word "AIDS" during the Reagan administration (even as close personal friends of the President and his wife — like Roy Cohn — succumbed to the disease).

Pieter's courage has made him a role model to people like Nelson Mandela, who expresses his admiration for the performer in Darling! The Pieter-Dirk Uys Story. But what really strikes the viewer is Uys's skill with words ("Hypocrisy is the Vaseline of political intercourse") as well as his intense efforts to discover from local health workers what language will be most effective when addressing children in nearby schools.

As writer/director Julian Shaw explains:

    "When I was 15 years old I saw a show that changed my life. The show was just one man on stage — Pieter-Dirk Uys. Honestly, I had never heard of him before. I didn't know much more about South Africa than who Nelson Mandela was. And here, before my eyes, was this funny bald Afrikaaner man. I became mesmerised by his story.

    “In his show I learned how he had once fought the inhuman system of apartheid with satire. This was brave, because he did it in a political climate that saw critics of the government go 'mysteriously missing' everyday. He risked his life every time he stepped onstage. It seems like he only got away with it by dressing up as a woman: Mrs. Evita Bezuidenhout. In the 1980s he put the worst truths about the apartheid government into her lip-stick smeared mouth. This female alter ego of his has become the most famous white woman in South Africa. Whilst I found the theatricality of Evita quite incredible, I soon learned there was something far more pressing than the fading legacy of apartheid. It was HIV/AIDS, and it continues to tear South Africa apart.

    “Pieter does his part by going around to schools in South Africa to present a free 'AIDS Awareness Entertainment' to schoolchildren. He has performed for a million young people. When I first learnt of this, it blew me away. I knew that I had to get over to South Africa and try and make a film about what Pieter was doing. Hardly anybody knew this man outside of South Africa, and I wanted the world to know his story. I was able to get over to Africa by myself for the first time in 2003.

    “Over time Pieter and I became closer and I was allowed into his normally off-limits inner world. While a celebrity of the highest order in his homeland, Pieter also lives a deeply private and lonely life in many ways. Allowing me to film in his home was a first. What I didn't quite anticipate was what Stephen Gray, Pieter's first play editor, calls 'the electric root of Pieter's talent.' He is talking about a family with many profound paradoxes — a father who was an apartheid-era censor, Pieter's heritage that is both Jewish and Afrikaans (hence the famous one-liner 'I belong to both chosen people'), and his early years on the fringe in a brutal Calvinist culture.

    “But Darling! focuses on the now. There is a virus that threatens to wipe out an entire generation of young people in South Africa. Speaking to the school students that Pieter performs to on the road left me speechless. These young people are the beating heart of Darling! and their words the most powerful evidence of Pieter's ability to inspire and change.".

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