Archived Reviews of Desperate First Ladies

REVIEWS OF DESPERATE FIRST LADIES in JOHANNESBURG  — AUGUST 2010

Mary Jordan: Review
– Mary Jordan, Business Day, 10 August 2010

PIETER-Dirk Uys is a theatrical phenomenon: successful, influential, an educator and a perfectionist. His conversation is witty and provocative, rather like Coleridge’s definition of Imagination: a combination of sameness with difference, of the unexpected and the familiar, of friendliness and competition.

Uys’s name is synonymous with surprise and even with shock, for he is a celebration of contradictions: hilarious and malign, polite and lewd, generous and caustic. But the most sensational of all his contradictions is that he has bamboozled us into accepting and keeping faith with Evita Bezuidenhout, the she who is a he, the amazingly actual star who has a complete life of her own.

Now, the joke of the pantomime dame lies in the tension between the female of the clothes and the sturdiness of the hairy male legs and heavy boots. The drag queen is the other extreme, really a man mocking a woman and at the same time trying to titillate the audience. Evita is somewhere in between: Uys, by the careful manipulation of Evita’s image on stage and screen, is a man, playing a woman, and making points about life. It is sublime character acting in which Evita takes on a visibility and a reality for audiences which vies with, and often subsumes, the public persona of Uys.

For Evita Bezuidenhout has her own inimitable style and career path. She has become a recognised celebrity, very much a part of the South African social scene. She has addressed Parliament. She has chatted to presidents and international movie stars. She is called upon to talk to book clubs, and to be interviewed on TV.

Yet, working from the premise that a politician whose intelligence is underestimated is more effective and more dangerous than a politician whose intelligence is respected, she never, ever misses an opportunity to hammer or lampoon those in government, for their conspicuously wasteful taste for the opulent and for their promises made and not kept.

What Uys has done, the trick that has been most successful, is to reproduce as accurately as possible something intrinsically funny in the way that most of us live. Once again he has repositioned himself, still illuminating the quirks and flaws in human behaviour , but registering and relishing them through the rich coherence of Evita’s own story, which Uys has built up over time, now barricading her into the trivia of domestic life by having her produce a cookbook.

Yet EVITA’S KOSSIE SIKELELA (Umuzi, R150), with design and culinary input by Linda Vicquery, is not just a random collection of soups and salads, bredies and curries, snacks, sweet desserts and tea cakes. It is a protocol of civility, an introduction to the difficult crosscurrents of modern family life, a rich description of ingredients and recipes that have remembered tastes and recollections, all heaped into a social archive to which each one of us can relate.

First, remove the dust jacket. Unfold it entirely, and there is Evita’s family, her son De Kock with his partner Moff de Bruyn, her daughter Billie Jean and husband Leroy Makoeloeli with their three children, LaToya-Ossewania, Winnie-Jean and Nelson-Ignatius. There’s a clock registering African time and a Groot Krokodil presented to Evita by the African National Congress Youth League. Glorious artwork on every page by Nina van der Westhuizen presents Evita in the styles of the Masters, from Rembrandt and Vermeer to Picasso, Warhol and Tretchikoff. Entertaining ideas range from Gorgeous Gay Muffins, Boesak’s Bubble and Squeak, Yengeni’s Swiss Chard with 4×4 Gravy to Golda Meir’s Chicken Soup. Each section is introduced with an irreverent rebuke, a resolute swagger, in the vigorous, confident falsetto prose that Evita has made her own.

Here are reliable recipes producing food that will not explode, collapse or fall over. Buy it.