Evita se Perron, Darling Station,
near Cape Town.
Pieter-Dirk Uys, satirical actor, writer and ever-vigilant critic of the government, many years ago created an alter-ego whom he named Evita Bezuidenhout. Erstwhile ambassador for the fantastical but all too real Bantustan of Bapetikosweti, and now intermittent candidate for the presidency of South Africa, Evita is a character known by South Africans of every persuasion who seem frequently to forget that her existence is imaginary. She is loved, laughed at and groaned at throughout the land.
Pieter bought the small railway station at a town called Darling, north of Cape Town, and there established a theatre complex, cabaret-café, and craft shop. The café is crammed with grotesquely hilarious but genuine artefacts of the apartheid era, such as for instance the kitsch lamp, the base of which is a bust of the terrorizing architect of apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd, who led the government from 1958 until he was murdered in 1966.
Countless framed photographs show Evita apparently being courted by the powers of the land - in this sample, Helen Suzman, Freni Ginwale, Tony Leon, Cyril Ramaphosa, F.W De Klerk, and, not least, Nelson Mandela.
Trainees pose with t-shirts. On the front: “Auntie Evita says...” and on the back: “Apartheid was a pigment of the imagination”; “Hypocrisy is the vaseline of political intercourse”; “Love your enemy: it will ruin his reputation”; and “The future is certain. The past is unpredictable”.
Pieter has also set up an outdoor museum which he has named “Boerassic Park”, exhibiting memorabilia of apartheid’s past. Lest we forget.
