Evita’s Blackbessie
by Evita Bezuidenhout
(Umuzi, R180)
There’s not much that Pieter-Dirk Uys (PDU) doesn’t have an opinion on. The good thing is that what he says is usually worth its weight in gold.
“I could easily become a bergie (vagrant) with a baard (beard),” he says about ageing and the way he keeps rolling from one thing to the next, like his latest book. “I could even become wasteful, but we have to respect the time we have.”
There’s not much chance of him not doing that because PDU is having way too much fun in his sixties. “I love being this age. We’re allowed to be who we want to be.”
And just like that, he snaps a finger and is on to politics and the municipal elections. “If we don’t reclaim our country, we will lose it,” he says. With the municipal elections, we are voting for the backstage staff. “These are the people cleaning our streets,” he notes. “We need to get it right or our cities and towns will fall apart.”
Tannie Evita is in town to promote her latest book, a journal of sorts, or as PDU says, “don’t push the send button, turn a page”.
Even though he is fully connected and loves it, he knows that writing things down and keeping your most important details in something other than electronics has to be done. “Everything we need is on that fragile little thing,” he says. If there’s a sudden sunflare, we will lose all our personal information.” He’s aware that journalist/author Max du Preez has lost his computer (“for a second time”, says PDU) and again he had no backup.
That’s what Blackbessie is about, in some instances. “Evita has given pointers throughout the book,” he notes, which are “pretty handy, including reminders about not dying without a will”.
“You’re gone and you leave everyone else in disarray.”
But, it’s not only these little niggles we need reminding about. PDU has always had a way of putting one foot in front of the other in the most astonishing way.
If there’s anyone who sees and views things as they are, here’s your man and yet, there’s always a smile on his face. He never stops smiling and in conversation, there’s always a giggle. “When people wallow in the negative, I leave to phone my aunt in China,” says PDU. “What’s the point?”
And that’s pretty much how he runs his life and why he jumps in and tries to fix what is broken rather than prattling on – and he does this much better than most.
But he knows this is again his time. He speaks his mind on and off stage but always chooses his words wisely. “We have to be the cracked mirrors to show the cracked society,” he adds.
That he does with great relish and in many different guises. And always with much laughter.
His heart is in the right place and he knows exactly how to say and show everything and anything. This, while prodding constantly with his rapier sharp tongue as he speaks his mind freely and smartly.
“People don’t do their homework,” he says as he wades through the centuries of men, money and often madness. “We need a little less tinsel and bling and more results.”
But he’s excited about things to come.
“There’s a new generation of voters out there who don’t care about the past.”
In his books and his shows, he understands that everything is about fear. “If we can laugh about it, it becomes less crippling.”
PDU does much more though than just spread laughter.
For many years, he has been visiting schools to spread the Aids message. He has also created the Darling foundation because of where he lives. What has him smiling at the moment is their early development programme.
“We started with a handful of kids between the ages of three and five,” he says. Now there are 70.
“These children have to be taught anything from reading skills to how to button their shirts. They don’t always have someone around to show them and sometimes their parents don’t know!”
He loves being involved. “I don’t act,” he says about many things. “I react.” He does so with amazing results and is thus acknowledged from Berlin, where he received the Teddy Award to our very own Naledi awards.
Getting ready to haul Evita out to talk about her latest book at the Pretoria News/WritersSpeak book lunch, he says it has become second nature. “All I have to do is to remember to suck in my tummy and check my double chins!
“This is the first time she’s speaking about the book and I have no idea what she is going to say.”