How the Most Influential South African Drag Queens Came to Work with a Girl from New Jersey
By Holly Lehren
When I started making documentaries, thinking about the kinds of stories I most wanted to tell, I knew one thing – I loved drag. I was a fan of that whole world, the performance, the camp, the glamor. The sheer over-the-top fun. Bringing the basic notion of gender to its knees with a simple bat of the eye.
And then, in 2018 while on vacation in South Africa, I wandered into a bookstore in a Johannesburg neighborhood and found a used paperback book. On the cover was a seemingly prim matronly woman shaking Nelson Mandela’s hand.
The woman smiling at Mandela was Evita Bezuidenhout, the most famous white woman in all of South Africa. She hosted a top-rated television show at the very time the country’s apartheid regime was crumbling. But here’s the twist: I soon learned there was a man inside the dress, satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys. Mandela was having a very public televised meeting with a drag queen just as he was taking office.
In the pages of Funigalore, I stumbled upon a little-known chapter of the surprising role South Africa’s drag queens played in the anti-apartheid and queer liberation movements. While subject to prosecution under apartheid’s Immorality Act, the performers were able to influence the 1996 constitution’s Bill of Rights, with South Africa becoming the first country in the world to explicitly include sexual orientation as a protected category.
My fascination with South Africa’s drag community grew. It’s an area, I would discover, that few filmmakers have explored, and as I began to access archival material and make inquiries into the Cape Town drag community, my idea for a documentary began to take shape.
In pursuit of this story, I sought out queer artists and was connected with the noted drag queen and activist Odidi Odidiva. Odidi has performed internationally and has served on the executive board of Cape Town PRIDE and as a spokesperson for the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation.
We spent a considerable amount of time during the global pandemic – emailing, phoning, texting through WhatsApp – discussing what a film about South Africa’s drag community would look like. Of course, at the top of the list was the story behind the picture of Evita and Mandela shaking hands. But first, I completed a short film on Odidi himself.
I sat on my side of the world, he sat on his. Zoom was the bridge, and Anton Kleynscheldt, a cinematography professor, was just off screen recording it all.
For the first interview, Odidi wore a coat of many colors, bright blues and oranges and reds.
“Odidi, I really like your jacket. What are you wearing?”
“Well, I’m wearing the biker jacket with African print. I bought it for my dad’s funeral, to tell you the truth. I just wore it as a full zipped-up jacket.”
I couldn’t help but smile at this.
“Well, you know, I wanted to put my best foot forward.”
With that our series of interviews began. Odidi talked about his formative years, his religious upbringing as the son of an Anglican priest, and the historical and contemporary art and queer community. I spent a month combing through the footage and produced a short doc on Odidi and how he developed his drag persona in the shadow of South African apartheid. “Why you have to be black and gay?” won “Best LGBTQ Short” in the Independent Shorts Awards, among other honors.
I continued with interviews and my research, and, of course, was extremely interested in meeting with Pieter-Dirk Uys. It seemed like a long shot.
During the summer of 2022, I asked Odidi, “Any chance we could swing Pieter-Dirk?”
Somehow, miraculously, we swung Pieter-Dirk:
Hi Odidi,
Great to hear from you!
Yes, come to Darling and we can set up and shoot at Evita se Perron, sounded by the Evita pics etc.
A date and time was settled; around noon South Africa time, around 5 a.m. my time, August 15, 2022. Odidi and Pieter-Dirk would sit down for tea at Evita se Perron, the cabaret theater and restaurant Uys has run for nearly 30 years. There’s also a museum that features Evita, the role.
Pieter-Dirk played on the popular television show that would introduce the country to Nelson Mandela and other major figures of South Africa’s new democratic government.
Odidi, who was growing up during this time in Cape Town, watching protests and marches from his home, explained Pieter-Dirk’s significance during this time: “[He was able to] connect current affairs, serious affairs, and just hold up a mirror to everybody. And say, ‘Look. This is how crazy and buffon-ius you are behaving.’”
What set Evita apart from the rest of the drag queens at the time, Odidi explained, was the authenticity Pieter-Dirk brought to the character.
“Because he was being authentically the character, being authentically Afrikaner, his etiquette of risque would never go over the line,” Odidi told me. “Evita is not a drag queen character from the drag scene. When that authenticity shines through, you don’t go over the line, because Evita wouldn’t do that. I think that’s what made it stand out … that it wasn’t typically drag.”
Pieter-Dirk was wearing a gray beanie and dark sweater for our interview. He sat comfortably in his chair outdoors, the birds tweeting around him. Odidi sat across from him, with me in New Jersey directing and recording over Zoom and Anton filming in the garden in Darling, South Africa.
We asked how Evita was able to scoop an interview with Mandela and the new government of South Africa.
“ I just knew that’s where she had to go.”
Just think about it — Mandela had just taken office when this interview aired. The new government was still trying to find a firm footing in the new South Africa. The police Mandela was addressing were mostly all white, with ties to the old apartheid regime. Not only that, five policemen on average were being killed every single day. Mandela realized that most were not watching the news, because their colleagues died on the news. But they were watching Evita’s lighthearted show with a funny Afrikaans matron. It was comfort food.
Pieter-Dirk Uys put it this way:
“The policemen were watching this program, Evita Bezuidenhout, a man in a dress talking to Nelson Mandela. And it was fun! But he got the message across, saying ‘we must work together and I am there for you.’ Brilliant! And I knew from that moment on that Nelson Mandela will change the world with a sense of humor.”
In this same era of South Africa’s history, gay rights activists in Johannesburg and Cape Town were among those applying pressure so that the country’s new constitution enshrined legal protections regardless of sexual orientation.
When I first started this project, I was entranced by the image of a drag queen shaking Nelson Mandela’s hand. Now, I’ve discovered how that picture came to be, and the trove of stories that exist beyond that one image. I had met – at least virtually – two of South Africa’s most prominent drag queens.
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