Tannie Evita was recently awarded the Living Legacy 2000 Award in San Diego by the Woman's International Centre for "Her contribution to the place of women in the last century."

While other honourees received the award for great things, Ons Tannie received hers for the laughter and positive energy that her presence evokes. Mother Theresa and Hilary Clinton are past honourees of this award.

Evita, non-PC superstar

Comedy critics often use the term "hard hitting" when we mean "not funny". It allows us to acknowledge someone's moral integrity while hiding the fact that we didn't actually laugh our socks off. It also proves that, in Britain at least, satire has taken a back seat to non-political humour.

In South Africa, no such luxury exists, as Pieter-Dirk Uys proved again last night. In a show which could have filled several pages of any dictionary of political quotations he flicked from one character to another, all of them trying to make sense of the aftermath o the apartheid, a creed which, as he says, "Was so successful we couldn't kill it off: we sold it to Yugoslavia."

It's slightly disorientating, but rather exciting to sit in a theatre and hear unfamiliar cultural references whizzing over one's head straight to their target. I couldn't, for example, say what was funny about "toyi-toying with sacred cows", though it provoked a roar of laughter from more informed audience members.

Chief villain of the evening, is the K-word, standing for the hated term "Kaffir". "I used to say the K-word", hisses one former apartheid apologist," but I can't say it in the new South Africa - I'd lose my job." Why? "My manager is one".

Uys has never shied away from putting on a dress to make a point. We have Lily Savage, but Afrikaners have Evita Bezuidenhout, the housewife mega-star and doyenne of political incorrectness. She salutes the new President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, "I did all the catering for his inauguration. Well, I had to, there was no one left in the kitchen - they were all in parliament!" It is a familiar Uys tactic, but is still devastating.

Evita was hard at work in the recent election - for real, telling villages about the importance of voting. There, she told us, one 18-year-old boy stood up and said "Madam, we fought for freedom and all we got was democracy."

There are many such pungent points, nor is our own system spared. Uys always does his homework, and anyone from the Dome or the Passport Office will have to endure some uncomfortable moments. Meanwhile, any inspiring political comedians should camp outside the bos office, and bring a notebook and pen.

"Dekaffirnated" (Tricycle Theatre) EVENING STANDARD by Alexander Games

Tackling the big K-word

Pieter-Dirk Uys (pronounced "Ace"), the white South African satirist, is nothing if not even-handed. His impersonation of a slobbering PW Botha is just as funny as his doddery Nelson Mandela.

The title of his new show incorporates the unspeakable "K" word, though the subtitle, "Calling a Spade a Spade", implies the pitfalls of frank expression in the new liberal dispensation. The key line is the cry that we fought for freedom but all we got was democracy. And Uys's white supremacists - some of whom now claim to have been "in the struggle" - admit that apartheid was a terrible mistake no one told them about.

Chief wriggler is the magnificent Evita Bezuidenhout, the Edna Everage of Jo'burg, fresh from a royal cocktail party, in shimmering black feathers and long red fingernails. Dressed to kill, or at least resemble Margaret Lockwood, Evita is the star in a gallery of displaced whites brought to vivid life with quick costume changes and wig switches. Uys injects real politics in to the laddish, cosy world of stand-up comedy. And you learn a lot about his uneasily developing country in two hours of satirical delight.

"Dekaffirnated" (Tricycle Theatre) DAILY MAIL by Michael Coveney

Satire is alive and well and living in South Africa

Political Stand-up comedy in this country is like voting Tory at a general election: a decidedly passé kind of thing to do. In South Africa, by contrast, people have never had the luxury of taking politics for granted. Even five years after the end of the apartheid, politics still infuses every nook and cranny of South African life. So it is hardly surprising that the leading comedian from that country, Pieter-Dirk Uys, should be a biting political satirist. He is now so used to the political arena that he recently performed in the South African Parliament as his most famous creation, Mrs. Evita Bezuidenhout, South Africa's answer to Dame Edna Everage. As he himself remarked, "I mean, please, can you see Lily Savage in the House of Commons?"

As Evita, he also fronted a 10 000 kilometre, 60-city voter education campaign before the general election last month. Uys has been a regular performer in London over the last decade, but his latest show, "Dekaffirnated", is perhaps his most moving work yet. It underlines how hopes for the brave new world of the Rainbow Nation have in many cases been cruelly dashed. "We quit a successful democracy", he reckons, "because we're all equally pissed off."

The most powerful sections of the show recount the voter apathy Uys encountered on his nationwide tour in the ballot bus.

Urging a black woman in a remote village to vote, he was unceremoniously buffed, "Why must I vote those fat cats back into the job, when they haven't given me a job?" In another off-the-beaten-track community centre, a young black man in the audience stood up and told Uys, "We fought for freedom and all we got was democracy."

In the character sketches of various South Africans that comprise the show, Uys demonstrates the frequent absurdity of politics. Language, for instance, has been distorted beyond recognition in the politically-correct, post-apartheid South Africa. When a bus is stolen in a township these days, "We call it affirmative commuting". Like all the best political comedians, Uys deftly intermingles light and shade, finding humour in subjects where by rights there shouldn't be any.

Who would have thought that a comedy show could include a routine about a white policeman telling Desmond Tutu's Truth and Reconciliation Commission the way he mistreated black female prisoners? When apartheid came to an end many predicted that Uys's satirical darts would be blunted.

"Dekaffirnated" (Tricycle Theatre) THE INDEPENDENT by James Rampton

Laughing in Black and White

Political comedy in this country died with the downfall of Mrs Thatcher. Bereft of her beté noire, comedians instead turned to surrealistic musings on the import of, say, Thunderbirds or Raleigh Choppers. In South Africa, on the other hand, political comedy is very much alive and kicking. The death of apartheid just gave comics fresh targets to take aim at.

South Africa's leading satirist, Pieter-Dirk Uys, who spent years kicking against apartheid pricks, now finds himself attacking those who are post-rationalising their role in it. In his new show at the tricycle, "Europeans only" - a reference to the signs that were seen all over public places during the apartheid era - his vehicle of attack is Evita Bezuidenhout. Dripping with the sort of spangles and sparklers that wouldn't have looked out of place on Liberace, she is a woman who, if it ever became an Olympic event, could win a gold medal in self-justification.

After her questionable contribution to the apartheid regime, Evita has reinvented herself as a peace campaigner. She now claims to have clinched the South African peace accord by feeding all sides with a pudding that stuck their teeth together. She is over here to offer Tony Blair the recipe for the Northern Island negotiations.

The problem is that evita's new sheep's clothing keeps slipping to reveal her old wolf's incisors. "We don't want worldly goods like diamonds and gold," she declares with typical grandiosity. "We just want aesthetic things - like cheap servants." Later Evita casts a worried glance at the servant preparing her food at the back of the stage and asks, "Are you Xhosa? Thank heavens. I thought I had a Zulu behind me with a knife in her hand."

Just before the interval, she implores us to contribute to the charity stall in the foyer, "For disadvantaged Afrikaners in Pretoria", before storming out to deal with her stroppy black driver. "I'm very good at negotiating with people like that. I have experience of talking to blacks," she asserts, drawing a pistol from her handbag.

But Evita does not just make jokes at the expense of white South Africans. At one point, she says of Nelson Mandela's long imprisonment, "He's very grateful we kept him from Winnie all those years."

British politicians are not off-limits, either. Evita proudly states that in South Africa, "We've had four years of democracy now - you've just celebrated your first." And she reckons that Britons took to Nelson Mandela because "They hadn't seen a politician they could trust for such a long time."

Uys's show does not always make for a cosy evening out - one particularly chilling section about the treatment of black female anti-apartheid prisoners had me shifting uncomfortably in my seat. But "Europeans Only" reminds us that political comedy doesn't have to be bludgeoning, blunt, broadsword; it can be an implement sharp enough to slice biltong with.

"Laughing in Black and White" (Tricycle Theatre) THE INDEPENDENT by James Rampton

Taking the Satire out of Africa

"Just as Americans have their unmentionable "N" word, so today's South African has one beginning with "K", to be uttered in public at the speaker's peril. But, of course, there are exceptions. Use is permitted on the rarest of occasions; when one particular person mouths it, if he or she is dressed in drag, is answered by shouts of joy, gasps of laughter and congratulations from all quarters, Nelson Mandela included.

That person is Pieter-Dirk Uys, a performer whose gifts and intentions are so rare nowadays he may be unique. He is a mimic, he is a comic; in Mrs Evita Bezuidenhout he has created the most famous white woman in Africa; but above all else, and at the same time underlying it, he is a passionate political and social satirist.

He began as a playwright. When most of his plays were banned in South Africa he launched his one-man shows targeting the bigoted National Party regime, a career swerve requiring courage. But, as he says of his former targets, "Most are now either dead, in retirement, insane, forgotten or recycled as avid supporters of black majority rule."

For the alert satirist, while old targets may die or fade away, new ones come hurtling into view. South Africa's new life as a democracy provides Uys with plenty to mock and 90% of his latest programme focuses upon this. He has been a regular visitor to Britain, performing at the "Tricycle" almost annually for more than a decade and our political practices have never been spared. It is not only in Pretoria that avid support can switch from, so to speak, white to black. As Evita memorably observes in one of her throwaway comments, "Hypocrisy is the vaseline of political intercourse…."

In the first half of the play he mostly plays himself, giving the history of the "K" word and then a moving account of his recent tour of the republic, visiting remote towns and townships in his ballot bus, urging people to exercise their new right to vote. There is vividly expressed passion here and passion of a different sort when he plays a policeman whose unreconstructed habits of thought leak out in terrible fashion when testifying before the Truth Commission. He catches the self-justifying stare in the eyes, just as a lopsided scowl turns him into a sour-faced PW Botha, and a down-turned grin astonishingly makes him Bill Clinton.

In the second half, furred and bejewelled, he gives us his casually bold-speaking Evita and two contrasting Jewish ladies….

"Dekaffirnated" (Tricycle Theatre) THE TIMES by Jeremy Kingston