Understanding Post-Apartheid South Africa Through Comedy

With a line of eight cars impatiently waiting behind me I release the clutch and press the gas sending four passengers and myself flying three feet into an intersection. I have stalled once again, but this time, all traffic lanes are blocked. Despite watching the instructional video on YouTube, my learning to drive stick shift on the fly is going as smoothly as, well, the manual switching of gears at the hands of an inexperienced driver. Regardless, this is how South Africans commute, and if I want to feel a part of this culture, I need to drive like them. Plus, no lack of automatic cars will prevent me from seeing Pieter-Dirk Uys perform stand up comedy as his alter-ego Evita Se Buitengracht, also known as ‘South Africa’s most famous white woman.’ At this moment though, I am not one with the South African culture, but am ‘that one blocking the road.’ When I began the day I did not realize how alienating my attempts at community immersion could be.

Once I manage to get to the comedy club Evita came on stage, and for an hour spoke intelligently and humorously about modern South African politics and the legacy of apartheid. The audience’s laughter spoke more than a simple ‘ha,’ – they displayed a strong sense of displeasure with the current state of South African politics, and a faint nostalgia for the days of the apartheid government. “You know what’s great about Mandela and 1994 (the year apartheid ended)?.... We got away with it!” She said. At that moment, I laughed as if I was one with the audience. One mighty guffaw displaced all pretenses and barriers preventing me from fitting in with the South African culture. All notions of formalities were thrown out the window as I, along with one hundred other people, communicated through grunts and shouts at the recognition of wit. On a deeper level though, this laughter indicated the whole audience was in a moment of agreement. We all recognized and accepted a truth about ourselves, something we already knew yet also freshly discovered in that moment.

Despite not being a white South African myself, Evita’s lamentations about apartheid created a bridge between our cultures and experiences. As I laughed with the audience, I laughed at the joke not in the context of being a South Africa, but as an American. I do not know the shame or lingering nostalgia of apartheid, but I have the experiences of my family owning slaves and enjoying the benefits of being white before the Civil Rights movement. I connected with the audience based on our shared feelings of embarrassment regarding the lasting benefits of a former racial hierarchy. I felt closer to that community in that moment than I would during the rest of my six months in the country. No class I took, or book I read, so aptly illuminated what it meant to be white in a post-apartheid South Africa.