The South African satirist and on stage drag queen Peter-Dirk Uys doesn’t mince his words. “After having had an apartheid government that killed people,” he says, ” we now have a democratic government that just lets them die.” He’s talking about AIDS — and what he says is the refusal of South Africa’s current president Thabo Mbeki to tell the truth about the disease that each day claims the lives of six-hundred South Africans.
Uys is no stranger to political theater. He’s been in the spotlight since the eighties, when he was famous for his one-man performances criticizing apartheid. But today, Uys says AIDS has become a more dangerous killer than apartheid ever was — and so he’s fluffed up his wigs, and his wit in a campaign to educate people about AIDS by getting them to laugh.
Guests:
Peter-Dirk Uys. His latest performance piece is “Foreign AIDS.”