Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - November 27, 2001
Donwald Pressly
At a function in Cape Town at which prominent businesspeople pledged to fight the disease in their workplaces, Uys urged people to do more to combat the disease.
Uys - who is best known for his role as Evita Bezuidenhout - said that children needed to be guided about the dangers of sex and so-called "dirty words" had to be demystified.
He said that he offered to do a show at Western Cape schools and got an immediate response from 120 schools including Rustenburg Girls' High "where they don't have sex ... but have credit cards" to schools in Mitchells Plain where they did "gangs and drugs".
Uys said it was a tragedy that in a society where the male sex organ was "96% black" there were only white condoms available. "They say it looks like a mealie wearing one," he told the crowd emphasing that while this seemed like a joke, it was a serious issue.
He said at a reformatory he had visited there was not a single condom vending machine although the "children" in the institution were there for a variety of crimes including murder and rape. As a result HIV levels were running high.
Uys said it was easy to say that the safest sex was no sex before marriage "but we are not living in a musical".
Even children needed to have access to "a parachute" in the form of a condom - because unprotected sex was a reality in South African society.
Uys said there was a serious problem of role models in society. People had to go out of their way like the late Princess Diana and hug an Aids victim.
"People thought she would die of Aids ... but she died because the driver was drunk".
He said that former president Nelson Mandela and President Thabo Mbeki were not going to kiss Aids victims, so the people needed to do the job. This was, he reported, already happening with school children going to such places as Nazareth House to help Aids babies.
At a recent visit to the nuclear power plant, Koeberg, he had asked the workforce about protective measures to avoid radiation contamination, and they had responded in great detail. But the audience remained silent when he asked about the measures they took against unsafe sex. He told them that up to 50% of them could die if they did not take the disease seriously.
At the function, business leaders Simon Susman from Woolworths, Dennis Coetzer from SA Breweries, Peter Doyle from Metropolitan and Wendy Ackerman from Pick 'n Pay signed a pledge on behalf of their companies to fight Aids in the workplace - which included the need to provide condoms to staff.
Altogether 44 companies have already signed the pledge in the Western Cape.
Also present at the ceremony were acting Cape Town mayor Belinda Walker and the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, Njongonkulu Ndungane.
Ackerman said that the level of Aids/HIV in KwaZulu-Natal were alarming with her company alone losing "about one or two members" of the workforce each month to the disease.
Ackerman said her company had worked on the Aids issue since the 1980s but had only made a major breakthrough to staff when the company produced a video using comedian Solly Philander talking about sex and Aids. Only then was there a noticeable use of the company's health packages to fight Aids.
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