Top-Rated South African Sitcom Satirizes Post-Apartheid Society

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - Across the barbed-wire fence separating their yards, Afrikaner patriarch Hempies van Rooyen and African grandmother Ma Moloi wage one of apartheid's last battles.

"You Pondo pygmy," yells Hempies, rifle in hand, comparing the diminutive Ma Moloi to a member of a pygmy tribe.

"You bloody racist baboon," she fires back.

Such politically incorrect venom is supposed to be receding in Nelson Mandela's new South Africa, making way for fresh tolerance, at least publicly.

But in this case, the antics of Hempies, Ma Moloi and their decidedly South African families may help change attitudes for the better.

They are the characters from "Suburban Bliss," a month-old situation comedy that already tops the ratings.

Billed as the nation's first multiracial sitcom, it recalls "All in the Family," Norman Lear's classic American sitcom on bigot Archie Bunker in the post-civil-rights era.

Like "All in the Family," "Suburban Bliss" confronts a radically changed country soon after a political and social revolution.

The sitcom presents some of the most unpleasant aspects of South African society - simmering racism, crime - in a cantering half-hour that forces people to watch themselves.

Usually, they laugh.

"I think it's actually breaking down barriers," said Desmond Dube, who portrays a gangster brother in the Moloi family. "It came at the right time. People can finally sit back and laugh at

themselves."

The brainchild of South African producer Gray Hofmeyr, "Suburban Bliss" answered a call by the South African Broadcasting Corp. for a sitcom that would appeal to both whites and blacks.

Its formula - an upwardly mobile black family living next door to a stagnating, middle-class white family - provides grist for characters and plots that satirize daily South African life.

"Things are very wide open here now," said Hofmeyr, 46, who has worked at the cutting edge of South African television since its inception in the early 1970s. "We're doing stuff here that we could never, ever do before."

As in all satire, the comedy blooms from a kernel of truth.

Hempies, played by veteran Afrikaner actor Patrick Mynhardt, rants and raves against "those people" and lets loose with strings of epithets at Ma Moloi, his foil across the fence. In an upcoming episode about New Year's Eve, he sits alone in the yard, rifle across his lap, peering through binoculars for intruders from the Molois' loud party.

Ma Moloi hates her daughter-in-law, a snobbish material girl always pressuring her husband, Ike, for more money and status symbols. That pressure caused them to move from the Soweto black township to a more fashionable white suburb in the first place.

"Life was better in Soweto," she snaps after robbers make off with their furniture.

Hofmeyr acknowledged the early episodes played more to blacks than whites, a wise move in a nation with a 75 percent black majority. He shrugged off criticism from what he called "white intellectuals" that the show lacks sophistication or depth.

"The black audience relates to this pitch of performance. They like it," he said.

In particular, they like hearing Ma Moloi's rapid-fire comebacks to Hempies' racist diatribes. Hofmeyr called such exchanges a kind of catharsis.

"I think the best method of bringing people together is through laughter," he said. "Everybody laughs and it kind of gets it off people's chests."

A few things - the worst racial slurs, for example - remain off limits. Everything else, down to the charcoal fire cooking food in Ma Moloi's backyard tavern, is authentic.

That realism, even in a comedy format, offers the chance to develop characters and relationships that genuinely reflect the country, said Sue Pam-Grant, who portrays Kobie Dwyer, Hempies' daughter.

"She's not a politically correct woman. She smokes, she gambles, she gets drunk," Pam-Grant said of her character. "People do it. Women do it."

Craig Gardner, an American actor and writer living in South Africa who has collaborated with Hofmeyr on most of the scripts, said the show will expand its scope to encompass more than race.

" `Suburban Bliss' is breaking ground in terms of race, but it's only a beginning," said Gardner, who is credited with injecting snappy, American-style sitcom dialogue into the show. "We've got a long way to go before you can make fun of everything."

Mynhardt, who brings his theater training and voice to his role as Hempies, said he wasn't always comfortable playing the most overt racist in the ensemble of eight. He changed a few epithets because they portrayed the nation's racial hatred a little too faithfully.

"I would fabricate my own terminology that was more lovable," he said.