In S. Africa, Freedom Is a Cultural Revelation

Apartheid may be over, but ugly racism still separates neighbors Hempies van Rooyan, a gun-toting white Afrikaner, and Ma Maloi, a sharp-tongued black African matriarch.

Van Rooyan says all blacks look alike and steal. Maloi says all whites drink and have strong body odor.

“You Pondo pygmy!” Van Rooyan shouts over the backyard fence.

“You racist baboon!” Maloi thunders back.

Meet South Africa’s newest, least likely heroes: the cast of “Suburban Bliss.”

The 10-week-old television sitcom ridicules racists, parodies right-wingers, pricks politicians and shocks nearly everyone else with crude language and political incorrectness. Unthinkable--and probably illegal--only two years ago, “Suburban Bliss” usually tops the weekly ratings.

It’s the latest example of how South Africa’s political transformation from police state to liberal democracy has started a stark social revolution as well, turning one of the world’s most intolerant, oppressive societies into one of its most open and permissive.

From gambling to gay rights, from talk shows to literature, startling changes are everywhere in a country once ruled by dour Afrikaners who frowned on public dancing, banned TV until 1976 and enforced more than 100 censorship laws in an Orwellian attempt to protect strict Calvinist morality and white supremacy.

“We’ve gone from total repression to almost anything goes,” said Craig Gardner, a Los Angeles native who has lived here 16 years and co-writes the hit TV series.

Even more surprising is how little protest, or even debate, the changes have brought.

South Africa’s interim constitution, for example, offers such sweeping safeguards to individual rights that it outlaws discrimination based on sexual orientation, making it the world’s only constitution to specifically protect the rights of gays and lesbians.

As a result, the defense committee in Parliament announced recently that the armed forces could not discriminate against gays and lesbians in enlistment, posting or promotions. Unlike in the United States, where President Clinton ignited a national uproar by trying to open the military to the openly gay, the news didn’t draw a single public protest in this nation of 41 million.

“There’s a lot more on people’s minds than gays at this point,” said Maj. Merle Meyer, spokeswoman for the South African National Defense Force.

Gambling, for instance. Until last year, casinos were banned in white South Africa. So bettors flocked to supposedly independent “homelands,” created under apartheid to isolate blacks, where glitzy casinos and topless dancers drew hordes of errant Afrikaners and other vice-prone visitors.

Parliament is considering legislation to allow 40 casinos across the country. But with the bill awaiting passage, and the homelands now part of South Africa, police largely turn a blind eye to thousands of technically illegal gambling dens that operate openly in malls and restaurants.

“We keep hearing rumors they are going to close us down, but nothing has happened,” said a dealer at the Regency Club, which opened in September here with a roulette wheel, three blackjack tables and a dozen slot machines. Business has been booming ever since.

The government ignored few such affronts in the old days. Many of the censorship laws would have been laughable if they weren’t so vicious.

The white minority regime banned the phrase “white minority regime.” It could ban anything that undermined “the dignity” of whites, showed blacks as unhappy or was seen to subvert the “peace and security” of the state.

Secret committees banned “Black Beauty,” although it is a children’s book about a horse. The TV miniseries “Roots” was forbidden after censors ruled blacks “would experience great or greater hate” against whites if they viewed it. Even a peace symbol on a key ring was deemed subversive.

Newspapers were not only censored or closed; they were banned from printing blank spaces to show where stories had been excised. To mock such absurd laws, the Weekly Mail once printed a join-the-dots picture of a brutal operation by South African security forces with the caption, “Don’t join the dots. If you do, you will get an illegal picture.”

Nudity was such a no-no that censors once ordered packages of stockings wrapped in plastic to protect an innocent public from viewing a woman’s bare legs. As late as 1994, photos of women’s breasts were still slapped with censors’ stickers.

Today, pornographic magazines--including one published in Afrikaans, the language used by apartheid’s rulers--line store shelves. Hustler magazine had a huge advertising billboard of a woman’s bare buttocks towed down major roads until drivers complained that it was causing traffic jams and nearly a few accidents.

Although the sex trade is illegal, lurid ads for prostitutes, massage parlors and escort services for both gays and straights fill newspaper classified sections.

The Sunday Independent, a respected Johannesburg weekly, boldly investigated its own back pages last month, publishing a reporter’s no-holds-barred account of a night in a bordello.

“The mushrooming of brothels in respectable neighborhoods . . . may well be one of the least-reported sociological revolutions brought on by democracy,” the Independent explained.

Democracy also has brought the first hard-core adult book and video stores. Joe Theron, publisher of a dozen sexually explicit magazines, including the South African edition of Hustler, estimates 300 such stores have opened in the last year. He plans to open 40 more this year.

“That’s the main growth in the industry now,” Theron said. The law is murky, he admits: “Even though they haven’t legalized it, no one can say you can’t do it.”

One thing, though, hasn’t changed: After 14 years in the job, Braam Coetzee is still the chief government censor. And he is unrepentant.

“On the whole, I look back on my years as well-spent,” Coetzee, whose official title is director of publications, said of his long career banning books, films, magazines and other media.

These days, he focuses on smut, not politics. A 20-member committee still orders confiscation of alleged pornography. The nation’s Constitutional Court is expected to rule next year on several cases arising from the seizures.

“We’ve gradually moved in a liberal direction because the community as a whole has become more accommodating and tolerant,” Coetzee said. “They’re more secularized. We now have freedom of choice for adults.”

Only one well-known book, Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses,” remains banned here. Coetzee said the reason is simple: No one has asked for it to be un-banned. “Everyone is afraid of what might happen,” he said, referring to what many Muslims consider the book’s blasphemous content.

But little else appears off limits. Callers flood talk radio shows to chat with sex therapists, witches and nearly everyone else. A white reporter was deluged with congratulatory calls after she announced that she was marrying her black boyfriend--an illegal union not long ago.

And state-run TV, which once kept apartheid’s rules by maintaining separate channels for blacks and whites, has broadcast shows with steamy love scenes, male strippers and a contest in which audience members competed to put condoms on cucumbers.

Even the comics are provocative these days.

“It’s amazing what we can get away with,” marveled Stephen Francis, one of three co-authors of “Madame And Eve,” a Doonesbury-like daily strip that has won a huge following by poking fun at the high and mighty.

How provocative? The cartoonists’ latest collection, “All Aboard for the Gravy Train!” has just knocked President Nelson Mandela’s acclaimed autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom,” off its No. 1 perch on the bestseller list.

Of course, not everyone is happy with the anything-goes democracy.

Religious leaders, anti-porn activists and self-described champions of family values denounce the excesses of the new society. Even some entertainers are confused at the dizzying pace of change since apartheid ended in April 1994.

“In the old days, there were so many rules to break, so many laws to defy, that it was a very noble battle,” said Pieter-Dirk Uys, the country’s premier political satirist. “Now it’s so easy to get up and say what you like that no one is interested.”

Many playwrights, authors, sculptors and artists also are disoriented by the new freedom of expression, said Sophie Perryer, arts editor for the Mail and Guardian, a highbrow weekly. She said “protest art” under apartheid was far more exciting.

“The artists are struggling because there aren’t any limits to push against,” she said. “People have been left absolutely stranded without statements to make.”

That hasn’t been a problem for the creators and cast of “Suburban Bliss,” the country’s first multiracial sitcom.

“Race is the cornerstone of the series,” said Gray Hofmeyr, chief writer and executive director. “It sends up all the racial stereotypes. It’s a great tension release. It’s therapy.”

The premise and the caricatures are simple and familiar. Billy and Kobie Dwyer are white and working class. Their new neighbors, Ike and Thando Maloi, are black and upwardly mobile. The family foils are the racist elders who live with them.

Like Norman Lear’s 1970s classic series “All in the Family,” the sitcom uses bigotry as grist for biting satire and lowbrow comedy. Episodes focus on crime, affirmative action, interracial dating and other facets of post-apartheid life. Only the worst racial slurs are off limits.

“It’s an attempt to make South Africans laugh at themselves and the stupidity of our racism,” said Patrick Myrnhard, who plays the Afrikaner grandfather. “In the past, we weren’t able to laugh at ourselves.”

Seputla Sebogodi, who portrays Ike, agreed: “This isn’t rubbing salt into the wounds of the past. It’s helping the wounds to heal.”