03 Sep 2009
Project leftovers? Andy Warhol loved them. He wrote: “I always like to work on leftovers, doing the leftover things. Things that were discarded, that everybody knew were no good, I always thought had a great potential to be funny. It was like recycling work. I always thought there was a lot of humour in leftovers.”
‘Leftovers’ contain the mistakes, the asides, the flirts, the failures, the secrets, the anger and the embarrassments. A leftover bin after my meeting with Jonathan Shapiro (Zapiro), would contain the endless correspondence with his assistants, as well as my initial fury (my swearing at his ‘arrogance’) at not being able to meet him because he was either working on a book or on some overseas trip. Then, when I finally manage to pin him down, he’s suffering from a bout of flu. But despite looking pretty haggard he does leave his bedroom and does give me two hours of his time. So instead of a flatulent Capetonian I find a funny, sharp and mischievous artist with a melancholic touch.
After some coffee I tell him I’m curious which cartoon character he identifies most with. He tells me about a little boy called Chip in an American strip called Hi and Lois. “He was always stealing something, and I said liked him. I thought he was a great little kid. That faded very fast.”
His real hero, however, is Tintin. “I was about seven and went to my cousin’s house and somebody was reading a Tintin book to him, and my world opened up there. It was The Secret of the Unicorn, one of the most profound influences. I was hooked completely, hooked for life - on the whole thing.”
I notice a little Tintin figurine in the studio. Zapiro nods. “What’s brilliant about Tintin is that he’s a kind of a cipher. He’s far less caricatured than some of the other characters in the stories. He’s got that face where you can read your own face in. And of course he’s idealistic. You don’t get much background for Tintin, where he comes from or where he is. He could be you as you try to find out what to do with your life. So for me as a 7-year old I identified with him, as a 15-year old I identified with him, and even as an adult, when he’s fighting his various good fights, you identify with him.”
Fighting the good fight has been the overriding theme in Zapiro’s work since the mid-80s. The problem is the concept of the enemy. In the past it was clear: the apartheid government. These days it’s murky: the good guys of yore are often the bad guys of now, and touchy subjects such as race and ethnicity are used in the increasingly nasty fights. Like the time when he was dragged into the discussion about the ‘racist’ Tintin in the Congo, and the Cape Times summarized his (very nuanced) opinion with a steaming headline: ‘Zapiro says racist comic should be published’. “That’s when you want to go into the newspaper, find the guy and smack him at least around the knees a bit,” says Zapiro.
“Then the next thing that happens is a reader of the Cape Times says: ‘Who is this Jewish cartoonist who tells us what we should and shouldn’t see or know, why doesn’t he speak for his own people?’ Which is very ironic considering that my record on issues Jewish is chequered to say the least.”
Then, in September last year, came the cartoon, that cartoon: The Rape of Lady Justice by the tripartite alliance, which he had to explain before the Human Rights Commission and possibly in court, since there is still a R7 million lawsuit from Jacob Zuma pending.
Whether the case will ever be given a hearing is doubtful. It would be a novelty to have a president suing a cartoonist. But the knives are out, and Zapiro is now seen as the enemy of the establishment and subsequently has had to endure accusations of being right wing (Jesse Duarte) and racist (Baleka Mbete). “I’ve been somebody who’s been criticising the ANC from the Left for as long as I can remember and they’re trying to paint me as a right winger and a racist...!”
Nowadays he receives letters advising him to get a one-way ticket out of the country. “They say I can’t think of anything positive with a black government,” he sighs. “It has nothing to do with a black government! It’s has to do with a particular group of people and a particular kind of politics. I still stand by all the cartoons I have done. I don’t regret any. I do think it was the wrong thing for the ANC to push Zuma into the presidency. But I don’t want the government to fail, I want the country to succeed, I want him to succeed.”
Hence Zuma has lost the shower head, or at least it’s no longer attached to his head, but ominously floating somewhere above.
Zapiro talks about how things have changed, how Mandela encouraged him, how Mbeki, despite his prickliness, never reacted, how even Vavi phoned him one day to say that he couldn’t stop laughing. But now, with the Zuma nomenclature, things are grim. “I used to love the fact that when I was a cartoonist for The Sowetan, I’d occasionally go to Joburg and would meet readers, and they would do a double take. They said: ‘You can’t be the cartoonist! You Zapiro? I thought you’d be a black guy.’ I was so happy, I felt I was able to tap into a mindset they wouldn’t expect, a mindset based on my experiences in the struggle and my perception of where South Africa was going, that made them think that I was somebody who was part of the broad movement towards something else, not part of a white minority.”
His cartoons are biting and cynical. Has ever made any real personal ones? He takes out a drawing called Ballot Box Blues, about a disillusioned strugglista. “When you’ve started out in the struggle it’s a sad day if you start to feel you no longer part of that,” he says, voicing the feelings of many former activists. “The lawsuits leave me completely unphased. What does affect me more is where I stand politically.”
Which begs the question: in these days of political and ideological chaos, what does he use as his moral compass? “My politics was really shaped by non-racial egalitarian politics of UDF (United Democratic Front) between ’83 and 88. I look back to that and I remember the people I was guided by then. When I was 23 I went into the army and I wanted to fight the system in some way. The UDF formed and the ECC (End Conscription Campaign). That’s where I got my political education, on the ground, working with organisations. And I think back to that period and the things I learned then.”
He looks frightingly pale now, so I say goodbye and leave.
One more leftover though. On my way out, I buy The Mandela Files, which he signs, drawing a cute picture of Madiba who says “You finally spoke to Zapiro? ...He’s harder to get hold of than I am!”
CV
1958 Born in Cape Town
1982 Conscripted into the army
1983 Politically involved with the UDF
1987 Cartoonist for South
1988 Detained
1988 Studies media arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York
1991 Returns to South Africa, produces educational cartoons with Story Circle
1994 Cartoonist for The Sowetan and Weekly Mail
1996 Publishes The Madiba Years, first of his yearly collections
1998 Cartoonist for The Sunday Times
2001 Wins a CNN African Journalist of the Year Award
2005 Cartoonist for The Star, Pretoria News, Mercury and Cape Times
2006 Sued by Zuma for R15 mln (dropped to R2 mln)
2007 Wins the American Courage in Editorial Cartooning Award.
2008 Wins Best Humorist Cartoon
2008 Sued by Zuma for R7 mln
2008 Publishes The Mandela Files
2009 SABC refused to screen a Special Assignment feature on satire (including Zapiro)
Heroes/influences
“[As a cartoonist] my first influence was Giles. Then came Tintin and Peanuts. As a teenager I admired the political cartoons of David Marais in the Cape Times. In my twenties I was influenced by the English graphic cartoonists Steadman and Scarfe, and also stylistically by their South African equivalent, Derek Bauer. There was some influence from these styles in my early cartoons, but I moved to a more accessible style, being influenced in drawing and writing by Doonesbury, Oliphant, Steve Bell, Tom Toles and Mike Peters.
“I’m with most South Africans in regarding Madiba as a hero. Archbishop Tutu certainly also remains a hero for me and I’m saddened at those factional fingers now pointed at him because he stands resolutely by his principles. I hope if I'm asked this question in five years time that Obama will still be up there…”