Whats so funny by NDMazin

Andy MAson

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Under the skin of South African cartooning

S Andy MAson

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DedicatION

This book is dedicated to Professor Jean Beatrice Mason and Catherine Anne Collingwood

contents PREFACE

An Iconographic Journey

PART ONE

The Illustrated Other CHAPTER ONE

Cruikshank’s Cannibals

CHAPTER TWO

The Noble Savage

‘MILK AND HONEY AND STRONG BEER’ ‘ALL THE HOTTENTOTS CAPERING ASHORE’ AN ENCOUNTER WITH THE OTHER CRACKING THE CARTOON CODE THE CHAIN OF BEING

What’s so Funny? First published 2010 Juta and Company Ltd First floor Sunclare Building 21 Dreyer Street Claremont 7708 © 2010 published work Juta & Company Ltd © 2010 text Andy Mason © 2010 in illustration, as credited on p247 ISBN: 978-0-70217-762-0 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Subject to any applicable licensing terms and conditions in the case of electronically supplied publications, a person may engage in fair dealing with a copy of this publication for his or her personal or private use, or his or her research or private study. See Section 12(1)(a) of the Copyright Act 98 of 1978. Project Manager: Marlinee Chetty Editor: Alfred LeMaitre Proofreader: Rae Dalton Designer: Peter Bosman Printed in South Africa by xxxxx The author and the publisher have made every effort to obtain permission for and to acknowledge the use of copyright material. Should any errors or omissions have occurred, the publishers would be grateful for information that will enable them to rectify these in future editions. Set in The Sans light 9pt on 13.5pt

ROMANTIC YEARNING IMAGINARY ZOOLUS BESOTTED HOTTENTOTS THE INADVERTENT CARICATURIST

ix 10 12 13 15 17 18

23 24 25 27

CHAPTER THREE

The River of Blood

CHAPTER FOUR

Imperial Monsters

WARS OF REPRESENTATION THE TRANSMOGRIFICATION OF BLOOD A SURREAL TWIST

THE BUTTER DISH THE DRUNKEN KING

CHAPTER FIVE

Hoggenheimer’s Legacy

THE MAN WHO KILLED BOTHA CRITICISM WITHOUT BITTERNESS STYLISTIC DIVERSITY GATHERING DARKNESS

CHAPTER SIX The

Liberal Dilemma

THE LITTLE WHITE MAN THE WIND OF CHANGE A SENSE OF ABSURDITY ABE BERRY’S JO’BURG LIBERALISM

28 30 32

38 44

45 48 48 50 52

57 59 60 64

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Jojo Enigma

CHAPTER EIGHT

Humorous Natives

THE MYSTERY OF GOOMBI PORTRAITS OF THE ‘50s EXTRAORDINARY EMPATHY THE SEMIOTICS OF RACIAL CARICATURE AN AFRICAN EVERYMAN

THE ORIGIN OF THE RHUMBA THE TINTIN CONTROVERSY

67 69 70 70 72

74 78

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NEW CONTENTS LIST PART two

Ink and Blood

Growing Up with the Comics: A Memoir

CHAPTER NINE

TRUE AFRICA IN THE SUBURBS ARE YOU GOING TO SAN FRANSISCO? THE FURRY FREAKS THE PASSIONATE LEFTIES THE PEOPLE’S WORKBOOK PRE-AZANIAN COMIX DAZED AND CONFUSED CHAPTER TEN

82 84 85 86 90 92 93

The Staffrider Generation

ONCE IN A LIFETIME THE EXISTENTIAL CHASM BLACK POWER, WHITE ANGST PROPAGANDA BLUES HOGGENHEIMER’S RETURN

94 95 97 98 100

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Storytellers for Africa

102

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Fine Line

112

MOTSHUMI’S COUNTRY PEOPLE’S COLLEGE COMICS A READING REVOLUTION BACK TO PHOTOCOMICS FROM MASS MEDIA TO MICRO MEDIA

102 105 106 109 111

EDITORS UNDER FIRE RICHARD SMITH’S PUBLIC EYE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Recipes for Disaster

THE BURNING QUESTION MARK THE IRASCIBLE CURMUDGEON THE IRREVERENT ICLONOCLAST

117

Sins Of the Fathers

137

THE WILD PARTY THE WHITE UNDERGROUND THE ART OF OUTRAGE THE FRENCH RECEPTION BIG, BAD AND BITTER ANTON KANNEMEYER’S CLEAR LINE THE ROMANTIC NIHILIST THE PERILS OF FAME

127 129 133

137 138 140 142 143 144 148 150

to Laugh About?

151

THE ART OF COMEDY 151 LAUGHING STOCK AND THE ORIGINS OF MADAM & EVE 156 THE STOLEN RAINBOW 159 AN ORDINARY DAY 162

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Black

and White in Ink

A DIFFICULT QUESTION SQUANDERED TALENT AN UNSIGHTLY BLEMISH ADVENTURES IN CAPACITY BUILDING AN INEXTINGUISHABLE SPIRIT THE WARRIOR THE HUMBLE EXAGGERATOR CONFRONTING OUR DEMONS

164

164 166 168 169 171 172 174 175

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Moments of Truth

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Men of Destiny

194

The Jester’s Space

211

LENTILS AND BOEREWORS STRIKING IT BIG MISSING THE BEAT SOMETHING BREWING UNDER THE RADAR REINVENTING COMICS IN THE DIGITAL AGE FOR THE LAUGH OF IT

BLOOD ON THE FLAG ZAPIRO’S LODESTONE UNDER THE MOUNTAIN OUT ON A LIMB

CHAPTER TWENTY

127

HOGARTH IN JOHANNESBURG SCARY MONSTERS THE ELABORATE JOKE

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117 121 123

White Like Me

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

112 113

CHAPTER SIXTEEN What’s There

A SHARP INTAKE OF BREATH RETURN TO POLLSMOOR A SHOWER OF INVECTIVE COURTING DANGER DON’T JOKE! LAUGH, THE BELOVED COUNTRY

EPILOGUE

177

177 182 184 186 186 190 192

194 197 204 206

211 213 215 219 221 223

A Vittoke in Azania

228

Notes to the text

234

Notes to the illustrations

242

Index of artists, comic practioners and projects

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Preface

An Iconograph ic Jou rn ey

‘The past does not exist. There are only infinite renderings of it.’ Ryszard Kapuscinski, Travels with H erodotus (2007) 1

his book documents a personal journey through a public domain

The iconographic journey documented in this book is in many ways an idi-

that I have come to think of as ‘the jester’s space’. Its main argument

osyncratic one. It is certainly not one of those pre-packaged tours where the

the same day, but 189 years and an ocean apart. The first, arguably South Af-

ing the unexpected is reduced to a minimum. It’s more like the course of a

is held in parenthesis between two epic cartoons, both published on

rica’s prototypical cartoon, was drawn by the celebrated British satirist George Cruikshank and published by T. Tegg of London on 7 September 1819. Its purpose

was to ridicule the British government’s proposed 1820 settler scheme. The sec-

ond of these parenthetical cartoons, arguably the most controversial cartoon in South African history, was drawn by the celebrated South African cartoonist

Zapiro and published in Johannesburg by the Sunday Times on 7 September

itinerary is meticulously planned in advance and the possibility of encounter-

meandering backpacker, in which chance encounters lure the traveller into unexpected corners, off the beaten track. Some readers may be surprised at

my inclusions, offended by my omissions or unmoved by my concerns, and I hope that other researchers will be motivated to plug the gaps and fill in the details of a multifaceted story that, to a large extent, still remains to be told.

As a practitioner of cartooning I have a natural curiosity about people who

2008. Its purpose was to protest against what was widely seen as an attack on

have chosen this unusual and often poorly rewarded profession, and this cu-

Jacob Zuma to power. Between these two cartoons lies the turbulent and often

between these discoveries is a large part of what this book is all about. I’m

the South African judicial system by political forces that had converged to bring bloody saga of a nation attempting to come to terms with its own diversity.

But the shenanigans of politicians and the twists and turns of a tortuous

history are not really what this book is all about. These are just the painted

backdrops of a stage on which the true subjects of this narrative – the visual

jesters who for a century and a half have mocked and taunted powerful public figures on all sides of the political battlefield – are given a few moments to

riosity has led me to some fascinating discoveries. Piecing together the links

not a professional historian, and my research methods haven’t involved long hours of dedicated archival and bibliographical investigation. Instead, I’ve

spent a lot of time, probably far too much, in stuffy second-hand bookshops, trawling down lines of tatty old books for a telltale name or title that might lead me down a new, uncharted path.

Over the years I’ve struck gold once or twice, and these moments are re-

strut their stuff. South Africa has had more than its fair share of bombastic

corded in this book. One of the most important, early on in my research, was

or deluded. And there have been one or two who can be described as truly

1820 settler cartoons were filed away in the depths of the William Fehr Collec-

politicians, some of whom have been downright evil, others merely misguided

great. But alongside them all the way, sniping at them from behind the paper

barricades of the Fourth Estate, have been the courageous and sometimes foolhardy inhabitants of the jester’s space.

For hundreds of years, democratic societies have found it necessary and

desirable that special permission be given to cartoonists to ridicule the ac-

tions and pronouncements of the most powerful and elevated members of society, and in doing so, hold them to account. Cartoonists occupy this space alongside stand-up comedians, humour writers, satirical playwrights and comedy filmmakers, and without these modern-day jesters the world would

be a dreary place indeed. But as I hope this book will show, the role of the

cartoonist is not simply to make the world more tolerable for the average Joe. Cartoonists also perform a political function, and societies that attempt to limit or close down the jester’s space are generally those on their way down the slippery slope towards authoritarianism.

the discovery that original hand-coloured prints of George Cruikshank’s famous tion in Cape Town. The opportunity to examine these cartoons in their original form gave me a taste of the excitement that archaeologists must experience

when they uncover a rare and precious artefact from long ago. A similar sense

of excitement overcame me when I discovered in a second-hand bookshop a pile of French cartoon publications from the Anglo-Boer War, in which the British

government was mercilessly satirised for its deplorable treatment of concentra-

tion camp inmates. Other key acquisitions include The Schröder Art Memento, celebrating the life of South Africa’s first cartoonist, a couple of very rare copies of Schröder’s satirical cartoon weekly The Knobkerrie, published in Cape Town

well over a hundred years ago, and a battered copy of Monty Wilson’s Humorous Native Studies, an intriguing collection of racist cartoons published by the Natal Daily News just before the Second World War.

Trying to make sense of these cartoons required background research into

the historical periods from which they emerged. My sources for this research

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have been the well-known histories of South Africa, with occasional forays

non-governmental organisations. For fun, I also edited an underground comix

toons used to illustrate the first part of this book are lifted from Ken Vernon’s

largely forgotten, constitute a valuable record of a crucial period in South

into the intimidating world of the specialist historian. A number of the car-

Penpricks: the Drawing of South Africa’s Political Battlelines (2000) and from 2

Murray and Elzabé Schoonraad’s encyclopaedic Companion to South African

Cartoonists (1989), previously published in Afrikaans as Suid-Afrikaanse Spot-

magazine that exposed the work of ‘unknown doodlers’. These publications, African history. Many of the strips and cartoons in the middle section of the book are extracted from these sources.

Political cartoonists whose work appears in newspapers on a daily and

en Strookprentkunstenaars (1983). I am indebted to these previous researchers,

weekly basis often choose to republish their best cartoons in annual collec-

magazines, culling their selections from thousands of possible contenders.

cally expanded – and dominated – by the annual Zapiro and Madam & Eve

who evidently spent hundreds of hours trawling through old newspapers and

Selecting from their selections, rather than going back to the original sources, has probably meant that some real gems have been missed. At this point

in time, no systematic attempt has been made to collect and archive South African political cartoons, and a comprehensive bibliography of South African

cartooning is sorely needed. This having been said, there is nevertheless a natural process of selection and re-selection through which certain works

become canonical, and just as South African fine art has its canonical works, frequent republication has lent certain cartoons a similar status.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part, based mainly on sec-

ondary sources, looks in a very brief and selective way at the origins of South African cartooning in the 1800s, and the emergence of key themes in the first

half of the twentieth century. The second part is based mainly on primary sources, including interviews with cartoonists and personal recollections. It

tions. Since the 1990s, the marketplace for books like these has been dramati-

collections, but there are a number of equally important if less visible collections that are worth looking out for. Dov Fedler, Fred Mouton, Stidy (Anthony

Stidolph) and Nanda Soobben have all published anthologies in recent years,

and copies of older collections of newspaper strips by the likes of Tony Grogan, Andy (Dave Anderson), Richard Smith, Dov Fedler, David Marais, John Jackson, Jock Leyden, Bob Connolly, Abe Berry and Len Sak can still be found tucked

away in obscure bookshop corners. These books were generally published in small runs of one or two thousand copies, and are thus becoming increas-

ingly rare and sought after, but occasional gems, some from as long ago as the Second World War, can still be unearthed by the wily collector. Wherever

possible, I have drawn my examples from original publications such as these, rather than from the selections of other researchers.

By far my most important source of primary evidence has been a series

opens with a memoir of the 1960s, during which I grew up reading comics in

of recorded conversations that I’ve had with South African cartoonists over

the 1970s, when, as a student at the University of Natal, I began, at first in

has not been able to find its way into this book, they have nevertheless pro-

Durban, one of the last outposts of the British empire, and continues through

a very haphazard way, to collect local cartooning products that interested me. Many of these were ephemeral pieces, published in short-lived and little-

known publications produced by students and activists during the struggle

years, and have all but completely disappeared from the historical record. To publish fragments from them here is to rescue them from oblivion. Similar exercises of preservation have been made in recent years by authors in related

fields. For example, Judy Siedman’s research into political poster design, Red on Black: The Story of the South African Poster Movement (2007) adds to the research done for the important Images of Defiance: South African Resistance Posters of the 1980s, compiled by the Poster Book Collective of the South Af-

rican History Archive and published in 1991. Another fascinating compilation is Revisions: Expanding the Narrative of South African Art (2006), which docu-

the last seven years. While much of the detail contained in these interviews

vided a foundation for many of the ideas I have employed and conclusions I have reached. In particular I owe thanks (in no particular order) to Jonathan

Shapiro (Zapiro), Enrico Schacherl (Rico), Anton Kannemeyer (Joe Dog), Conrad

Botes (Konradski), Neil Verlaque-Napper, Peter Esterhuysen, Alastair Findlay, Mogorosi Motshumi, John Curtis, Len Sak, Aren Damiani (a custodian of Derek Bauer’s work), Richard Smith, Dov Fedler, Tony Grogan, Brandan Reynolds, Moray Rhoda, Themba Siwela, Sifiso Yalo, Siphiwo Sobhopa, Jason Bronkhorst, Nanda

Soobben, Leonora van Staden, Joe Daly, Jeremy Nell and Wilson Mgobhozi. In addition I also interviewed several satirists and artists who had important

insights to offer, including Gus Silber, William Kentridge, Norman Catherine, Brett Murray, Trevor Makhoba and Justin Nurse.

Every new discovery along the way has led to a new set of questions. In the

ments the amazing collection of South African paintings, drawings and sculp-

process of trying to answer these questions, I have frequently found myself

Smith. This book exposes a sub-tradition of satirical and humorous drawing

is so rigorously policed that the non-professional enters at great risk – a false

tures, mainly by black artists, amassed by the private collector, Bruce Campbell and painting by black South African artists that has a direct bearing on the

history of South African cartooning. In addition to published sources such as

these, I am indebted to a number of fellow enthusiasts, mostly cartoonists themselves, who have opened their own collections and archives to me.

From the beginning of the 1980s, I became professionally involved in comic

art production, as a writer, editor and artist, mostly producing comic strips for the so-called alternative press or for educational publications produced by

trespassing on the territory of the professional historian. This is a place that

step or naive assumption can easily result in mortification. I have suffered

several mortifying moments in discussion with historians, thankfully none

of them public, but these salutary experiences have taught me that there is

no corner of South African history that can blithely be traversed without fear of falling into quagmires of interpretation or nomenclature. Fierce debates rage about whether South Africa’s aboriginal people should be referred to

as the Bushmen or the San, or whether the first name of the woman who

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became famous as the Hottentot Venus is more correctly Saartjie or Sara.

Other readers have been Sean O’Toole, David Johnson, Steve Kotze and Glen

There are any number of published histories, and there is the discipline known

for Part One). All of them helped me avoid quagmires of naive interpretation

Luckily, as I have come to realise, there is no such thing as historical truth.

as History, but there is no single ‘history of South Africa’ to which differences of opinion can be referred for adjudication. Instead, there are multiple inter-

pretations, each of which depends on the ideological standing of the historian you happen to be reading. And as South Africa transforms itself into a new

society, the revision of past histories and the emergence of new histories can

Thompson (who gave me the phrase ‘the Illustrated Other’, used as the title

or dongas of inappropriate language usage, and I thank them for it. I’m particularly indebted to Alfred Le Maitre, who edited the final manuscript and

whose expert pruning of superfluous or poorly researched material has saved me, no doubt, from multiple embarrassments.

Keith Dietrich’s unpublished doctoral thesis, Of Salvation and Civilisation:

be expected to accelerate.

The image of indigenous southern Africans in European travel Illustration from

ing this book. The decision to interweave the history of cartooning in South

most comprehensive study of early illustration relating to South Africa, this

But this is not the only swampy ground that I have had to traverse in writ-

Africa with an anecdotal petit histoire documenting my own involvement with

cartooning and comic art has been a risky one, tied to which is an attempt to

the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, has been indispensable. By far the book should be in print.

I would also like to make a special mention of my wife Catherine, who has

convey theoretical concepts in a non-formal language accessible to the gen-

lived through every chapter and to whom this book is dedicated; my Mother,

informal language of the anecdotal narrative and the more precise language

provided welcome guidance from the other side of the generation gap, and

eral reader. This has necessitated crossing back and forth between the chatty, of critical analysis, and I hope I have not offended anyone too greatly in this attempt. But, after racking my brain, scratching my head and chewing my lip for months, I could see no other way to do it.

The book began as an academic monograph couched in the lingo of cul-

tural studies, and one of the things that happened in the process of rewriting it was that a number of commonly used academic terms had to be liberated

from the cages of jargon in which they were imprisoned. The purpose of

academic jargon is to allow theorists to hold a multiplicity of meanings in a single word or phrase. These meanings, with all their nuances, are familiar

to theorists within the discipline, but are often not clearly understood by the general public. When the door of the jargon cell is opened, all kinds of monsters come leaping out. Taming them can be quite a business.

The few jargonised words that have been retained are defined and com-

Professor Jean Mason, to whom it is also dedicated; my sons Christopher, who Luke, who assisted in compiling the Notes to the Illustrations; my parents-inlaw, Mike and Gail Collingwood, who helped with proofreading and transcribing

the interviews; my friends Rick Andrew, Chris Chapman, Linda Cilliers and Steve

Pike who read early drafts of the manuscript and offered reassuring comments; Glenda Younge, Sandy Shepherd and Marlinee Chetty of Double Storey Books, whose patience was stretched beyond reasonable limits; Kate Soal, who assisted

with the Index; to Peter Bosman, the book’s designer, who went far beyond the call of duty to assemble the hundreds of images in an orderly and accessible way; to Zapiro, Stephen Francis, Anton Kannemeyer, Brandon Reynolds, Brett

Murray, Nanda Soobben, and Sifiso Yalo for providing 'shouts' for the back cover, and to Rico and Anton for reworking existing images specially for the cover and frontispiece.

All I have left to say is, thank goodness for the cartoonists. During the

mented upon in the Notes at the back of the book. These Notes are also used

research conducted for this book I have become good friends with many of

ous to the general reader.

my mission; Anton Kannemeyer, who forced me to confront the neglected

for asides that will be of interest to the specialist reader, but may be superfluA number of people have read parts of this book in manuscript form,

and their comments have been invaluable. Professors Keyan Tomaselli and Lynn Dalrymple supervised the original dissertation4, and their patience

was laudable. The comments of external examiners Dr Jean-Philippe Wade

of the University of KwaZulu-Natal and Dr John Lent of Temple University in Philadelphia (who is the publisher and editor of the International Journal of Comic Art) were instrumental in securing the publishing deal with Double

Storey Books. Equally influential was a recommendation by Zapiro to the publisher, Bridget Impey. Her colleague, Russell Martin, subsequently read the

dissertation and provided valuable comments. Colleen Hendrikse, who later took over the publisher’s role at Double Storey Books, insisted that the book had to be rewritten in easier language. Her desire to see more of me in it led

to the interlacing of historiography, cultural analysis and personal anecdote.

South Africa’s modern-day jesters: Zapiro, who gave me a sense of myself and

artist within me; Themba Siwela, whose path was destined to become interwoven with my own; Sifiso Yalo, whom I watched transform himself from a

young township pantsula into a major South African cartoonist; Lennie Sak, the grand old man of South African cartooning who embraced me like an old

friend; Mogorosi Motshumi, the battle-scarred warrior who has endured the worst that the years have had to offer but still soldiers on; Rico, the wizard

of ink; and many more – from the survivors of the old guard like Dov Fedler, Richard Smith and Tony Grogan to the ambitious new generation personified in Joe Daly, Jeremy Nell and Wilson Mgobhozi. Lastly, I’d like to give recognition to my home town crew, Tyron Love and the rest of the okes from the Durban

Cartoon Project. There are many names omitted here, and to those whose

names are not mentioned, I offer equal thanks. I can truthfully say that the experience of getting to know all these people has changed my life.

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PART one

The Illustrated Other

anonymous, illustration from john Hamilton moore: Moore's voyages and travels, london, 1785

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CHAPTER ONE

Cruikshank’s Cannibals ‘Oh, L-d! Oh L-d! I might as well have stayed in England to be starved to death as come here to be eaten alive!’ B ritish settler, in a cartoon by George C ru ikshank (1819)

minous jungle noises imposed themselves on my imagination. The air was thick with the din of cicadas, the growls and rustling sounds of invisible beasts. Suddenly, with a frightening roar, a lion leapt from the bushes. At the same moment, a huge crocodile lurched from the murky water, its gaping mouth glittering with teeth. On the other side of the clearing, a python slithered into view. And then in a great hullabaloo, a band of ferocious cannibals pounced upon us ... ‘Excuse me sir, will you be buying any of these books?’ The shop assistant’s voice brought me back to the present. I was in a quaint second-hand bookshop in Kalk Bay, on the Cape Peninsula. On a pockmarked yellowwood table I had placed a small pile of treasures, mined from the bookcases and shelves that cluttered the shop – a portfolio of early twentieth-century caricatures by Daniel Boonzaier, a book of World War II cartoons by Bob Connolly, a collection of

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Fig 1 GEORGE CRUIKSHANK, COLOURED ENGRAVING, 1819 (DETAIL)

Vorster-era cartoons by David Marais, Tony Grogan’s Vanishing Cape Town, Abe Berry’s South Africa and How It Works and Derek Bauer’s SA Flambé and Other Recipes for Disaster (Fig 2).1 ‘Yes, I’ll take the lot, and this one too, thank you,’ I said, handing her the book I’d been looking at, an illustrated history of the 1820 settlers by Lynne Bryer and Keith Hunt.2 Outside the bookshop tourists clogged the pavements and gulls circled and swooped above the fishing boats in the little harbour. But in here, behind the profusion of collectibles displayed in the window, the mustiness of old books imposed quietness upon the customers, who spoke in hushed tones as though they were in a library. In a glass case, precious volumes of Africana, including several illustrated accounts of early travellers to the Cape and the southern African hinterland, enticed me to tarry longer. And in a corner a pile of old maps, squiggly with coastlines, rivers and mountains and crammed with exotic labels, demanded my attention. Mixed up amongst the maps were loose pages cut out from illustrated periodicals of the kind that were so popular in the nineteenth century. These flimsy pages had survived because of their intriguing pictures, engraved in the meticulous style of the period. These illustrations fascinated me. It had occurred to me at an early stage of my research that to understand the origins of South African cartooning I would also have to look at the work of the illustrators who provided the first visual records of what European mariners, explorers and settlers found when they arrived here. As I paged through old volumes of traveller’s tales and histories of the Cape, certain names asserted themselves – François Le Vaillant, Samuel Daniell, George Angus, Thomas Baines, Charles Davidson Bell. But there were many others, explorers, missionaries, skilled amateurs and professional artists, who documented life in this part of the world in the days before photography. Some of them never came anywhere near the Cape, but, in studios in London, Paris and other European cities, produced illustrations based on written descriptions or rough sketches, or simply copied what others had done before them.

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Fig 2 COMIC TREASURES Covers of some classic South African cartoon anthologies (clockwise from top left): Rand Faces by Daniel Boonzaier, 1915; A Further Selection of War Cartoons by Bob Connolly, 1941; Tony Grogan’s Vanishing Cape Town, 1976; SA Flambe and Other Recipes for Disaster by Derek Bauer, 1989; Europeans Only by David Marais, 1960; Abe Berry’s South Africa and How it Works, 1980.

Fig 4 GEORGE CRUIKSHANK, COLOURED ENGRAVING NO. 1, 1819

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Fig 3 JAMES GILLRAY, very slippery weather, COLOURED ENGRAVING, 1808

Fig 3 CARICATURE SHOP This 1808 cartoon by James Gillray shows cartoons and caricatures in the window of Mistress Humphrey’s print shop in St James’s Street, London, giving us some idea of how comic art was distributed in those days.

Many of these images are exaggerated and outlandish, but some have a scientific validity. The botanical illustrations are the most accurate, meticulously copied from collected specimens, while the drawings of animals, especially the larger animals like hippopotami or buffalo, tend to be more fanciful. The most intriguing of all are the depictions of the people who were living at the Cape when the Europeans first arrived. Here one encounters, in vivid visual form, the myths and misconceptions, fears and fantasies that were conjured up in the minds of Europeans when they thought of the people of Africa. But the image that had caught my attention, transporting me back to a mythical African jungle that existed only in the imagination, was unlike any of the others. Entirely lacking in scientific pretensions, its purpose was not ethnographic but political – to dissuade gullible Britons from falling for their government’s 1820 settlement scheme. The cartoon (Fig 4, overleaf) was one of a pair produced in 1819 by the celebrated nineteenth-century British cartoonist George Cruikshank (1792–1878). These two cartoons are important not only because they provide a direct link between South African cartooning and the great British tradition of satire and caricature that goes all the way back to William Hogarth, but also for the light they shine on a murky topic that continues to obsess South Africans – race, ethnicity and cultural difference.

‘MILK AND HONEY AND STRONG BEER’

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In the early years of the nineteenth century, cartooning was all the rage in London. Sixpenny prints were sold on the streets and large hand-coloured engravings, at a few shillings apiece, were exhibited in the windows of printmakers’ shops for the public to view. An 1808 cartoon by the waggish London caricaturist James Gillray (1757–1815) (Fig 3) shows a gentleman coming to grief on the slippery streets of London, but what is more interesting is that the incident takes place outside Mistress Humphrey’s print shop in St James’s Street, where members of the public, gentlemen and apprentices alike, peer through the window at a display of caricatures and cartoons, giving us some sense of the way comic art was consumed in the early days. Following Gillray’s death in 1815, the young George Cruikshank became London’s favourite caricaturist. He has a special place in the

history of South African cartooning because of his two 1820 settler cartoons, published by T. Tegg of Cheapside, London, on 7 September 1819. Discovering that original hand-coloured prints of these two cartoons were buried away in the archives of the William Fehr Museum in Cape Town, I was able to examine these works, with all their descriptive and textual detail, and to note a number of things that weren’t clear from the reproductions. Firstly, I was surprised at how big they were. Intended not for newspaper reproduction, but for private sale to collectors, they were printed in a limited edition and coloured, possibly by Cruikshank himself, in watercolour. Both cartoons were published on the same day, 7 September, 1819, and are numbered 1 and 2. The first cartoon (Fig 4) is extraordinarily detailed, and actually contains two other cartoons within it. The reader is placed behind a group of English paupers, who are looking at two cartoons pasted on a city wall. On the left, a pair of skinny boys stare in horror at a depiction of a squadron of British yeomanry, sabres bared, hacking their way through an unarmed crowd. Entitled ‘The Manchester Slaughtermen’, this cartoonwithin-a-cartoon depicts what came to be known as the Peterloo Massacre, when an outdoor meeting of discontented textile workers, held in St Peter’s Field near Manchester on 16 August 1819, was charged by cavalry, leaving several dead and many wounded. The caption under the picture reads: ‘If your children ask for bread, will you give them a bullet?’ To the right of this picture, a miserable British family, disgruntled and hungry, wistfully gazes at the other cartoon on the wall. You can tell by the cut of their tatty clothes and the old man’s soiled wig that they are recently impoverished. They represent the shopkeepers and artisans who fell on hard times during the recession that followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Incredulously, they stare at the depiction of a family of corpulent, brown-coloured people dressed in European clothes, positioned in front of a grass hut. Cabbages and carrots protrude from the roof of the hut, and loaves of bread grow on a tree in the background. In the foreground are two fat pigs, one with a knife and fork stuck into its rump. On the right of the picture, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, sits on a pile of sacks labelled ‘The Fat of the Land’. Behind him is the bloated face of the Prince Regent. Castlereagh is promising the group of paupers a better life in the Cape of Good Hope. His words, if somewhat indecipherable, are quite fascinating, and it is worth quoting them in full: As you can’t get any work Johnny, you can’t expect any victuals, so we’ll transport you (transplant you I mean) to the Cape of Good Hope, where you’ll have no occasion to work and victuals will run into your mouth ready chew’d as I may say, so you’ll have nothing to do

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Fig 4 GEORGE CRUIKSHANK, COLOURED ENGRAVING NO. 1, 1819

but swallow! Look at this picture, Johnny, it is made on purpose to give you an idea of what you may expect to be in this Garden of Eden! This second Paradise! The Land of Promise described by Moses was a mere humbug to it. You’ll be up to your neck in milk and honey and strong beer! The rocks are all roast beef and the hailstones are plum puddings and the rainwater is as strong as gin!! The land is all sugar and brandy and the grass is all lollipops and barley sugar, and the sticks are all lickerush! The bread and milk grows upon trees! What do you think of that Johnny? Indeed the milk is all cream and the cream is all butter. Indeed you may live like a Prince and grow as fat as a hog, so the sooner you are gone the better Johnny and joy go with you! And to give you a proof of our attachment towards you, and to convince you that we’ll never leave you, we’ll allow you still the pleasure of paying taxes!

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‘ALL THE HOTTENTOTS CAPERING ASHORE’

The second cartoon (Fig 5, overleaf) is less complex and more direct. The Manchester paupers of the previous cartoon have been transported to an untamed land, where they are being attacked by wild animals and bestial savages who attempt to eat them alive, clothes and all. In a reference to the previous cartoon, the wig of the man in the blue jacket, a symbol of his civilized status, is being removed from his head. Behind him a young woman in a red dress, with refined features and delicate upraised hands, melodramatically succumbs to her fate. Around them are further scenes of horror. A man is devoured by a lion, a child runs into the jaws of a crocodile, and an infant settler is doubly assaulted – a miniature cannibal ludicrously bites off a foot while a python swallows the baby’s head. Behind, a cannibal spears a settler woman and pins one of her children to the ground with his foot, while

Fig 4 FORLORN HOPE The British government’s scheme to relocate 5,000 Britons to the ‘Cape of Forlorn Hope’ met with scalding derision from London’s leading cartoonist, George Cruikshank.

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Fig 5 GEORGE CRUIKSHANK, COLOURED ENGRAVING NO. 2, 7 September, 1819

his female counterpart, her baby perched upon her rump, sets the settlers’ home alight. Despite the ferocity of these attacks, the assaulted settlers are nevertheless able to articulate the cartoonist’s view for the reader’s benefit: Oh! D-n the Devil – he be going to eat me! Rot me if he ain’t as bloody minded as a Manchester butcher [referring to the Peterloo massacre]! Oh dear! Oh dear! D-n your outlandish jaws! And: Oh, L-d! Oh L-d! I might well have stayed in England to be starved to death as come here to be eaten alive!

Fig 6 Mc Cleary Massatt, copy of CRUIKSHANK cartoon (reversed), dublin, circa 1820

Figs 5-6 CANNIBAL OGRES

A number of different versions of this famous cartoon, some in colour, some in black and white, have appeared in print, including this very neatly rendered reverse copy published by McCleary Massat of Dublin, who also published a reverse copy of the other cartoon in the series.

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Underneath the cartoon is the following title: All among the Hottentots capering ashore’!! or the Blessings of Emigration to the Cape of Forlorn [deleted] Good [inserted] Hope (i.e.) to be half roasted by the sun and devoured by the natives!! Recommended to the serious consideration of all those who are about to emigrate.13

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AN ENCOUNTER WITH THE OTHER

Both of these cartoons have been quite widely reproduced in South African history books, though the cannibal cartoon is the better known of the two. It is generally presented as a more-or-less straightforward representation of British racial ideology in the early 1800s. Its most recent incarnation is in the lavishly illustrated New History of South Africa (2007), edited by the eminent South African historians, Herman Giliomee and Bernard Mbenga. A replica of the cartoon is reproduced alongside the caption: ‘Cartoonist George Cruikshank’s alarmist drawing shows what, according to him, awaits the 1820 British settlers in South Africa – cannibalism, burning houses, wild animals.’4 When I first caught sight of it in this book, I got quite a shock. It appeared to be printed back to front. But closer inspection revealed it to be a very neatly drawn copy (Fig 6), in which the copyist had intentionally produced a mirror image of the original. The plagiarism of popular prints was very common at the time, but why the copyist chose to flip the drawing escapes me. Someone had written under the cartoon: ‘Copied from one by Mr. George Cruikshank’. This rather obvious detail was evidently missed by the picture editors of New History of South Africa.5 It was disconcerting to find this wrongly accredited image in what is otherwise a beautifully published book. I couldn’t help wondering whether the picture research undertaken for the book had been accorded the same level of care as the production of the text. Looking through other illustrated books on South African history, I noticed something similar – a rather obvious lack of editorial rigour in the selection and accreditation of cartoons and illustrations, especially when it came to dating and identifying the artists behind them.6 A conscientious editor would never dream of omitting these details in the reproduction of a work by a fine artist, but for some reason the same courtesy does not seem to have been accorded to cartoonists and illustrators. But it is not just a question of giving cartoonists and illustrators their due. Underlying these editorial lapses, it seems to me, is a lack of recognition of the importance of cartoons and illustrations as visual texts. If we see these pictorial representations as texts in their own right, rather than simply as adornments to the written word, it becomes clear that they should be read and interpreted as carefully as any other source of historical evidence. Tied to this is the bigger question of how cartoons and illustrations from long ago should be presented to today’s readers. Apart from the mistaken accreditation, the interpretation (or lack thereof) of this cartoon in New History of South Africa places some important issues on the table. It is not simply an ‘alarmist drawing’, as these historians suggest. It is a spoof, a piece of satire, both of the British government’s emigration scheme and of the fears of the British public. As such, it should be taken with a pinch of salt. In examining this cartoon, we

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have to ask ourselves whether Cruikshank’s readers would have read it simply as a warning, or whether they would have seen it as a parody. Did they really believe that the Cape was swarming with monstrous man-eating savages capable of gobbling up a family of colonists, clothes and all? Delving into these questions has forced me to think hard about the nature of parody. It is clear that while the cartoonist relied on the technique of gross exaggeration to achieve his effect, he nevertheless drew attention to real fears that existed amongst the British public at the time. Cruikshank’s cannibals didn’t come out of nowhere – behind the stereotypes embedded in the cartoon lay a complex set of attitudes and beliefs. It would be wonderful to be able to go back in time to interview Cruikshank and his 1819 readers in order to establish his intentions and their responses. But until someone invents a time machine, we have to look elsewhere for clues. The best place to start is within the cartoon itself. Here one encounters visual codes that derive from the social world inhabited by the cartoonist. These codes are in turn made up of signs, arranged in particular ways. In order to properly understand these cartoons, we thus need to decode them, to decipher the signs embedded within them. Cartoonists complain that they are constantly asked where their ideas come from. They tend to ‘um’ and ‘ah’ about it, but it is nevertheless an important question. And it’s a question that we can validly pose to the cartoon itself, without needing to have its author on hand to explain it. Where did these stereotypes come from? Were the attitudes propagated in the cartoon common or unusual? Was Cruikshank simply reproducing the racist ideas of the British public, or was he playing a more critical role by satirising the dominant ideology of the day? The first thing that has to be said about Cruikshank’s cannibals is that they bear absolutely no physical resemblance to the ‘Hottentots’ they were supposed to depict. During the course of my research I have looked at many ethnographic illustrations of the indigenous inhabitants of South Africa, dating back to the seventeenth century and before, and Cruikshank’s cannibals resemble none of these. While the early European illustrations of the inhabitants of southern Africa are somewhat varied in style, they are mostly rendered according to neoclassical conventions of figure drawing and appended with exotic accoutrements to signify their ‘primitive’ status (Figs 7-8). I found some really strange ones, engraved by J Bafire, amongst the torn-out pages in the Kalk Bay bookshop. These clearly weren’t taken directly from travellers’ sketches, but were cobbled together from various sources by a studio artist who had only the vaguest ideas about Africa and its

Fig 7 HERBERT, ‘A MAN AND WOMAN AT THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE’, ENGRAVING, 1638 (DETAIL)

Fig 8 FRANCOIS LE VAILLANT, ‘NARINA, JEUNE GONAQUOISE’, ENGRAVING, 1798 (DETAIL)

Figs 7-8 ETHNOGRAPHIC VARIATIONS Early illustrations of the indigenous inhabitants of the Cape were rendered according to the prevailing neoclassical traditions of European figure drawing and bedecked with exotic clothing and accoutrements. The top figure holds up a string of offal.

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what’s so funny?

Fig 9 FANCIFUL RENDITION Many illustrations produced to accompany travellers’ tales, such as this drawing entitled ‘Military dress of Commanders and Common Soldiers in Angola people, from De Bry’, engraved by J Bafire, were produced by European studio artists who had no visual references to work from.

Fig 9 J BAFIRE, ENGRAVING, DATE UNKNOWN

Fig 10 MOCK EUROPEANS Cruikshank’s corpulent Hottentots, attired in European clothes, provide the first South African example of an enduring colonial stereotype – the mock European.

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inhabitants. Of course, not all the illustrations of this type are so outrageous, and some, particularly those that accompany the accounts of Peter Kolb (1719) and François Le Vaillant (1796), are based on actual encounters with the indigenous people of the Cape. But whatever their level of accuracy, these drawings all have certain common features, particularly in terms of pose and physique, that demonstrate the extent to which the illustrators of the day were locked into a way of seeing that was structured by the artistic tradition they had inherited.7 Cruikshank’s cartoons pay no homage to this tradition. His artistic forebears were not Kolb and Le Vaillant, but Hogarth and Breugel, and his drawings pulsate with comic energy. The over-dramatised postures and expressions of his characters are vaudevillian and preposterous, and perhaps because

Fig 10 GEORGE CRUIKSHANK, COLOURED ENGRAVING, 1819 (DETAIL)

of this, they are far more evocative than the typically stilted poses of the early ethnographic illustrations. In the early 1800s, engravings based on the work of artists who spent time at the Cape and conscientiously attempted to record what they saw began appearing in British and European news publications. In many of these illustrations, evidence of the ‘noble savage’ archetype is clearly visible (see Chapter 2). Once again, it was clear to me that Cruikshank didn’t derive his cannibals from these sources. Instead, they looked more like ogres from the fairy tale books I used to enjoy as a child. It was only when I saw the original hand-coloured prints in the William Fehr Collection and was able to examine all the text crammed into them that I began to understand that Cruikshank’s cartoons were not really about the Cape at all. Rather, they drew upon a general fear of the unknown to lambaste the British government’s proemigration propaganda. Cruikshank’s so-called Hottentots were in a sense incidental to his purpose – his real targets were the government and the Crown and their specious argument that the solution to problems at home was to be found in an ersatz paradise across the sea at the foot of the Dark Continent. The representation of the African people in the first cartoon, while overshadowed by the monstrous cannibals in the second, is equally worthy of consideration. Clearly, the reason that Cruikshank and his publisher numbered the two cartoons (a detail that is absent from most reproductions) is because they were intended to be read as a pair. And when the two cartoons are read together, it immediately becomes evident that we are presented not with a single racial stereotype, but with two. The African people in the first cartoon, sitting in front of their hut made of food, have been drawn as flabby mock-Europeans (Fig 10). As a parody of the government’s propaganda about the comforts of life at the Cape, this image raises a whole set of questions of its own. As my research progressed, I continued to encounter variants of these two stereotypes.They are part of the visual lexicon not only of South African cartooning, but of cartooning in the Western world in general. The image of a white man sitting in a steaming black pot presided over by a barefooted black chef is one of the standard cartoon images of the twentieth century (Fig 11). Less ubiquitous, but tenacious nevertheless, is the stereotype of a ‘primitive’ African incongruously attired in European clothes, mimicking the conventions of Western civilisation (Fig 14, overleaf). While political correctness has more or less succeeded in banishing these stereotypes from post-apartheid cartooning in South Africa, they have not disappeared entirely,8 and they can be found in the work of fine artists who intentionally parody them to comment on

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Fig 11 MELTING POT The cannibal cooking pot is another enduring stereotype of Africa that has consistently been exploited by cartoonists and satirists.

Fig 11 JOCK LEYDEN, DAILY NEWS CARTOON, 1963

changing identities in post-apartheid South Africa (Fig 12). That Cruikshank should have pinpointed these stereotypes so early on is an example of the remarkable prescience of which great cartoonists are occasionally capable. The questions posed by Cruikshank’s cartoons – about race, identity and representation in South Africa – are still current today. But these cartoons also pose a second, equally important, set of questions, relating to their value and trustworthiness as historical records. It astonishes me that cartoons and illustrations continue to be presented in popular history books without analysis or explanation, as though their meanings were fixed and obvious. Not only are these pictures frequently left undated and the artists behind them consigned to anonymity, but, even worse, the presumption that they are accurate recordings of the situations and events they depict is seldom challenged.

Fig 12 ARTISTIC PARODY Fine artist Brett Murray parodies the cannibal cliché to comment on changing identities in postapartheid South Africa. (See page 135)

CRACKING THE CARTOON CODE

Can we really trust these artistic depictions of yesteryear? To me, the answer is obvious: we should always be careful when interpreting visual images, but we should be especially careful when confronted with cartoons and illustrations from long ago. In current debates about how images are read and understood, it is generally accepted that all visual texts are open to interpretation – and misinterpretation. Artists,

Fig 12 BRETT MURRAY, ‘CRISIS OF IDENTITY’, PAINTED METAL WALL HANGING, 2000

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what’s so funny?

Fig 13 MME MIGNERET, ‘ESPECES. BLANCHE; NEGRE EBOE; ORANG (SINGE)’, ETCHING, 1824

Fig 13 SCIENTIFIC RACISM The so-called science of phrenology claimed to be able to demonstrate how the structure of the human skull signified the position of various races on the evolutionary scale.

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photographers or editors cannot control the circumstances under which their images are seen or read, nor can they dictate to their readers exactly how to read these images or what to take from them. That’s why proper captioning is so important. The caption serves to anchor the image and circumscribe the variances of interpretation that the reader may ascribe to it, and to rescue us from what Roland Barthes referred to in a famous essay as ‘the terror of uncertain signs’.9 Cultural theorists use words like ‘multivalent’ and ‘polysemous’ to describe the multiple planes of meaning that hover around visual images. These are brought into play both when an image is created and again when it is interpreted. But while images are always open to interpretation, it would be naive to assume that the reader has perfect freedom in interpreting them. Readers, like cartoonists and illustrators, operate within an ideological context, calling upon and reproducing (and occasionally challenging) the ideas of the society they have grown up in. The images that readers encounter have been constructed according to codes and conventions learned at home, at school or at work, and it is these generally understood codes and conventions that the reader employs when interpreting the image. Often, this process of calling upon prevalent social ideas has an unconscious or unintentional dimension. Where the creator of the image and the reader inhabit a similar ideological space, their interpretations will be reasonably congruent. But where there is a long time span or a cultural hiatus separating the moment of creation from the moment of reception, the reader may miss important historical or cultural clues, and the variance in interpretation may be enormous. Because of their satirical intent and the heavy ideological load they carry, cartoons are the most scurrilous of images. Most of us are trained, at least to some extent, to deal with words, to analyse and interpret what we read or hear so that we can make reasonably informed judgements about it. But when it comes to visual images, we are on much less stable ground. The meanings held by images are, as Barthes noted, often slippery and uncertain. Fine art images, as we all know, are subjective, tend towards complexity and demand informed interpretation. But cartoons can be as tricky, if not trickier, because their meanings at first sight seem so obvious. Located somewhere between fact and fiction, between truth and ideology, between the explanatory diagram and the fine art image, between the deadly seriousness of the propagandist and the madcap humour of the clown, is the notoriously swampy patch of ground occupied by the cartoonist. It is a place where things are seldom what they seem, where the careless visitor can come to a sticky end. While it is tempting to try to establish Cruikshank’s intentions in order to understand his cartoons, we should be aware that we are in a realm not entirely governed by conscious thinking.

THE CHAIN OF BEING

Cruikshank’s 1820 settler cartoons were published forty years before Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. It was a time when all kinds of weird ideas about race, ethnicity, creation and evolution were swirling around in British and European society. Some of these ideas derived from artificially distorted versions of the Judaeo-Christian creation myth, others were part of a quasi-scientific discourse that is today labelled as ‘scientific racism’. The notion of polygenesis or multiple creations, for example, was very popular. God, the proponents of polygenesis believed, must have staged a number of different creations – otherwise how could the physiognomic differences between people of different races be explained? Also popular was the so-called science of phrenology, which purported to demonstrate that the structure of the human skull, particularly the shape of the jaw and angle of the face, signified the position of various races on the evolutionary scale (Fig 13). What these explanations had in common was the notion of a Chain of Being, a hierarchical ladder that extended from the lowliest corners of the earth, inhabited by brutish creatures, to the celestial realms of heaven, inhabited by God and His angels. Of course, the people of the northern countries believed that they were very far up the ladder, and therefore closer to heaven, than the people of the south. And, according to these theories, the further south you lived, the lower down the ladder you were. The exaggerated prognathous jaws, slanted heads, huge lips and menacing teeth of Cruikshank’s cannibals suggest that he was familiar with these ideas. But, as I discovered from Rachel Holmes’s 2007 biography of Sara (Saartjie) Baartman, the famous Hottentot Venus who performed for British audiences at a Piccadilly music hall in 1810, there was something else going on here. On the front cover of Holmes’s book is a detail of a caricature of Baartman produced by Charles Williams in 1811, entitled ‘Love and Beauty – Sartjee the Hottentot Venus’, in which a plump little Cupid rides jockey-like on Baartman’s huge bottom, pointing his arrow at the reader and proclaiming: ‘Take care of your Hearts!!’ (Fig 15, overleaf).10 In Cruikshank’s cannibal cartoon, the woman in the background, waving an axe and a flaming torch, also has a baby perched on her rump (Fig 16, overleaf).It seems that Cruikshank might have borrowed this idea from Williams’s caricature, thus providing us with a link through which his Hottentot women can be connected back to the Hottentot Venus.16 All the female Hottentot figures in Cruikshank’s 1820 settler cartoons have Saartjie Baartman’s famously steatopygic buttocks.11 According to Holmes, Baartman’s posterior was a favourite subject of the cartoonists and comedians of the day, and images of the Hottentot Venus appear in cartoons by Cruikshank, Rowlandson and others. Holmes suggests that Cruikshank might have seen Baartman in one

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Fig 14 ‘CIVILISATION’ German-born caricaturist Heinrich Egersdorfer (1853–1915) provides a fine example of the stereotype of the mock Englishman, incongruously attired in European clothing and mimicking the conventions of ‘civilised’ society. One of the forgotten artists of South African cartooning, Egersdorfer provided covers and illustrations for this short-lived weekly paper, a local imitation of the famous London Illustrated News, between 1884 and 1885.

19 Fig 14 HEINRICH EGERSDORFER, ‘CIVILISATION’, ENGRAVING, 1885

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what’s so funny? Khoikhoi people – the so-called Hottentots – had been coexisting, albeit less than comfortably, for more than a hundred years. The real Khoikhoi were by no means unknown. Likewise, there was no evidence of cannibalism amongst the Khoikhoi or the Xhosa who lived at the northeastern edge of the colony adjoining the land where the 1820 settlers were to be located. And yet, according to Dietrich: ‘Reports of cannibalism, savage superstition, witchcraft, bizarre sexual customs, and slavery were unquestioningly accepted as reality’ by the British public. It seems that the existence of these popular stereotypes derived less from a lack of information than from a deliberate ignorance that couldn’t care less about the realities of life in southern Africa. Whether or not he believed these cannibal stories himself, Cruikshank would certainly have been well aware that the British public was enthralled by the phenomenon of cannibalism – according to the anthropologist Gananath

Figs 15-16 BAARTMAN CONNECTION Cruikshank’s image of the baby riding on its mother’s buttocks was probably derived from Charles Williams’s 1811 caricature of Sara (Saartjie) Baartman.

Fig 15 CHARLES WILLIAMS, ‘LOVE AND BEAUTY – SAARTJEE THE HOTTENTOT VENUS’, ENGRAVING, 1811

Fig 16 GEORGE CRUIKSHANK, COLOURED ENGRAVING, 1819 (DETAIL)

modify BYLINE Cruik copy

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of her Piccadilly performances,12 and I must say I’m intrigued by this idea. Holmes provides an interesting perspective on the tragic story of the Hottentot Venus, in which Baartman is portrayed less as a victim dragged to London against her will than as a feisty young woman who strove to hold onto her dignity and identity in the face of tremendous odds. Whether or not Cruikshank did sit through one of Baartman’s performances we can’t be sure, but he certainly would have been aware of the hotly debated controversy surrounding the court case in which her roguish employers, Alexander Dunlop and Hendrik Cesars, were accused by the abolitionist campaigner Zachary Macaulay of subjecting her to ‘abject slavery’.13 The case of the Hottentot Venus caused such a furore in London not so much because she was a strange and exotic savage, although this was how she was billed, but because an important section of the public saw her as the victim of a kind of bondage that was akin to slavery. While the stereotype of Africans as uncivilised savages was undoubtedly prevalent in Britain in the early 1800s, it was countermanded by an enlightened Abolitionist viewpoint that the practice of slavery, and other forms of bondage that might disguise or supplant it, contradicted the notion of civilisation and represented savagery of a different sort.14 By the time Cruikshank penned his cannibal cartoon, Britain had already been involved in the affairs of the Cape for decades. Here was a society where Europeans and

Obeyesekere, descriptions of ‘the horrid banquet of human flesh’ were a common feature of travellers’ tales. Most of these tales, argues Obeyesekere, were grossly exaggerated or simply made up to titillate the imagination of the British public, in the same way as horror movies titillate the public imagination to this day.22 The kind of nervous excitement that is stimulated by horror stories depends on the existence of an imagined Other, which tugs at something in ourselves that is normally hidden or repressed. In the same way, Cruikshank’s cannibal cartoon toyed with the inchoate anxieties of the British public, mischievously exaggerating the actual dangers that awaited the 1820 settlers. Cruikshank struck a nerve with his cannibal cartoon, but it was not just a knee-jerk racist reflex. It was something deeper, secreted away below the level of conscious thought, in the subliminal domain where the forbidden lure of an imagined Other connects with the anxieties that simmer and bubble beneath the surface of ‘civilised’ society. And so it turns out that Cruikshank was just doing his job as a cartoonist. His flabby mock Europeans and grotesque cannibal ogres need to be seen for what they really were: mischievous satires employed in service of a blistering attack on the British government’s 1820 settlement scheme.23 And they are still powerful today because they remind us of the origins of the fears and anxieties that lie beneath racial prejudices. As British and European emigrants settled in greater numbers in South Africa, these prejudices would coalesce into the particularly vitriolic form of racism that has held the country in its grip for more than a century. Like the hapless victims consigned to the big black cooking pots of cartoon cannibals, the 1820 settlers were just one more ingredient in the human stew that would continue to boil furiously in the racial melting pot at the southern tip of Africa.

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CHAPTER TWO

The Noble Savage ‘[W]ere it not for their colour, even Europeans might pronounce them a very handsome race of men.’ Samu el Daniell, artist’s notes to Afr ican Sc en ery an d An imals (1820)

hat was it about the Khoikhoi people – the fabled Hottentots – that exerted itself so forcefully upon the European imagination? The encounter with Cruikshank’s cannibals awakened my curiosity about representations of the Other in the popular art of the Cape Colony. Delving into the work of documentary artists who worked in the Cape during the early 1800s, several of whom accompanied expeditions of exploration, I came across a rich seam of evidence. While there are not many cartoons from this period, there are plenty of illustrations. Most of these were produced by a handful of artists, mostly British or European, who visited or lived at the Cape between 1800 and 1850. At least two of them, Charles Bell and Thomas Baines, also produced cartoons at one time or another, but in the

main these artists were painters and illustrators concerned with documenting life at the Cape and in the hinterland. None of their work is as outrageous as Cruikshank’s, but their paintings and illustrations nevertheless present a pungent potpourri of racial stereotypes. As has been noted, ethnographic illustrations and paintings of the period fall naturally into two categories: those rendered by studio-based artists and engravers back home who were given the task of producing finished art from rough sketches or written descriptions, and those produced by artists who actually spent significant lengths of time in the southern African region, travelling through the countryside and making notes and sketches that were subsequently used as references in the production of paintings, lithographs and engravings.

Fig 17 ADAMIC IDYLL This idealised portrayal of a Hottentot couple and their baby is in direct contrast to the frightening ogres depicted in Cruikshank’s cannibal cartoon.

FIG 17 W M CRAIG, ‘A HOTTENTOT MAN AND WOMAN WITH A VIEW OF THE TABLE MOUNTAIN AND CAPE TOWN AT THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE’, HAND-COLOURED ENGRAVING, CIRCA 1800

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what’s so funny?

Fig 18 WILD MAN The archetype of the Wild Man, represented here in a 15th century woodcut, goes back to the earliest myths and legends of European culture.

FIG 18 MARTIN SHONGAUER, ‘WILD MAN WITH COAT OF ARMS’, ENGRAVING, 15TH CENTURY.

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An early nineteenth-century engraving of Hottentots in front of Table Mountain (Fig 17) is an example of pictures that fall into the first of these two categories. The engraving portrays a man and woman, the latter carrying a child on her back, depicted according to the artistic conventions of the time. The male figure has a boyish aspect and an innocent, cherubic face. But the sheepskin tied at his neck and draped over his firm chest and the skimpy loincloth covering his manhood while revealing his entire thigh provide the image with a sexual subtext. The female figure is rather coy (no pun intended), dressed in a stylish hat and striped leggings, but with part of her thigh enticingly revealed. The necklace draws attention to her breasts. Strolling down to the bay with their cows ambling ahead of them, they are far from terrifying savages. Rather, they are presented as sexually attractive beings comfortable in their near nakedness, posed against an idyllic landscape – an African Adam and Eve, living in a southern Paradise. ‘Englishmen found the natives of Africa very different from themselves ... they seemed to be a particularly libidinous sort of people’, according to the historian Winthrop Jordan.1 Is there a disjuncture between the depiction of a prelapsarian African idyll and the stereotype of the libidinous African? The cultural theorist Lola Young thinks so.2 She suggests that the European stereotype of the naked or semi-naked African is inherently contradictory, holding feelings of attraction and repulsion in an uneasy balance. And, when one compares the African idyll to Cruikshank’s cannibal cartoon, it’s hard to disagree. To my mind, these contradictions lift the image of the savage African above the mundane world of the stereotype and transport it into the realm of archetype and myth. Stereotypes are by their nature reductive, focusing on certain aspects of the subject and exaggerating these for satirical or political effect. Archetypes, by contrast, are reservoirs of complexity in which the paradoxes of human existence are imbued with mythic significance. While the image of the savage African may seem to be a simple stereotype, it is actually highly complex, multilayered and contradictory, and it may be more useful to see it as a mythic archetype with close affinities to Pan, the Warrior and the Wild Man (Fig 18). Like all archetypes, the Savage is as old as human civilisation, going back to our primeval origins, while

simultaneously continuing to exist, more or less unconsciously, within every one of us. As suggested in the previous chapter, the image of the Other comes into existence not as a result of careful observation and rational thought, but as a projection that arises out of anxiety or desire – a spontaneous incarnation of the shadow, the dark side of the Self. Our characterisations of the Other are thus in a sense an attempt to banish – to dump onto other people – those dark, shadowy aspects of the Self with which we are uncomfortable. Anthropological research has been described as an exercise in self-inspection by means of comparison.3 This

might explain why travel writing was so popular in Britain and Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As people in the northern countries came increasingly into contact with people from parts of the world previously unknown to them, this experience of the Other influenced the way they saw themselves. European discovery and conquest were driven by a set of ideas about the illumination of the dark unknown by the light of Renaissance culture. Through the scientific process of mapping, classification and description, the wild regions of the world could be tamed and their resources appropriated. Science was seen as the triumph of Reason over superstition, while, at the same time, converting the heathen to Christianity was seen as an absolute necessity. All these ideas were subsumed into one overarching notion: the introduction of civilisation to the primitive Other. These ideas are clearly discernible in the drawings and sketches, and the engravings and paintings based on these sketches, produced by the documentary artists who lived and worked in southern Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century. Some of these artists, such as Charles Bell and Thomas Baines, spent most of their adult lives here; others, like Samuel Daniell, stayed just a few years, and one, the swashbuckling James Saunders King, died in the midst of his adventures. Fired up by the enthusiasm for exploration and scientific discovery that held the Western world in its thrall, these artists took their task seriously – they saw it as their responsibility to provide accurate and convincing visual images to supplement the written records of the explorers whose tales of travel and adventure were voraciously devoured by audiences back home. 4 In their enthusiasm, they imposed their own way of seeing on the people of Africa, and in some cases their drawings and paintings tell us as much about the artists themselves as they do about the people they strove to represent. At first glance their depictions of indigenous people present themselves as ethnographic portrayals in which clothing, tools, weapons and other accoutrements, as well as vernacular architecture, the landscape and the local flora and fauna, are recorded as accurately as possible. But there’s far more to them than that.

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the noble savage

FIG 19 SAMUEL DANIELL, ‘A KORAH VILLAGE ON THE LEFT BANK OF THE ORANGE RIVER’ FROM AFRICAN SCENERY AND ANIMALS, COLOURED ENGRAVING, 1831

ROMANTIC yearning

Of the notable documentary artists who came to South Africa from Britain and Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, one of the earliest, and most talented, was Samuel Daniell, who arrived in the Cape in 1799 at the age of 25, and two years later was given the opportunity to travel into the interior as the secretary and draughtsman of a year-long expedition to Bechuanaland (now Botswana). The gifted young artist sketched incessantly, accumulating a valuable visual record of the people, animals and landscapes encountered en route. On the journey to Bechuanaland, Daniell’s party encountered a Khoikhoi community known as the Korah or Korana. The young artist was deeply impressed by these people. Returning to England in 1802, Daniell set about producing a portfolio of 30 coloured engravings entitled African Scenery and Animals. One of the best-known works in this portfolio is entitled ‘The Korah Village’ (Fig 19). In his introductory notes, Daniell wrote: ‘The village that appears in this view is on the Gariep or Orange River, and is habited by Hottentots of a tribe denominated Khoras, settled on the south bank of that river, who are, perhaps, the best featured of all the different nations or orders of this extraordinary race of human beings’.5

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This picture presents a rural idyll of pastoral people blessed by an abundant Nature. Daniell was particularly impressed by their domed huts and the ingenious method used by the Korah to convey their livestock across the river. To the young artist’s Romantic turn of mind, the natural lifestyle enjoyed by the Korah would have been a reminder of what, back home, had already, to a large extent, been lost. As industrial development quickened in Britain and peasants became proletarian slum dwellers, Romantic poets and artists mourned the passing of rural innocence and the loss of the benefits of the bucolic country life. Daniell’s work is likewise imbued with Romantic yearning.

FIG 20 SAMUEL DANIELL, ‘A HOTTENTOT’ AND ‘A HOTTENTOT WOMAN’ FROM AFRICAN SCENERY AND ANIMALS, COLOURED ENGRAVING, 1831 (DETAIL)

Figs 19-20 EXTRAORDINARY HUMANS Samuel Daniell, a young English artist who participated in a yearlong expedition through the southern African region in 1801, was particularly impressed by the exemplary lifestyle of the Korah people who lived on the banks of the Gariep (Orange) river.

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what’s so funny?

Imaginary zOOlUs

The Romantic idea of the noble savage is equally evident in the illustrations attributed to James Saunders King that appear in Nathaniel Isaacs’ Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa (Natal).6 King was an adventurous ex-naval officer who commanded the ill-fated brig Mary, on which, accompanied by Isaacs, he set out from the Cape in 1825 in search of his business partner, Francis Farewell, an entrepreneurial explorer who had reportedly purchased a huge tract of land at Port Natal from Shaka, king of the Zulus. In Isaacs’ narrative Lieutenant King is represented as a heroic figure, but recent research into his activities reveals him to have been something of a rogue, who tried to manipulate British colonial policy towards the Zulus to his own advantage.

FIG 21 JAMES SAUNDERS KING, ‘CHAKA, KING OF THE ZOOLUS’, 1836

Figs 21-22 MISLEADING IMAGES These highly romanticised images are attributed to the swashbuckling explorer James Saunders King, who travelled in Zululand in 1825. Despite its highly inaccurate details of clothing and weaponry, the image of Shaka (above) has become a popular marketing emblem for the KwaZuluNatal tourism industry.

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There are doubts about whether King actually produced the sensitively drawn but highly romanticised studies of Zulu subjects which appear in the 1836 edition of Isaacs’s book.10 These images include the much-reproduced ‘Chaka, King of the Zoolus’ (Fig 21), which has subsequently become a marketing emblem for the modern-day Zulu Kingdom.11 The irony of this image is that it bears no resemblance to the actual Shaka of historical record, and the ethnographic details of dress, shield and spear bear little more than an imagined relation to the actual Zulu costume or weaponry of the time.8 In the work attributed to King the noble savage is so imaginatively articulated that the images shake themselves loose from the real world and shimmer like chimeras at the gates of myth. ‘Zoolu Prophetess’ (Fig 22) depicts a classically proportioned woman of regal bearing attired in an ensemble of leather and fur, her elegant dress gracefully cut to display her perfect breasts and noble feet. In one hand she holds a long, thin spear, while with the other she clasps a posy of flowers to her bosom. But the drawing is not entirely fanciful. The woman is wearing an accurately depicted isibhodiya apron, which would normally indicate that she was pregnant with her first child.9 Of course the artist had no idea what the apron was for, or how it should be worn. The placing of the apron under her bare breasts, with the band of leather crossed between them, is pure fantasy. The incorporation into the image of this accurately depicted traditional Zulu garment, wrongly worn, gives it a quasi-scientific authority that is completely illusory. It is an excellent example of the myth-making tendencies of early ethnographic illustrators and further complicates our understanding of the role played by illustrations such as these in constituting a romanticised image of Africa in the European mind.

FIG 22 JAMES SAUNDERS KING, ‘ZOOLU PROPHETESS’, 1836

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the noble savage

FIG 23 CHARLES BELL, ‘HOTTENTOTS – STREET SCENE’, WATERCOLOUR, CIRCA 1840

BESOTTED HOTTENTOTS

A useful glimpse of colonial attitudes towards the Khoikhoi is provided in the work of Charles Davidson Bell, who came to the Cape as a young man in 1830 and eventually rose to the rank of Surveyor General of the Cape Colony. Until the 1990s, Bell’s work was not widely appreciated. He was better known as the designer of the famous Cape Triangular postage stamp, issued in 1853, and for the Cape Town suburb of Bellville, which is named after him. But he was also a prolific artist whose drawings and prints provide a valuable record of colonial life. A 1995 book on Bell’s life and work by Phillida Brooke Simons and Michael Godby aims to rehabilitate the reputation of this somewhat neglected colonial artist and bring his work to the attention of a broader public. However, there is a sting in the tail of this endeavour. In the foreword to the book, the chairman of the trust set up to look after Bell’s work, Dr Frank Bradlow, wrote: ‘I feel sure that his satirical and humorous sketches were not made by him with any intention to belittle the people he portrayed.’10 This kind of comment is always an invitation to go back and look at the work more closely, to see what it was that th e writer was worried about. And, in Bell’s case, one does not have to look

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very far. In a number of his drawings, although by no means all of them, the indigenous people of the Cape are presented in a way that might be considered racist by today’s standards (Fig 23). But this does not mean that Bell’s work should be

rejected or discounted. On the contrary, his pictures provide a valuable visual record of how the people of the Cape saw each other in those days. And, in his defence, it should be noted that Bell produced whimsical and occasionally uncomplimentary drawings of Boer and British people as well. What makes Bell’s work so interesting is that, inside the persona of the sober documentary artist, was a cartoonist clamouring to be let out. This was recognised by at least one contemporary, who referred to Bell’s ‘Cruikshankian labours’.11 In his assessment of Bell’s work, Godby writes that many of Bell’s drawings reveal ‘a patent satirical intention in their style that is directly at odds with any scientific purpose’.12 Of all Bell’s portrayals of the people of the Cape, the ones most likely to invite censure are his pictures of Khoikhoi and Khoisan people. And it is here that we encounter, once again, the powerful and enduring stereotype of the Hottentot. Bell’s Hottentots are usually shown drinking, smoking, dancing or reclining. They are seldom shown at work. But

Fig 23 PARTY TIME Charles Bell, who later became Surveyor General of the Cape, was a prolific illustrator whose work often tended towards caricature, especially in his depictions of the Khoikhoi people of Cape Town, who were his most popular subjects. As Godby (1998) has observed, a poster for the Temperance Society on the wall behind the figures confirms the artist’s ‘facetious intent’.

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what’s so funny?

Fig 24 sex, achohol and tobacco In this lithograph, in which an angry wife is about to sjambok her wayward husband and his girlfriend, Charles Bell delineates the stereotypical behaviour patterns of the Hottentot: idleness, intoxication and licentiousness.

FIG 24 CHARLES BELL, ‘the irate wife ’, LITHOGRAPH, CIRCA 1840

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while Bell’s images embody European stereotypes of the Khoikhoi, these people nevertheless had a strange attraction for him and were evidently his favourite subjects. And, given the number of Hottentot drawings he produced, it is sensible to assume that they would also have been popular amongst the audience for whom his work was intended. Bell’s Hottentots are fun-loving people with a weakness for alcohol. They love to dance, often unsteadily, with a bottle

in one hand. The women are invariably shown with a pipe clasped between their teeth. In one particularly telling lithograph, known as ‘The Irate Wife’ (Fig 24), a couple enjoying each other’s company, with pipe and bottle in hand, are about to be pounced upon by a second woman wielding a sjambok, obviously the man’s wife. This third element completes the stereotypical triad of Hottentot behaviours: idleness, intoxication and licentiousness.

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the noble savage

THE INADVERTENT CARICATURIST

In the work of Thomas Baines (1820-1875), the indigenous inhabitants of the country are presented in a far less idealised or romanticised way than they are in Samuel Daniell’s 1832 portfolio African Scenery and Animals, the original drawings for which were produced several decades earlier. Baines’s depictions demonstrate that the progression of the imperial project no longer allowed space for the noble savage archetype. As Marion Arnold has pointed out in her 1996 study of his life and work, Baines grew up in a world where British expansionism was rampant and aggressive, characterised by a self-confident belief in the righteousness of imperialism and social progress. In this context, attitudes that are today dismissed as racist and paternalistic were accepted without question. While Arnold makes no excuses for Baines’s chauvinism, she does make the point that his attitudes were typical of the colonial mindset of the day and had a particularly Victorian flavour.13 While Baines refrained from romanticising the African, he showed no such restraint in his landscape paintings, in which the flame of Romanticism ardently burns. Here his role as a disciplined scientific observer and documenter in service of the empire gave way to the true love that animated his life and work – the evocative and mysterious African landscape, which in his paintings is often feminised and imbued with subliminal eroticism. Godby suggests that, in his depictions of the Victoria Falls in particular, a contradiction between his scientific pretensions and his more artistic and Romantic yearnings is revealed.14 Baines saw himself as a man of science and his depictions of the indigenous people were produced in this context. According to Arnold, he took his role as pictorial ethnographer seriously, and many of his illustrations and paintings were accompanied by long and detailed entries in his journal. But in amongst all this scientific documentation are moments of inadvertent caricature that take us deeper. A good example is the picture variously entitled ‘Kafirs having made their fortunes leaving the colony’ and ‘Kafirs on trek with their belongings’ (1848-1852). It depicts a disgruntled group of Xhosa people walking through the countryside past a milestone inscribed ‘GT XXX’ (indicating that they are thirty miles from Grahamstown). Their dejected postures, miserable expressions and the motley possessions piled on their heads do not suggest people who have ‘made their fortunes’. Instead, they are presented, almost comically, as representatives of a humbled people. A comparison of this image with Daniell’s aquatint entitled ‘Kaffirs on a march’, is instructive. In Daniell’s work the notion of the noble savage is clearly evident, whereas in Baines’s treatment of a similar subject, produced some fifty years later, we see in a grimmer, more realistic, if not somewhat satirical representation of the Xhosa people.

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FIG 25 SAMUEL DANIELL, ‘KAFFIRS ON A MARCH’, COLOUR AQUATINT, 1831

FIG 26 THOMAS BAINES, ‘KAFIRS ON TREK WITH THEIR BELONGINGS’, HAND-COLOURED LITHOGRAPH, 1852

According to Arnold, ‘Baines’s Romanticism never extended to notions of the “noble savage”, and perhaps rightly so, because what he witnessed was not in any way romantic, but a harsh process of turning independent people into slovenly labourers and kitchen servants’.15 As colonial life became entrenched at the Cape, the archetype of the noble savage gave way to functional stereotypes that were more congenial to the emerging social and economic realities of South Africa.

Figs 25-26 IMPACT OF COLONIALISM A comparison between these images by Samuel Daniell and Thomas Baines demonstrates the demise of the noble savage stereotype, and gives some idea of how colonialism impacted on the social and economic life of the indigenous population during the first half of the nineteenth century.

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CHAPTER THREE

The River of Blood ‘As an Afrikaner, I have to face all these facts about my forefathers. At this point in history, I cannot merely justify their actions as the behaviour of a strange group of pale-faced people who came from Europe. Their sins are being visited upon me still today.’ Max du Preez, Pale Native (2003)

ne of my favourite pastimes is to spend more time and money than I can afford scratching around in second-hand bookshops for old books or magazines, hoping to find interesting illustrations or cartoons from long ago. Every now and then I stumble upon a piece of Africana that makes it all worthwhile and helps me gain a deeper understanding of the history of South African cartooning, and the cartooning of South African history. One such acquisition was the discovery of two loose pages cut out of a July 1879 edition of the French weekly newspaper, Le Journal Illustré, depicting scenes from the Zulu War. I noted with interest that in the first illustration, a composite in which scenes from rural Zulu life are depicted alongside studies of Zulu and British combatants (Fig 28), a Zulu warrior is depicted holding a rifle (Fig 27). And in the second, a battalion of Zulu warriors charges towards the viewer in full cry, garbed in traditional battle dress (Fig 29). It is a familiar enough image, except that the Zulu warriors have guerrilla-style bandoliers over their shoulders and are brandishing rifles alongside their knobkerries, shields and spears. While these pictures are entirely conventional and typical of the news magazine illustrations of the time, I was immediately struck by how the Zulus had been depicted. It was quite startling to realise how much had changed in the sixty years since Cruikshank penned his cannibal cartoon. These rifle-toting Zulus represented a new kind of adversary. FIG 27 JULES DES PRES, ENGRAVED BY H. H. MEYER,

WARS OF REPRESENTATION

The years after the arrival of the 1820 settlers were filled with warfare. There was ongoing violent conflict in the eastern Cape, where the settlers had been placed (rather cynically, some thought) by the British colonial administration as a buffer between the colony and the Xhosa, whose power base lay across the Fish River. The population of the region was an melange of Xhosa, Khoisan, Dutch and English people, and the families who lived there, whatever group they belonged to, were subjected to all the worst features of war-torn regions – killings, burnings, rapes, abductions and reprisals, in a self-perpetuating cycle of violence. Meanwhile, the Voortrekkers were making their way into the hinterland, and the skirmishes between them and the indigenous populace became more frequent and more serious as they entered Basuto and Zulu territory. As these changes forced themselves upon the landscape, new ways of thinking and seeing were taking shape. Alongside the stereotypes of the primitive Bushman and the lazy Hottentot emerged new stereotypes: the fierce Zulu warrior, willing to defend his honour to the death; the arrogant British imperialist, lord of all he surveyed; the hardworking settler, labouring to carve a place for himself and his family in a wild and dangerous land; and, with a Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other, the plucky but obdurate Voortrekker. The violent battles for supremacy that characterised the early period of modern South African history were not only about land and physical resources. They were also wars of representation. Despite the warnings of Cruikshank and others, Britons continued to settle in South Africa throughout the nineteenth century, though in much smaller numbers than in the other colonies.1 Britain gained full control of the Cape in 1814, and set about trying to discipline what Leonard Thompson describes as ‘a complex, violent and largely anarchic society scattered over a vast hinterland’.2 The British regarded themselves as temporary custodians of this untamed

‘GUERRE DU ZOULOULAND’, 1879 (DETAIL)

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FIG 28 JULES DES PRES, ENGRAVED BY H. H. MEYER, ‘GUERRE DU ZOULOULAND’, 1879

Figs 27-29 GUN-TOTING ZULUS These illustrations, produced to accompany articles on the AngloZulu War of 1979 in the French illustrated periodical Le Journal Illustre, are notable for their ethnographic detail. Of interest is that, alongside their traditional weapons, the Zulu warriors carry rifles and wear bandoliers.

29 FIG 29 JULES DES PRES, ENGRAVED BY H. PAILLARD, ‘GUERRIERS ZOULOUS MARCHANT AU COMBAT’, 1879

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what’s so funny?

Figs 30-31 BLOOD RIVER REVISITED Conrad Botes’s potent retelling of the Battle of Blood River wittily deconstructs one of the sustaining myths of Afrikanerdom..

land, and the government’s decision to allocate a fund of £50 000 to settle some four thousand British emigrants in the eastern Cape in 1820 was, in this context, something of a paradox. But whatever the reasoning behind it, the arrival of successive waves of British settlers in South Africa was to have profound consequences, accelerating the process of demographic reorganisation that was already underway. A key element of this process was what has come to be known as the Great Trek. During the 1830s, fuelled by antiBritish sentiment, the abolition of slavery in the colony and republican aspirations, some 6 000 Afrikaners emigrated from the Cape in search of a promised land where they would be free of British control.3 Their frequent and often violent clashes with the indigenous population irked British officials, who were opposed to unnecessary expenditure in the region and realised that the unchecked migration of Afrikaners into the hinterland was likely to cause them a major headache. In 1838 the Voortrekkers found a route through the great east-facing escarpment known to them as the Drakensberg (dragon mountains) and to the Zulu as uKhahlamba (barrier or row of spears). 4 As they made their way down steep mountainsides scattered with wild flowers, with verdant lands stretched out below as far as the eye could see, it must have seemed to them that they had found their promised land. But it didn’t take long for them to come face to face with the fabled military might of the Zulu. In a bloody battle now popularly known as the Battle of Blood River, the Voortrekkers convincingly demonstrated the superior killing power of the rifle over the assegai, and thereafter gained control of the region, proclaiming the Republic of Natal in 1842. This the British could not allow, and in a more or less peaceful annexation, Natal was incorporated into the British Empire the following year. In 1849 a further 5 000 British emigrants settled in Natal. 5

turning of the river water to red; and the subsequent renaming of the river. As the blood of the Zulus merged with the river water, it was as if it underwent a mystical transmogrification, becoming a symbolic substance. Although in the actual battle the Boers were virtually untouched by all the Zulu blood that was spilt, as a nation they were somehow anointed by the mythical substance that the blood had become. The turning of the river to blood somehow signified God’s approval for whatever killing would be required in their subjugation of the indigenous population. It was an outrageous proposition, but we were taught it as if it were the holy Gospel. Today, the Day of the Covenant is still honoured in South Africa, although it is now known as the Day of Reconciliation. The Battle of Blood River, as a symbolic moment in Afrikaner history, has been the subject of numerous paintings, prints, diagrammatic representations, sculptures and monuments over the decades. But in the post-apartheid context, in which the sustaining mythologies of Afrikanerdom have been discredited and, to a large extent, abandoned, the battle of Blood River has been identified by satirists as a rich source of material for jokes about racism and religion. A particularly potent retelling of the myth is Conrad Botes’s comic strip ‘Bloedrivier’, published in Bitterkomix in 1995 (Figs 30-31).6 In an article originally published in the South Atlantic Quarterly in 2004, and republished in a shortened form in The Big Bad Bitterkomix Handbook (2006), Rita Barnard notes how ‘the familiar story of suffering and triumph with which all Afrikaners were once trained to identify’ is

THE TRANSMOGRIFICATION OF BLOOD

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Blood River looms large in the mythology of Afrikanerdom, and indeed of South Africa as a whole. The events that led up to it are still the subject of argument, and historical accounts of the battle differ according to the ideological position of the historian recounting the story. The events that transpired are known more or less off-by-heart by every white South African who went to school during the apartheid era. We were required to memorise the entire story in exhaustive detail: the exact positioning of the laager of wagons on a defensible bluff overlooking the Ncome river; the methods of securing the Boer wagons and the number and placement of their cannons; the number of Zulu warriors who massed for the attack and the number killed; the holy Covenant made on 9 December 1838 that if God granted victory to the Boers, they would commemorate the day for all time; the symbolic

FIG 30 CONRAD BOTES, ‘BLOOD RIVER’, COMIC STRIP, 1998 (DETAIL)

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31 FIG 31 CONRAD BOTES, ‘BLOOD RIVER’, COMIC STRIP, 1998 (PAGES 1, 2, 5, 7)

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what’s so funny? erupted like festering boils when the Day of the Vow was celebrated annually.’ In a surreal twist, Konradski and his sidekick, the whiskyswilling Jack Burns, descend into Hell in a flying Chevrolet, where, in a river of boiling blood, they encounter the souls of the damned, among whom is Andries Pretorius, guarded over by a black Pegasus who periodically blasts him with an AK47 rifle (Fig 32). As Rita Barnard points out, the final image depicting the Boer leader’s agony in the river of flame is an echo of the earlier depiction of Zulu warriors dying in the river of blood. The strip, she suggests, is ‘a parable of karmic circularity’ that serves ‘not only to debunk history, but to exact a kind of symbolic revenge on it as well’.

FIG 32 CONRAD BOTES, ‘BLOOD RIVER’, COMIC STRIP, 1998 (PAGE 13)

Fig 32 KHARMIC RETRIBUTION In what Rita Barnard calls ‘a parable of kharmic circularity’, Boer hero Andries Pretorius is condemned to eternal suffering in the burning river of the damned, guarded by an AK47wielding black Pegasus.

Fig 33 GODFORSAKEN Conrad Botes’s tattooed Afrikaner patriarch bemoans his fate.

Fig 34 (OVERLEAF) SATIRICAL VERSION Jason Bronkhorst provides another satirical version of the battle of Blood River.

revealed by Botes to be the ‘self-interested construction of a myth’.6 Botes’s satirical deconstruction begins in a familiar way, revisiting, albeit with a mischievous twist or two, all the time-honoured tropes: the cruel, corpulent Dingane (who is reputed to have cried ‘Bulalani abathakathi!’ – ‘Kill the wizards!’ – but in Botes’s strip cries ‘Kill the colonialist pigs!’); the savage clubbing of Piet Retief and his men; the brutal massacre at Weenen; the lionisation of Andries Pretorius; the diagrammatic representation of the laager on the Ncome River; the preparations for battle; the mass slaughter of the Zulu impis; and the turning of the river to blood.

a surreal twist

But then the story is interrupted by Professor Konradski, an alter ego of the cartoonist, who begins to critically examine the myth, beginning with the delusion that ‘the Afrikaners, along with the Israelites, are God’s chosen people’. Helping himself to a spoonful of soup from an ancient cast-iron coal stove (an emblem of Afrikaner survivalism), Konradski continues: ‘The Afrikaner Nationalists took this predestination thing to absurd extremes. Manifestations thereof

A decade later, the Battle of Blood River is again the subject of a satirical comic strip that debunks the myth, this time by Jason Bronkhorst (Fig 34, overleaf). Here the cartoonist toys with the familiar diagrammatic representation of the laager and the oncoming Zulu hordes, but this time the Zulu warriors are armed with modern automatic weapons. It is only the surprise appearance, thanks to a ‘time hiccup’, of a squadron of British Spitfire fighter planes en route to the 1940 Allied evacuation of Dunkirk, that saves the day for the Boer commandos. Bronkhorst’s strip produces a result not dissimilar from Botes’s, but with more economy and less passion: the Boers misguidedly believe that their victory is the result of divine intervention, whereas it is really the result of a time warp. In both of these strips, it is not the Battle of Blood River, but the telling of history, that is the artists’ real concern. They challenge the ideal of objective historical truth, using their comic strips to deconstruct and question the history that was forced down their throats when they were schoolboys. In doing so they have shifted position in relation to traditional Afrikaner mythology, signified in the figure of the Bible-waving patriarch, from whom they seek to distance themselves. This patriarch is feelingly represented in Botes’s cover illustration for The Best of Bitterkomix, Volume One (Fig 33), in which the English version of the ’Bloedrivier’ strip first appeared: a dark-eyed fanatic with biblical features, dressed in nothing but a pair of stained underpants, his body tattooed with scenes from Afrikaner mythology, standing in the graveyard of his forefathers, crying out in words borrowed from Jesus Christ: ‘My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?’. In Bronkhorst’s final frame, the Boers listening to the story are shown to be damaged – blinded and with amputated limbs; referring perhaps to the human costs of maintaining the myth. As the Good Book predicts, the sins of the fathers continue to be visited upon subsequent generations.

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✓

FIG 33 CONRAD BOTES, COVER ILLUSTRATION, THE BEST OF BITTERKOMIX, VOLUME ONE, 1998

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FIG 34 JASON BRONKHORST, ‘HISTORY REVISITED: HOW SHIT REALLY HAPPENED, PART ONE’, COMIC STRIP, 2007.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Imperial Monsters ‘From the military point of view, the camps were useless.’ Eric Walker, A H istory of South er n Afr ica (1935)

Fig 35 BLOODTHIRSTY TOAD The withering contempt with which French intellectuals regarded the leading figures of British imperialism at the time of the Anglo-Boer War is palpable in this portrayal by Jean Veber of Lord Kitchener.

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he old suburbs through which Cape Town’s Main Road runs are a curious mix of colonial decay and urban renewal, as yuppie couples move in alongside struggling families and previously depressed neighbourhoods get a new lease on life. One such neighbourhood is Observatory, where acclaimed Cape Town artists Claudette Schreuders and Anton Kannemeyer (Joe Dog) have their studio. One of the most popular hangouts in the area, located on Lower Main Road amongst trendy coffee bars, eateries, booksellers and bric-a-brac shops, is the Obz Cafe, where Joe Dog, Conrad Botes and their Bitterkomix cohorts often held court during their heyday.1 Opposite the Obz Cafe is one of those intriguing second-hand bookshops that are the nemesis of the addicted bibliophile. Here, too often, I’ve exchanged the contents of my wallet for tatty anthologies by great cartoonists of yesteryear like Peter Arno, Saul Steinberg or Ronald Searle. But it is also here that a chance meeting led to one of the most satisfying discoveries I have made so far in my search for unusual South African comics and cartoon collections. One afternoon, as I was about to join a coterie of cartooning cronies for a few hours of argumentative tub-thumping at the Obz Cafe, my bibliophilic addiction caused my feet to veer off course and into the bookshop opposite. Behind the counter I encountered an old friend, Mthandeni Ziqubu, an effervescent bon vivant who had worked with me years before in Durban on an obscure arts magazine called Mamba, a precursor to Mamba Comix.2 When I first met him, Mthandeni was one of those gifted township kids who, despite all the disadvantages of his upbringing, had pursued his own education with the unschooled ardour of Sartre’s autodidact, immersing himself in the

world of art, music and literature and developing an affinity for Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky alongside a passion for black cultural icons like Dambuzo Marachera and Ike Ude. It was great to encounter him here, surrounded by books, where he belonged. A year or two later, I bumped into Mthandeni again. This time he was about to leave the country, in pursuit of a beautiful young woman in an old European city, but before he disappeared he sat down with me at a Long Street burger bar and told me an intriguing story.

FIG 35 JEAN VEBER, CARICATURE OF LORD KITCHENER, L’ASSIETTE AU BEURRE, 1901 (DETAIL)

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The owner of the bookshop where he used to work, said Mthandeni as we made our way through nouvelle burgers with arty names, was approached by the family of a reclusive bibliophile who had died all alone in a Sea Point flat. The deceased man’s abode was reputedly packed from floor to ceiling with books of every description, but the family wanted nothing to do with any of it, except to get it off their hands for a fair price. Mthandeni was sent to investigate. The place turned out to be so tightly crammed with publications of every description, including numerous first editions and other Africana collectibles that, he said, the only access from the front door to the bedroom, and from the bedroom to the bathroom and kitchen, was through tunnels burrowed between the pillars of books. Mthandeni became highly animated as he described, in great detail, how he’d spent days going through the huge collection, uncovering one treasure after the next, from autographed Tretchikoff catalogues and rare portfolios of botanical art to obscure tomes whose secrets were hidden in impenetrable jargon. It was one of the defining moments of his life. Intrigued by this story, I contacted the Observatory bookseller and enquired whether the collection he’d acquired included any publications containing cartoons or comic art. He invited me to pay him a visit, which I eagerly did. As I parked my car outside the bookshop, I was in a state of nervous anticipation. The bookseller, after greeting me warmly, disappeared momentarily into his storeroom and returned with a brown paper packet filled with tabloid-sized sheets of old newsprint. Hardly able to restrain my excitement, I settled down at his desk to scrutinise the pile of brittle, brownish paper, most of it more than a hundred years old. The newsprint was so dry and fragile that fragments fell like confetti from the ragged edges of the pages as I gently removed them from the packet. But the gorgeous quality of the printing was still evident, and the colours, though somewhat subdued by the loss of contrast caused by the discoloration of the paper, were still fast. One pile of pages consisted of a collection of covers torn from Le Petit Journal, a tabloid-sized Paris weekly that featured a full-page colour engraving on the cover of every issue. These wonderfully detailed illustrations depicted scenes from the Anglo-Boer War and visits by Transvaal president Paul Kruger and his generals to Paris during the war years. Another of the publications was a collection of Boer War cartoons by the famous French caricaturist, Caran D’Ache (Emmanuel Poiré), entitled Kruger le Grand et John Bull le Petit (Fig 37), and a third was a collection of caricatures of newsmakers of the day by Leal da Camara, featuring a formidable-looking Kruger on the back cover. There were also some embossed postcards depicting famous Boer War battles and various other bits and pieces.

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FIG 36 CHARLES LEANDRE, COVER ILLUSTRATION, LE RIRE, 1900

Figs 36-37 CONTRASTING PORTRAYALS The contrast between Charles Leandre’s portrait of a dissolute Rhodes, and Caran d’Ache’s dignified portrait of Paul Kruger demonstrates the existence of strong pro-Boer, anti-British sentiment in France at the time of the Anglo-Boer War.

FIG 37 CARAN D’ACHE, COVER ILLUSTRATION, KRUGER LE GRANDE ET JOHN BULL LE PETIT, SUPPLEMENT TO LE RIRE, 1900

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FIG 38 JEAN VEBER, ‘GALANTERIE BRITANNIQUE’, L’ASSIETTE AU BEURRE, 1901

Figs 38-39 CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY Jean Veber’s lithographs depicting conditions in the concentration camps set up by the British during the Anglo-Boer War are amongst the most famous images to have emerged from the war.

But at the bottom of the pile was a publication that sent a shock of recognition through my system. It contained a number of drawings and lithographs by Jean Veber, a French caricaturist working in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century, famous for his hard-hitting Boer War cartoons. I had already seen reproductions of several of these images in Ryno Greenwall’s Artists and Illustrators of the Anglo-Boer War,3 and a moment or two of careful scrutiny was all it took to ascertain that what I held in my hands was one of the most important and influential comic art publications to come out of that war.

THE BUTTER DISH

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L’Assiette au Beurre (The Butter Dish), published between 1901 and 1912, was one of Paris’s most popular satirical weeklies, featuring work by the city’s best caricaturists. The issue that I had acquired (Fig 40) consisted of a collection of drawings and lithographs by Jean Veber on the subject of the Anglo-Boer War and conditions in the British concentration camps. Of all the historical fragments that I found that day, Veber’s lithographs were by far the most compelling,

evoking a strong sense of revulsion at the horrific conditions under which the inmates of these camps were interned. Caran d’Ache is better known than Veber, and his linework is certainly scintillating, but it is in Veber’s drawings that the real anger lies. Even after the passage of a century, the invisible fumes of the artist’s fury seem to rise from the surface of his images. Born in Paris in 1868, Veber trained in painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but later switched to satire. An accomplished lithographer with several awards to his name, he contributed for many years to the leading Parisian illustrated publications, including Le Rire, Gil Blas, Le Journal Illustré and L’Illustration. But the images for which he is most famous are those collected in issue number 26 of L’Assiette au Beurre, published on 28 September 1901. 4 The passion embedded in Veber’s imagery is so palpable that I was immediately overtaken by feelings of indignation. The British imperialists of the period may have considered themselves to be at the pinnacle of civilisation, but the look on the face of the soldier kicking a pregnant Boer woman in the stomach (Fig 38) is anything but civilised. It is a look I’ve seen many times – on the faces of schoolboys killing a frog, on the face of a schoolmaster tapping his palm with a bamboo cane, on the faces of police sergeants and army corporals. It is the look of a little man pumped up with an inflated idea of his own right to abuse others. There was something about this image of a sadistic English soldier, drawn by a Frenchman, that I found deeply disturbing. These feelings were exacerbated by a subsequent conversation with Anton Kannemeyer and Claudette Schreuders in the kitchen at their home, not far from the Observatory bookshop. I told them of my discovery and of my reaction to it, and as he pottered around the kitchen, stirring a pot on the stove and tending to the needs of his baby daughter, Kannemeyer broke into one of his famous rants. With the child clasped on his hip with one hand and a wooden spoon in the other, he tossed me a dollop of accusations that went all the way back to the Boer War. ‘Jislaaik, julle Engelsmanne!’ he growled.‘Why is it that the English are always the last to admit to anything? You know, it really makes me mad. You bloody English are so superior! Why is it that English people are the only people in South Africa who refuse to speak more than one language? They never try to speak Afrikaans. But when you speak English to them they make you feel stupid because your grasp of the language is not perfect! Show me one English South African artist who fully accepts the blame for apartheid. With the English, it’s always somebody else’s fault!’ I subsequently came across a similar sentiment in Max du Preez’s Pale Native, where he writes: I have on occasion experienced, as has every Afrikaner, English-speaking white South Africans treating me

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FIG 39 JEAN VEBER, ‘LES PROGRES DE LA SCIENCE’. L’ASSIETTE AU BEURRE, 1901

like someone not so cultured or sophisticated. When in the company of English-speakers such as these, Afrikaners become very nervous about their pronunciation and table manners.5 As I studied Veber’s pictures, trying to work out why they disturbed me so much, Kannemeyer’s words rang in my mind like the late-night barking of a neighbourhood dog, maddeningly irritating, but impossible to ignore. I had to admit that there was still a part of me, deep down, that still believed that the kind of cruelty revealed in Veber’s drawing was not an English thing. Deep down, I still clung to the idea that the English were somehow exonerated by their famous liberalism from true complicity in the crimes against humanity that indelibly stain the modern history of southern Africa. There was something about Veber’s images that reminded me of the drawings scratched on bits of paper that were smuggled out of Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War. They also reminded me of the drawings in Maus, Art Spiegelman’s famous graphic novel about the camps. Were the methods of subjugation developed by the British

Fig 40 FLIMSY RELIC The cover of a rare and tatty copy of the 1901 special edition of L’Assiette au Buerre in which Veber’s famous Boer War cartoons were collected, found in a secondhand bookshop in Cape Town.

FIG 40 JEAN VEBER, ‘LE SILENCE’, COVER ILLUSTRATION, L’ASSIETTE AU BEURRE, 1901

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what’s so funny?

Fig 41 THE SOUTH AFRICAN ABATTOIR This scathing attack on Chamberlain and Kitchener was one of a large number of lithographic cartoons about the Anglo-Boer War produced for De Amsterdammer by the Dutch cartoonist Johaan Brakensiek, considered to be ‘the finest draughtsman in Holland’ (Greenwall 1992).

Figs 42-43 MYTHICAL STATUS Boer icons Christiaan de Wet and Paul Kruger attain mythological status in these cartoons by Jean Veber, giving some idea of the adulation that was showered upon these republican fighters by the French public.

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FIG 41 JOHAAN BRAKENSIEK, ‘HET ZUID-AFRIKAANSCHE ABATTOIR’, SUPPLEMENT TO DE AMSTERDAMMER, 1901

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imperial monsters during the Boer War a direct precursor to the methods used so efficiently by the Nazis four decades later? The prominence given to the Anglo-Boer War in European publications clearly shows that this was not just a South African war – it was an international war of global significance and the graphic interpretations of this war by European artists raise some intriguing questions. Why were the Boers so championed by the European public and press, and why did everybody hate the British so much? The Boer struggle was personified by the Afrikaner president, Paul Kruger, who was portrayed by the international press as a plucky, down-to-earth republican, representing the aspirations of humble farming folk who just wanted to be left in peace but instead were being hounded by the British. The British, in turn, were personified by Cape premier Cecil John Rhodes, Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Kitchener. In a brilliant cartoon by the Dutch artist Johan Braakensiek, published in a supplement to De Amsterdammer in 1901 (Fig 41), Chamberlain and his commander-

in-chief, Lord Kitchener, are depicted as demented butchers sharpening their blades in ‘het Zuid-Afrikaansche abattoir’ while behind them on the wall are scenes of British atrocities against the Boers. Similarly, in a 1900 cartoon by Caran d’Ache, an insouciant Rhodes is pictured, hands in pockets, in the foreground of a landscape strewn with corpses (Fig 44).

FIG 42 JEAN VEBER, ‘L’INSAISISSABLE DE WET’, L’ASSIETTE AU BEURRE, 1901

41 FIG 43 JEAN VEBER, ‘L’EPAVE’, L’ASSIETTE AU BEURRE, 1901

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FIG 44 CARAN D’ACHE, ‘L’AUTEUR’, KRUGER LE GRANDE ET JOHN BULL LE PETIT, SUPPLEMENT TO LE RIRE, 1900

Figs 44-45 GRIM REAPERS In these caricatures by Veber and Caran d’Ache (Emmanuel Poiré), Rhodes and Chamberlain are blamed for the tremendous loss of life wreaked by the war. These scenes of carnage may have been derived from the famous photographs of British dead after Spion Kop, where more than 300 British soldiers lost their lives and 1600 were wounded in a humiliating defeat inflicted by Boer forces under General Louis Botha in January 1900.

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FIG 45 JEAN VEBER, ‘L’HONORABLE CHAMBERLAIN’. L’ASSIETTE AU BEURRE, 1901

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imperial monsters Known by the British as the Boer War, but to Afrikaner historians as the Second War of Independence, the conflict was extensively covered by the European press. From our present vantage point, it’s hard to imagine the difficulties faced by news editors in London, Paris, Amsterdam or Berlin a century ago, when air travel, international telephonic communication and easily portable photographic equipment, the basic requirements of international news reporting, were not available. In this context, the role played by illustration in visually documenting the war cannot be overstated. War artists of varying degrees of proficiency, the greatest of whom was Melton Prior of The Illustrated London News, were sent by their editors to accompany the troops and wherever possible to draw from life. These artists were British, European or American and their work was mainly published in overseas publications. Nevertheless their work is a legitimate part of South Africa’s illustration and cartooning history, and deserves to be acknowledged as such. Their contribution to a visual understanding of the war, at a time when photographic equipment was still too cumbersome for effective field use, was immense.6

Figs 46-47 HEROIC REPUBLICANS Caran d’Ache’s stereotypical Boer fighter, with his biblical beard, checked shirt and braces, symbolises the republican spirit of the Boers. While the kindly Boer offers a bowl of soup to a British soldier, another soldier sets his humble home alight.

FIG 46 CARAN D’ACHE, ‘LES DEUX BIBLES’, SUPPLEMENT TO LE RIRE, 1900

FIG XX AUTHOR DATE

FIG 47 CARAN D’ACHE, ‘LE CHOCOLAT DE LA REINE ET LA SOUPE DE L’ENNEMI’, SUPPLEMENT TO LE RIRE, 1900

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THE DRUNKEN KING

FIG 48 JEAN VEBER, ‘l’impudique Albion’. L’ASSIETTE AU BEURRE, 1901

Figs 48-49 DISSOLUTE MONARCH Veber produced several vicious caricatures of the British King, Edward VII. His notorious cartoon of Edward’s face inscribed upon Albion’s naked buttocks (above) was eventually suppressed by the French police, and in later reprints of the publication a blue polka dot skirt covers the king’s face.

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FIG 49 JEAN VEBER, ‘LE FOUDRE DE GUERRE’. L’ASSIETTE AU BEURRE, 1901

Jean Veber was a Parisian caricaturist, not a war artist, and his concentration camp drawings should be seen as symbolic representations of imperial cruelty rather than the documentary images of a war artist. In addition to these, collected in the special edition of L’Assiette au Beurre, are more conventional, but nevertheless wickedly uncompromising, political cartoons. The drawing placed on the back cover of the publication is the most infamous of them all, and has often been reproduced. It depicts Albion, Britain’s female symbol of empire, as a common prostitute, lifting her skirt to bare her substantial rear end, upon which the face of the British King, Edward VII, portrayed as a dozy drunkard, is inscribed (Fig 48). The face is cleverly positioned to place the king’s mouth between the cheeks of Albion’s corpulent buttocks, and the inference is obvious. More than a hundred years later, it remains a perfidious piece of character assassination. According to Greenwall, at least 12 editions of this issue of the publication were produced, with a reputed circulation of 250 000 copies. After what may have been seen by some as a dilatory interval, the back cover cartoon was eventually suppressed by the Paris police, and in the last couple of editions Albion’s posterior was overprinted with a blue polka dot skirt, rendering the cartoon meaningless. The long time it took for the Parisian police to react to Veber’s Albion cartoon, and the lacklustre remedy that they proposed, suggest that no-one was particularly perturbed by Veber’s attack on Queen Victoria’s successor. In another cartoon in the same publication, Veber launches a further attack on Edward VII, this time placing him in a wine barrel from the bottom of which a urine-like substance is leaking out (Fig 49). His ermine cloak is infested with rats, his subjects are abject blobs, and his puffy eyes and comatose expression speak of constant inebriation. War brings with it the necessity to legitimate the excesses of warfare. And as we have seen, war and oppression are best legitimised by casting those on the receiving end of aggression in the role of a demonic Other. But in the case of Veber’s anti-British cartoons, we have an interesting variation on this theme. To the Romantics and intellectuals of the fin de siécle, the republican aspirations of the antiimperial Kruger and his courageous countrymen symbolised cherished ideals. Everything that seemed to be wrong with the world was synthesised by Veber into his emblematic caricatures of arrogant and dissolute British imperialists. These depictions arose not from racial or ethnic anxiety, but from strongly held beliefs. Veber’s imperial monsters were another version of the demonic Other that would remain a constant presence in the unfolding story of South African cartooning, throughout the course of the twentieth century and beyond.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Hoggenheimer’s Legacy ‘Here, more than in most places, one’s nose is rubbed in compromises every day.’ William Kentridge, ‘Art in a State of Grace, Art in a State of Hope, Art in a State of Siege (extract )’ (1986)

t is a peculiarly South African irony that one of the few things that our cartoonists and visual satirists have in common, whether they be Afrikaans or English, African or European, radical or conservative, is an imaginary Jewish industrialist with a taste for fine wine and big cigars. Created in the early years of the twentieth century by the renowned Afrikaans political cartoonist Daniel Boonzaier (1865–1950),1 Hoggenheimer represents the wealthy industrialists, known as Randlords, who became enormously powerful during the diamond and gold boom of the late nineteenth century. They subsequently consolidated their power under the umbrella of the Chamber of Mines, and since then have maintained an iron grip on the South African economy that has scarcely lessened to this day.

Hoggenheimer, in one form or another, has maintained a consistent presence in South African cartooning for more than a hundred years. He is recognisable by his pinstripe suit (or, occasionally, a black dinner jacket and checked trousers), his fat belly (often encased in a waistcoat and adorned with a gold watch chain), his perennial cigar and his corpulent jowls. He is often shown gorging himself at a laden table, or quaffing an expensive wine (Fig 50). In Boonzaier’s earlier renditions he is presented as obviously Jewish, reflecting the pervasive anti-Semitism of the times, but more often than not he is simply employed to depict the generic capitalist, enjoying the fat of the land while the workers starve. In a 1973 cartoon by Richard Smith, published on the cover of Wits Student, he is shown as a money-grubbing scrooge defended

Fig 50 MAN OF SUBSTANCE Adapted by the cartoonist Daniel Boonzaier from a character in a Cape Town theatre production in the early 1900’s, Hoggenheimer became one of the great iconic figures of South African political cartooning.

45 FIG 50 DANIEL BOONZAIER, ‘HOGGENHEIMER LAG’, CARTOON, DIE BURGER, 1933

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FIG 51 RICHARD SMITH, COVER ILLUSTRATION, WITS STUDENT, 1973

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FIG 52 ZAPIRO, CARTOON, SOUTH, 1987

by a mad policeman whose finger is on a giant trigger, with an emblematic mineshaft in the background (Fig 51). And in the radicalised alternative newspapers and political posters of the militant 1980s he became, literally, a fat pig – in one of Zapiro’s early South cartoons, drawn in 1987, Hoggenheimer is shown as a corporate porker arm-wrestling a beefy mineworker, his puny biceps bolstered by a barrage of ominous gun barrels (Fig 52). In a strange turn, Hoggenheimer, or at least a figure that resembles him in every way, entered the world of high culture in the late 1980s in an animated film by the celebrated South African fine artist, William Kentridge. In Kentridge’s 1989 film, Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris, we are introduced to Soho Eckstein, who plays a central role in this and several of Kentridge’s subsequent films (Fig 53). Eckstein is variously portrayed as a real estate developer and a mining magnate, but whatever his profession, he is the contemporary embodiment of the original Hoggenheimer. What sets Eckstein apart from all the Hoggenheimers who have gone before him, however, is the empathy with which he is portrayed. Born into a wealthy Johannesburg family, Kentridge has had excellent first-hand experience of the contradictions of South African liberalism, and in his work these contradictions – sympathy for the liberation struggle on one hand and a resigned enjoyment of the material comforts of his own privileged lifestyle on the other – are constantly in evidence. Kentridge’s Soho Eckstein breathes life into the Hoggenheimer stereotype by humanising it.

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FIG XX AUTHOR DATE

FIG 53 WILLIAM KENTRIDGE, CHARCOAL DRAWING FROM THE FILM JOHANNESBURG, 2ND GREATEST CITY AFTER PARIS, 1989

Figs 51-3 VARIATIONS ON A THEME Variations on the Hoggenheimer theme have been explored by South African cartoonists and satirists for a century or more. These range from hideous caricatures like Richard Smith’s money-grubbing Scrooge (opposite), Zapiro’s corporate porker (top) or Eddie Roux’s cannibal monster (FIG 59 , page 52) to the more sympathetic portrayal of Soho Ekstein (above), the mining magnate who features in William Kentridge’s early films.

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what’s so funny?

THE MAN WHO KILLED BOTHA

Fig 54 OBESE IDOL Boonzaier variously portrayed general Louis Botha, whom he hated with a passion, as a servile lackey of British imperialism, as an expedient political chameleon, and as an obese idol (below).

While Boonzaier is perhaps best known for his creation of the Hoggenheimer stereotype, his influence was far wider than that. He was an accomplished stylist, prone to experimentation with techniques of shading and figure drawing, and at the height of his powers was able to call upon a range of stylistic approaches, depending on the effect he aimed to achieve. Primarily, he was a political activist who used his pen as a sword to advance the cause of Afrikaner nationalism. One of my most treasured anthologies from the early days of South African cartooning is a copy of Daniel Boonzaier’s Rand Faces (Fig 2, p11), a collection of caricatures of prominent South Africans, published by Boonzaier himself, in 1915. On the cover of the book is a back view of the artist at his drawing board, busy with a rendering of the prime minister, General Louis Botha. The book contains some 46 caricatures, and uncomplimentary depictions of Botha (Fig 54) appear in several of these. No other person appears more than once, not even General Smuts, which suggests that Boonzaier had a thing about Botha. And according to Ken Vernon, author of Penpricks: The Drawing of South Africa’s Political Battlelines, he did.2

It is not often possible to demonstrate the actual effect of a cartoonist’s work on the course of history, or its impact on the lives of leading figures of a particular epoch. But this, according to Vernon, can be done in the case of Boonzaier’s impact on the life of Louis Botha. General Botha swept to power in the Transvaal, arm-in-arm with Jan Smuts, in the first election after the Boer War. Three years later, he became the first prime minister of the Union of South Africa.3 Boonzaier’s cartoons from this period frequently depicted Smuts and Botha as lackeys of British imperialism and of the capitalist Randlords, symbolised by Hoggenheimer. But it was Botha’s decision to take South Africa into the First World War in support of Britain that inflamed Boonzaier’s Afrikaner nationalism, resulting in a relentless barrage of cartoons against the prime minister. Boonzaier’s attack on Botha coincided with an important event on the South African publishing scene, the establishment of Nasionale Pers in Cape Town in 1915, and the launch of the first Afrikaans daily newspaper, Die Burger, under the editorship of DF Malan (who was to become prime minister in 1948), with Boonzaier as the paper’s full-time cartoonist. Boonzaier’s position on the new, radically pro-Afrikaner, antiBritish newspaper provided him with the perfect vantage point from which to intensify his bombardment of Botha. According to Vernon: ‘It has been said that the pain and sorrow of these pictorial attacks, as well as the stress of trying to answer the unanswerable and insidious impressions they created, was at least partially responsible for breaking Botha’s health. For many years Boonzaier was referred to as “the man who killed Botha.”’4 Vernon regards Boonzaier as the greatest South African cartoonist of the early period, describing how in the 26 years he worked for Die Burger, Boonzaier saw his ideal of Afrikaner nationalism develop ‘from the impossible dream of a war-weary and defeated people to being just a step away from realisation’. And there is no doubt, argues Vernon, that ’his cartoons played a major part in helping to achieve that goal. He was undoubtedly the Thomas Nast of South Africa, a cartoonist whose like has yet to be seen again’.5

CRITICISM WITHOUT BITTERNESS

The history of cartooning in South Africa is intimately entwined with the history of the South African press, and the schisms and battles that have characterised the history of the press are mirrored in the work of the country’s newspaper cartoonists. As Vernon describes, the first growth spurt of the South African press occurred in the mid-1800s.6 Following the discovery of gold in the Transvaal and the proclamation of Johannesburg in 1886, a clutch of ‘boomtown papers’ appeared on the streets of the brash young mining town, including the Eastern Star, which was transplanted from Grahamstown in 1887, renamed The Star and became

48 FIG 54 DANIEL BOONZAIER, CARICATURE OF GENERAL LOUIS BOTHA, 1915

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hoggenheimer’s legacy South Africa’s largest daily paper. All this hustle and bustle was great news for those of an artistic inclination who saw the opportunity to commit their talents to the fourth estate, and from the 1870s, newspapers in Cape Town and Port Elizabeth began to employ cartoonists.7 Of South Africa’s earliest cartoonists, the most influential was William Howard Schröder (1852–1892). According to Schoonraad, Schröder was the first South African-born full-time cartoonist, but in fact he was more than that. He was also a prominent artist, and a pioneer of self-publishing in South Africa. I have always admired those writers and cartoonists who, usually because the mainstream press is too hidebound by convention to accommodate their work, have had the courage to launch their own publications. Although these publications seldom last long and usually suffer from distribution problems and financial difficulties, their influence is often disproportionate to their limited circulation. They contribute to our understanding of the past because they demonstrate the existence of alternative views that mainstream publications – and mainstream history – tend to gloss over. WH Schröder’s The Knobkerrrie (Fig 55) was published weekly in the Cape Colony between 1884 and 1886. In his editorial to the first issue, issued on 11 June 1884, Schröder wrote: In starting a little comic paper in Cape Town, the proprietors believe – to use an old-fashioned, stereotyped expression – that they will be supplying a want long felt in the community for light and amusing sketches and reading on the current topics of the day. There is plenty of room in Cape Town for a purely comic paper; and while The Knobkerrrie is intended expressly for local circulation, the proprietors hope to render it worthy of general colonial acceptance. The Knobkerrie will be conducted on the following principles: Wit without Personality, Gossip without Scandal, Criticism without Bitterness, Humour without Broadness, Comment with Fairness, Clippings with Judgement, and every endeavour on behalf of the proprietary and staff to furnish a paper worthy of the patronage of every family in the country. The Knobkerrie’s mascot was a strange hybrid man, half Zulu warrior, half British gentleman. His upper half is decked out in a dress suit jacket with a rose in the buttonhole, while a beshu conceals his nether regions. An object of adornment protrudes from his earlobe, a monocle covers one eye, and a top hat decked with a feather completes his costume. In one hand he carries a cowskin shield, in the other a knobkerrie, a pencil and a pen. In 1894, two years after Schröder’s death, a commemorative book entitled The Schröder Art Memento: A Volume of Pictorial Satire Depicting our Politics and Men for the Last

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FIG 55 W.H. SCHRÖDER, COVER CARTOON, THE KNOBKERRIE, 1885

Thirty Years, in Black and White, by South Africa’s Only Artist, was published by the Pretoria newspaper The Press, where Schröder had been employed before his death. The list of patrons at the front of the book is headed by ‘His Honour SJP Kruger, State President of the South African Republic’. The list also includes the Cape Colony’s Cecil John Rhodes, who, amongst others, provided financial assistance for the book’s publication. The ‘principal raison d’être’ for the publication is stated as a need ‘to provide Mrs Schröder and her family with a comfortable, if perhaps only moderate competency’.8 That Schröder was able to garner such approval from the leading Afrikaaner and English figures of his day, a few years before the Boer War, speaks volumes for the talent and tenacity of this remarkable man, but it also says something about the high esteem in which the arts of cartooning and caricature were held in those days. During his 25-year career, Schröder drew for The Zingari, The Lantern, Transvaal Truth, The Cape Argus, Het Volksblad, the Cape Times Weekly Edition, The South African Illustrated

Fig 55 HYBRID MASCOT The mascot of William Schröder’s satirical weekly, The Knobkerrie, was an intriguing hybrid, half English gentleman, half Zulu warrior. Schröder’s satirical venture, for which he drew all the cartoons, lasted two years, from 1884 to 1886.

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what’s so funny? portrayed in his cartoons. His last major commission was a full-length portrait in oils of Kruger, for which the president sat regularly for several weeks. During this time, judging from Kruger’s warm handwritten note reproduced in the Memento, the two men became great friends. In one of Schröder’s most telling cartoon portraits of Kruger, published in The Lantern in 1887 and entitled ‘The Old Story – the Mop and the Ocean’ (Fig 56), the obdurate Trans-

vaal president, armed with a broom marked ‘Independence’, attempts to sweep back the tide of ‘Progress and Unity’ that threatens to engulf his tiny republic. But while the cartoon parodies the apparent hopelessness of his position, the sympathetic portrait of the exhausted Kruger, his hand across his brow, betrays the cartoonist’s true feelings. By the time he joined The Press in 1891, Schroder’s pro-Kruger sentiments had blossomed into full view. One cartoon produced that year portrays Kruger as a ‘good old pilot’ who, despite a violent storm, ‘with shrewd political foresight still keeps the ship of the State well up to the wind’. In another he derives great satisfaction from subjecting the hated Lord Randolph Churchill, whose letters to the Daily Graphic had stirred up great animosity, to a kick on the rump from Kruger’s mighty boot. Powered by public opinion, the kick sends Churchill flying like a rugby ball over the Transvaal border and into touch – inspired no doubt by the successes of South Africa’s first rugby tour to England, which took place that same year.10

FIG 56 W.H. SCHRODER, ‘THE OLD STORY – THE MOP AND THE OCEAN’, CARTOON,THE LANTERN, 1887

Figs 56 SYMPATHETIC PORTRAIT Schröder admired Kruger’s strength of character, his stubbornness, and his nononsense attitude. One of the last works he produced before his death was a full-length portrait of Kruger, in oils.

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News, the Cape Argus Weekly, Cape Punch, Cape Diamonds, The Cape Register, and The Press. He worked full-time for the last of these papers towards the end of his short but busy life. The number of publications he drew for not only testifies to his energy and ability, but also gives some impression of the thriving publishing scene that existed in South Africa, especially in the Cape Colony, a century ago. Many of these publications were short-lived, and part of the reason why The Schröder Art Memento was produced – to raise money for Schröder’s otherwise destitute family – went back to the fact that Schröder was forever contributing his time and resources to idealistic satirical ventures that stood little chance of financial success. He was truly a man after my own heart. On his death, Charles Cowen, his long-time friend and editor of The Zingari, wrote: ‘[H]e should have achieved wealth as well as fame, but ... it was his fate to be connected with publications like The Zingari, The Knobkerrie and The Lantern, where brain utterly failed to procure an equivalent in cash.’9 While Schroder worked both for English and Afrikaans papers (The Press strongly favoured the Afrikaner cause), his sympathies were always with Kruger, whom he often

STYLISTIC DIVERSITY

Notable cartoonists in the English press during the early period were Frank Holland, Arthur Lloyd and Edgar Packer, who drew for The Star; Herbert Mackinney (Mac), who drew for the Cape Times; William Bradley and Denis Santry (Fig 57), who both drew for the Rand Daily Mail; and Charles Evenden, who drew for the Natal Mercury.11 By the end of the decade, major events on the inter national stage had impacted on South Africa and its press and a quickening of the country’s ideological pulse displayed itself in a more vociferous and engaged approach to newspaper cartooning. Simultaneously, liberating advances in the technology of graphic reproduction demonstrated themselves in a wider variety of technical approaches, which in turn allowed a greater range and depth of expression.12 On the extreme left of the political spectrum were the radical communist papers, Umsebenzi and Umvikele Thebe/ African Defender, which featured cartoons executed in a crude but effective linocut style, characterised by a naïve line and strong black and white contrasts with no half-tones (Fig 59, overleaf). Vernon attributes these cartoons to Eddie Roux, editor of Umsebenzi, who, in his autobiographical history of the early years of the South African Trade Union movement, described his involvement in these papers as that of ‘editor, printer, cartoonist and street salesman rolled into one’.13 The

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hoggenheimerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s legacy

Fig 57 CLASSICAL TOUCH Born in Ireland, Dennis Santry (1879-1960) was one of an important group of South African political cartoonists who emerged in the early years of the 20th century. His work is characterised by strong compositions and flowing brushwork.

FIG 57 DENIS SANTRY, CARTOON, 1913

Fig 58 FEMININE RARITY This cartoon is notable for the fact that it was drawn by a woman cartoonist, Constance Penstone, under the nom de plume Scalpel. Penstone and her husband, Charles, published the satirical weekly, The Owl, in Cape Town during the mid-1890s, for which Constance drew the editorial cartoons. She also drew for The Cape Times and other publications.

51 FIG 58 SCALPEL (CONSTANCE PENSTONE), CARTOON, CIRCA 1895

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what’s so funny?

FIG 59 ATTRIBUTED TO EDDIE ROUX, ‘BLACK BABIES SACRIFICED TO WHITE IMPERIALISM’, CARTOON, UMSEBENZI, 1930

Fig 59 REVOLUTIONARY STYLE Vernon attributes this cartoon, taken from the pages of the communist newspaper Umsebenzi, to its editor, Eddie Roux, also known for his autobiographical account of the early years of the South African trade union movement, Time Longer Than Rope.

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style employed in these cartoons has long been associated with revolutionary poster-making14, and goes back to the popular woodcuts of the late Middle Ages. Its strong, varied linework and dramatic black and white contrasts are characteristic of the woodcut or linocut method, and the origination of this style cannot be attributed to any one artist. It later became synonymous with what is often called ‘township art’ and remained an indelible genre in South African resistance publishing throughout the rest of the century. It is visible, essentially unchanged, in the resistance poster art of the 1980s and is also characteristic of the work of artists such as Azaria Mbatha, John Muafangejo, David Hlongwane, Bongiwe Dhlomo and Patrick and Sydney Holo.15 To the right of the political spectrum, following the retirement of Daniel Boonzaier in 1941, the main Afrikaner cartoonists were TO Honiball (1905–90), who replaced Boonzaier at Die Burger; Victor Ivanoff (1909–), who drew for Die Vaderland from 1937 to 1972; and Eric Thamm (Etam) (1911–85), who drew for Die Transvaler from 1946 to 1973. Thomas Ochse Honiball took over from Daniel Boonzaier as full-time cartoonist at Nasionale Pers in Cape Town in 1941, and during a long career which continued until his retirement from Die Burger in 1974, his cartoons and comic strips also appeared in Beeld, Rapport, Die Huisgenoot and Landbouweekblad. While Honiball did not come close to his predecessor’s brilliance as a political cartoonist, his cartoons are notable for their visual slapstick and zany humour (Fig 60). If the political content of his work was more often than a depiction of ideas provided to him by his editor, this was a function of the times, as powerful structures of ideological control took hold of the Afrikaans press. The proudly critical jester’s stance held by Boonzaier in the Botha and Smuts

years was reduced, in the work of Afrikaans cartoonists over the next few decades, to a posture of cowering submission. According to PJ Cillié, a longstanding editor of Die Burger,16 Honiball’s cartoons were ‘faithful and masterly expressions of editorial ideas’. Cillié describes how, from the 1940s until the 1970s, he ‘collaborated’ with Honiball, and later Fred Mouton, on the idea for each cartoon, keeping a close eye on the artist’s implementation of his idea, until he was satisfied with the final result.17 All too often, the ‘collaboration’ required of Afrikaans cartoonists during the apartheid period meant submitting to strict, if not authoritarian, editorial control.18 Whatever his limitations as an editorial cartoonist, there can be no doubt about Honiball’s importance as a creator of humorous comic strips. I can remember, as a schoolboy, reading Huisgenoot during Afrikaans lessons at high school in the 1960s. Long mornings were enlivened by the madcap escapades of TO Honiball’s Adoons-hulle. His other strips, Oom Kaspaars and Jakkals en Wolf, were equally zany. There are still those who regard Honiball as South Africa’s greatest comic strip creator. (Fig 61)18 His first comic strip, Oom Kaspaars, appeared in Die Burger in 1939, and his work with animal characters in the Afrikaans children’s magazine Die Jongspan led to Adoons-hulle, published in Die Huisgenoot from 1948 to 1971. According to Schoonraad, the baboons and other animal characters in his strips became part of Afrikaner ‘volkskultuur’ (folk culture). Academic commentators discussing classic American comic strips like Walt Kelly’s Pogo or George Herriman’s Krazy Kat have accorded them a kind of folk art status, and the same can be said of Honiball’s creations. According to Schoonraad, Honiball was less comfortable with political cartooning than with his illustrated folk tales and animal stories. Here he gave expression to an idealised Afrikaans village life, not yet seriously challenged by anti-apartheid critiques.

GATHERING DARKNESS

Whereas Boonzaier and Honiball were both born in South Africa, the two other important Afrikaans cartoonists of the mid-century period, Victor Ivanoff and Eric Thamm, both came from Eastern Europe. Ivanoff was born in Lithuania in 1909, where his father was stationed as general of a Cossack regiment. He attended a Cossack military school and developed twin passions for singing and drawing. With his parents, he fled the outbreak of the Russian Revolution to Yugoslavia. According to Schoonraad, Ivanoff received his earliest artistic training from General Nicholai Karpoff at the Cossack Cadet School.19 In 1936 he travelled to South Africa with a Cossack choir, whereupon, the story goes, he decided to stay. After a brief sojourn in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), he joined Die Vaderland in 1937 and worked there for 35 years. His

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FIG 60 T.O. HONIBALL, adoons hulle, comic strip, 1961

work, notable for its loose, flowing ink strokes, was widely admired. One commentator remarked: ‘His emotional objectivity, his powerful imagination and his sharp sense of humour have placed him in the forefront of artists who have raised the cartoon from a crude instrument of crude propaganda to an artistic level.’20 Eric Thamm was born in Estonia, then under Russian control, in 1911, and came to South Africa in 1937 to work as a prospector and mine surveyor. In 1941, because of his Russian-German nationality, he was arrested by the Smuts government and held in an internment camp until the end of the Second World War. According to Schoonraad, it was while imprisoned in Pretoria that he came into contact with Afrikaner political prisoners and also developed an interest in cartooning. After the war, he presented his portfolio to Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, then editor of Die Transvaler, the mouthpiece of the National Party, and was immediately hired. Between them, Ivanoff and Thamm introduced a new, more vigorous graphic style to Afrikaans cartooning. Compared to the disciplined linework of Boonzaier and the quirkiness of Honiball, it could hardly be termed an improvement, but it was certainly darker and inkier than anything that had gone before. Earlier cartoonists like William Schröder, Frank Holland and Herbert Mackinney had worked in the intricately crosshatched style of the illustrated publications of the nineteenth century, but advancements in graphic reproduction techniques now allowed cartoonists the freedom to work more expressively with brush and ink. The capacity to convey shadows with a few

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FIG 61 T.O. HONIBALL, CARTOON, DIE BURGER, 1943.

broad strokes resulted in greater contrast and heightened graphic impact, but it also lent itself to dark imagery that conveyed a sense of foreboding appropriate to the mood of the war years. In Thamm’s case, this inkiness may have been the expression of a melancholic personality, or an exorcising of emotional wounds sustained in the government internment camps. Whatever the sources of his personal anguish, Thamm is important in the history of South African cartooning because his style – more vigorous and less controlled than the cartoonists who had preceded him – introduced a darker era of Afrikaans political cartooning. Thamm’s drawings, penned under the nom de plume Etam, reveal quite nakedly the racist attitudes that underlay

Figs 60-61 HONIBALL’S ZANY WIT Best-known for his comic strip sagas, Adoons-Hulle, Oom Kaspaars and Jakkals en Wolf, Thomas Ochse Honiball took over from Daniel Boonzaier as political cartoonist at Die Burger in 1945. His zany wit is demonstrated in this cartoon of Smuts dancing with a black devil while Hoggenheimer plays the piano and Winston Churchill conducts.

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what’s so funny?

Figs 62-63 ANTI-SMUTS SENTIMENT In this 1940 Die Vaderland cartoon, Victor Ivanoff gives graphic expression to widespread doubts about Smuts’ ability to defend the Kruger legacy. By the historic election year of 1948, such doubts had hardened into outright hatred, as seen in the racist cartoon by Etam (Eric Thamm) below, which depicts of Smuts as a kafferboetie leading a howling mob towards Parliament.

Figs 64-66 DIRE WARNINGS Eric Thamm’s strident cartoons were designed to prey on the fears of the white electorate in the run-up to the crucial 1948 general election. Smuts’s United Party was defeated by DF Malan’s Nationalist Party and the apartheid era, which was to last until 1994, began.

FIG 62 VICTOR IVANHOFF, CARTOON, DIE VADERLAND, 1940

54 FIG 63 ETAM, ‘HY LEI ... MAAR WAARHEEN?’ (HE LEADS ... BUT WHERE?), CARTOON, DIE TRANSVALER, 1948

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South African social and political life in the years leading up to the National Party victory of 1948.21 Nevertheless, according to Schoonraad, Thamm was a friendly, helpful and unpretentious man, with the ability to laugh at himself and a keen interest in philately and ornithology.He was certainly no monster, and it is therefore reasonable to assume that the violently racist attitudes exemplified in his cartoons were not extreme or unusual at that time. In a 1946 Etam cartoon entitled ‘Die Grootste Trek: 1936–?’ (The Greatest Trek 1936–?) (Fig 64), long lines of impoverished African people move across the landscape towards an idealised Johannesburg, so insubstantially portrayed that it looks as if it is made of glass. The figure of a black man in the foreground, seen from the back, his worldly possessions wrapped up in a rag, his hand grabbing emptily at the air, looms dark and menacing across the composition. One gets the sense of a fragile city about to be engulfed by an unstoppable human tide. In another cartoon, dated 1948 (Fig 65), a white woman symbolising South Africa, with two children clinging to her skirts, is marooned on a tiny island, surrounded by a rising, inky sea of ‘Liberalisme’ (liberalism), ‘Kommunisme’ (communism) and ‘Gelykstelling’ (equality). And in another striking image from the same year, Smuts, clad in the warlike costume of an African chieftain, leads a harshly caricatured horde of black warriors towards Parliament (Fig 63). The caption above the cartoon reads: ‘He leads, but where?’, referring to a parliamentary speech where Smuts had said: ‘We shall continue to lead the black population; we shall take their hands and lead them.’22 One of Thamm’s favourite targets was the deputy prime minister, Jan Hofmeyr, whom he always portrayed as being accompanied by what Schoonraad calls ‘his little black warrior’.23 This diminutive Little Black Sambo figure was designed to mock Hofmeyr’s liberal tendencies. In a 1948 Etam cartoon (Fig 66, overleaf), Hofmeyr, cheered on by his Black Sambo, attempts to cut down the colour bar (kleur-stut), the only thing preventing South Africa from being crushed by a big black rock labelled swart gevaar (black peril). The familiar tropes of racist caricature are clearly visible in Thamm’s Black Sambo figure, drawn in the classic ‘coon’ style, barefoot and wearing nothing but a beshu, with thick rubbery white lips against a pitch black face. Published in the year that the National Party gained control of the country, the cartoon is a vivid rendition of the key elements of the racist ideology that was to be so forcefully propagated by the new masters of Thamm’s adopted country.

FIG 64 ETAM, ‘DIE GROOTSTE TREK: 1936– ?’ (THE GREATEST TREK: 1936– ?), CARTOON, DIE TRANSVALER, 1946

55 FIG 65 ETAM, ‘DIE DONKER STROOM STYG’ (THE DARK TIDE RISES), DIE TRANSVALER, 1948

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FIG 66 ETAM, ‘DIE BAASKAPPER’ (THE CHIEF AXEMAN), CARTOON, DIE TRANSVALER, 1948

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CHAPTER SIX

The Liberal Dilemma ‘Verwoerd, Vorster and Botha were as nasty a trio as you could encounter in your worst nightmares.’ Helen Suzman, I n No U nc ertai n Terms (1993)

he term ‘liberal’ has always been problematic in the South African context. It is a portmanteau into which such a diverse range of political positions has been crammed that anyone prising it open is bound to be shocked at the garish contradictions that are revealed. Nowhere is this contradictory collection of opinions better displayed than in liberal cartooning in the middle years of the twentieth century.1 It seems that South African liberals characteristically saw themselves as caught between distasteful extremes. Ken Vernon uses the words ‘confusion and equivocation’ to describe the position in which they found themselves. He points out that while the newspapers the liberal cartoonsts worked for were opposed in principle to the Nationalist government, the readers of those papers tacitly supported the government’s apartheid policies.2 Like many other white South African intellectuals, these cartoonists were in the invidious position of being both critics and beneficiaries of the country’s political system. The contradictions of the socalled liberal dilemma are evident in the work of cartoonists like Abe Berry, Bob Connolly, John Jackson, David Marais, Jock Leyden and Len Sak, all of whom nevertheless produced fine examples of biting satire rooted in angry sentiments. Towards the centre of the political spectrum, the general stodginess of South African cartooning in the English press during the mid-century years was enlivened by the introduction of two refreshing new talents, both born outside the country. The first was Bob Connolly (1907–1981), an American, who brought his trademark ‘little man’ to the Rand Daily Mail in 1939. The second was a lively Scotsman, Jock Leyden (1908–2000), who asserted a bold new style influenced by his contemporaries, Britain’s David Low (1891–1963) and Carl Giles (1916–1995).3 Connolly and Leyden were the first of an important new group of Englishspeaking cartoonists who dominated FIG 67 BOB CONNOLLY, South African cartooning at that time. ‘the LITTLE MAN’

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FIG 68 LEN SAK, CARTOON, CONTACT, 1961

THE LITTLE WHITE MAN

Bob Connolly’s famous Little Man was based on a real man – Bob Germane, a newshound at the New York World, where Connolly worked for a decade or so before a one-year contract brought him, and the Little Man, to South Africa in 1937. His employer dreamed of a chain of South African newspapers bearing his name, but, according to Connolly, ‘Mr IW Schlesinger’s dream of a chain of newspapers turned into a nightmare of newspapers in Johannesburg and Durban only.’4 Connolly ended up living in Johannesburg for 45 years, working first for Schlesinger’s Daily Express and then, when that paper folded in 1939, for the Rand Daily Mail. The fame of his Little Man, also known as Johnny Elkemann, representing ‘the taxpayer and the SA public’, spread rapidly, until, according to his creator, he was ‘known from Cape-toCairo’.5

Fig 67 CARTOON MASCOT Bob Connolly’s cartoon mascot, the Little Man, represented the views of the white taxpayer.

Fig 68 Schlesinger’s ABUSE OF JUSTICE BJ Vorster, later to become Prime Minister of the country, was appointed Minister of Justice by Hendrik Verwoerd in 1961. Here Len Sak registers his alarm at Vorster’s fascist tendencies.

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what’s so funny?

Fig 69 BLINKERED MENTALITY The ‘laager mentality’ of the apartheid government is well summarized in this 1958 cartoon by John Jackson, who began drawing for The Argus in 1957 and remained at that paper until 1981.

Fig 70 FEAR OF TV Connolly’s unkempt top-hatted Afrikaner nationalist represented a hidebound mindset, fearful of the Western world. The Nationalist government delayed the introduction of television into the country until 1975.

FIG 69 JOHN JACKSON, CARTOON, THE ARGUS, 1958

FIG 70 BOB CONNOLLY, CARTOON, RAND DAILY MAIL, 1963

Connolly spoke of the world of ‘the great human comedy’, but this comedy was pretty much a whites-only affair, and the Little Man should probably have been referred to as the Little White Man. Black people seldom appeared in his cartoons, with the exception of political figures, who were depicted according to the conventions of racial caricature. In his political cartoons he often attacked the National Party, but these attacks, according to Schoonraad, ‘were cheerful rather than malevolent’. Vernon is dismissive of Connolly’s contribution: ‘Connolly did his very best to attack the nationalists, but he lacked the armaments with which to do any serious damage. His drawing skill was consistently mediocre, while many of his ideas were too often simply inane.’7 Vernon criticises Connolly because he was unable to come up with a hard-hitting response to the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, or to grasp the underlying facts of South African political life. Instead, ‘he tried to equate apartheid and black nationalism as equal evils’.7 To my mind, his importance in the history of South African cartooning is that he did exactly this, giving us a very accurate picture of the state of South African liberalism during the period. Ending off his autobiography, The Bob Connolly Story, published in 1957, the popular fifty-year-old cartoonist wrote: My art was difficult to come by and it has been challenged by politicians and other antagonists, but although I might suffer pain, frustration, sadness and despair, I will continue to try to make at least part of South Africa laugh. Like a clown, a cartooning clown,

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the liberal dilemma who might stay on in the hearts of men and women seeking in the refuge of merriment respite from the scowls of the long day. Against the modern will of some politicians to destroy their country and themselves, and against mad deeds that would undo the heritage that has made South Africa great, cartoonists, including myself, will continue to laugh bigoted bigwigs out of power.8

THE WIND OF CHANGE

Prolific and accomplished, Jock Leyden was born in Grangemouth, Scotland, in 1908 and came to South Africa with his family in 1926. His work first appeared in the Natal Advertiser a year later, following which he returned to England for a few years where he produced cartoons for motoring publications and studied drawing, painting and graphics. In 1936 he returned to Durban where he drew initially for the Daily Tribune until that paper’s collapse in 1939, following which he began his long and illustrious career at the Daily News, where he worked until 1981.9 His work was internationally renowned and widely reproduced, especially during the war years, when he faithfully presented the Allied point of view.10 After the war, he continued to present a British viewpoint, which gradually became more South African as the years went by. Leyden has bequeathed us many classic expressions of the liberal dilemma. In a 1960 cartoon (Fig 71), drawn in response to the famous ‘wind of change’ speech by British prime minister Harold Macmillan,11 he shows the Rhodesian prime minister, Roy Welensky, hosing down the thatched roof of his cottage in a vain attempt to protect it against the fiery blaze of African nationalism sweeping down from the Congo, while below him, at the southern tip, the architect of grand apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd, suns himself unconcernedly outside his Cape Dutch house. In a 1963 cartoon, Kenneth Kaunda is depicted as a cannibal, stirring a big pot in which the British-controlled Central African Federation is about to be cooked (Fig 11, p17). In these cartoons, Leyden warned that black nationalism was an unstoppable force that whites ignored at their peril. According to Vernon, Leyden was so fearful of the impact of black nationalism on the white population of South Africa that ‘he bought hook, line and sinker the Nationalist line that Africans fighting for political equality were ‘terrorists’.12 In a 1967 cartoon (Fig 72), Leyden depicts the long arm of the law firmly grasping a grimacing black man labelled ‘terrorism’, with a caption that simply reads: ‘Out!’ In this cartoon Leyden clearly expresses approval for the government’s antiterrorism legislation. But while he feared black nationalism and abhorred terrorism, Leyden was nevertheless highly critical of the state’s security apparatus. In a 1969 cartoon (Fig 73), he depicted the government’s Bureau of State

FIG 71 JOCK LEYDEN, CARTOON, DAILY NEWS, 1961

Security (BOSS) as a shadowy and ominous figure looming over the South African judiciary, and in a 1973 cartoon (Fig 74), he showed BJ Vorster threatening to crush the press under the heavy weight of government action. In their expression of distaste for black political activism on the one side and repressive state security measures on the other, these cartoons reveal the quintessential experience of South African liberals: a sense of being hemmed in by extremism on both sides of the political spectrum.

Figs 71-72 WINDY DAYS Leyden espoused a liberal viewpoint, but was fearful that the flames of African nationalism, sweeping down from the north, would engulf South Africa. While critical of the government’s race policies, he nevertheless expressed approval for the apartheid government’s antiterrorism legislation.

FIG 72 JOCK LEYDEN, CARTOON, DAILY NEWS, 1967

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A SENSE OF ABSURDITY

One of the most interesting cartoonists of the period was David Marais, who drew for the Cape Times from the mid1950s until his death in 1974. His style, very different to Leyden’s, was employed in service of another kind of liberalism. Leyden was a South African liberal of the British colonial variety. He abhorred communism, was wary of black nationalism and felt that it was correct for the government of the day to clamp down hard on terrorism. He glorified everything British, championed the necessity of an independent judiciary and freedom of expression (within limits), was distrustful of the Afrikaner and looked down upon the African population with a kindly paternalism. He depicted African people and their way of life with an inbred racism that was not malicious, but was simply a product of the formidable sense of superiority with which British people were imbued in those days. Marais, on the other hand, gave vent to a more indigenous kind of humour that arose out of his truly South African background. He was born in Germiston in 1925 and matriculated from Boksburg High School. While still a teenager, his work was published in the Sunday Express. He served in the navy in the Second World War and subsequently worked as a journalist in the eastern Cape, before joining the Cape Times in the early 1950s. By 1958 he was working as the paper’s full-time cartoonist. Marais’ eye and ear were fine-tuned in a very South African way to the absurdities of apartheid society, and he was the first cartoonist to consistently poke a finger at the ridiculous lengths to which the Nationalist government FIG 73 JOCK LEYDEN, CARTOON, DAILY NEWS, 1969

Figs 73-74 SECURITY APPARATUS Under Vorster, who became Prime Minister after the assassination of Hendrik Verwoerd in 1966, the South African press was intimidated by the twin strategies of censorship and security police surveillance.

60 FIG 74 JOCK LEYDEN, CARTOON, DAILY NEWS, 1973

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was prepared to go in order to legitimate its policies to the electorate and to an increasingly critical world. ‘It is my aim whenever possible to show up the ridiculous anomalies in the Government’s race policies,’ he said in an interview in 1964.13 Much that was happening in South Africa during the first two decades of the apartheid period seemed, to the liberal mind, to be absurd. It would take the radical Marxist theorists of the 1980s, and the cartoonists influenced by them, to point out the method behind the madness, but for many liberals of the day, the events leading up to the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, and the events that followed it, had a surreal, insane quality about them. One of the perennial humorists of the apartheid period was John Scott, whose satirical columns in the Cape Times and other English-language papers expressed a quintessentially liberal viewpoint. Scott and the renowned playwright Athol Fugard worked together as apprentices at the SABC in Cape Town in the early years of their careers, and Fugard provided the foreword to a 1977 collection of Scott’s political satire. In this short but revealing text, the playwright referred to South Africa as a ‘madhouse’, prey to ‘a unique brand of idiocy’. Laughter, argued Fugard, was as important as indignation in the face of this kind of madness. Laughter is the sound of sanity, and in a country where the white minority took itself seriously ‘to a ludicrous degree’, it served as a survival mechanism.14 Similarly, newspaper columnist Molly Reinhardt, in a foreword to a 1972 collection of cartoons by David Marais, referred to the cartoonist as ‘the foremost portrayer of the

FIG 75 DAVID MARAIS, CAPE TIMES, 1963

antics, foibles and inhumanities of the rulers of this mad and sunny land’.15 The idea that the policies of the South African government were insane was a common feature of liberal humour during the early and middle years of the apartheid period. Alongside this was the perception that South African politicians took themselves far too seriously. As the country became increasingly entangled in the Byzantine legalism of grand apartheid, an element of surrealism began to creep into the work of South Africa’s liberal cartoonists.

Fig 75 RIDICULOUS COSTUMES The absurd posturing of apartheid politicians provided Cape Times cartoonist David Marais with endless opportunities for mirthful satire. The ridiculous costumes in which Marais often attired his targets gave his political critique a surrealistic air.

Fig 76 HOTLINE TO GOD In 1963 the Transkei became South Africa’s first selfgoverning ‘homeland’, with Kaizer Matanzima as chief minister. One of Marais’ most famous jokes was Verwoerd’s direct telephone line to God, offered here to Matanzima in return for his collaboration in the apartheid system.

61 FIG 76 DAVID MARAIS, CARTOON, CAPE TIMES, 1963

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FIG 77 DAVID MARAIS, CAPE TIMES, 1963

FIG 78 DAVID MARAIS, COVER ILLUSTRATION, ALL THE NUDES THAT’S FIT TO PRINT, 1972

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the liberal dilemma In the cartoons of David Marais, the repeated appearance of symbolic characters dressed up in ridiculous costumes evokes this sense of surrealism. Whether as members of the censorship board dressed up as Mother Grundies with absurd hats (Fig 75), as eyeless spooks clad in Ku Klux Klan robes, or as nude policemen patrolling Sandy Bay beach on the lookout for transgressions of the Immorality Act (Fig 78), Marais’ characters all seem a bit mad. BJ Vorster himself, first encountered in Marais’ cartoons as Minister of Justice under Verwoerd and then as Prime Minister, is portrayed as a corpulent golfer with a diminutive caddy staggering under the weight of his clubs, or in a Nazi uniform with jackboots and jodhpurs, a huge Luger-like pistol strapped to his hip by a thick black belt (Fig 77). Interestingly, it is in their portrayal of African people that the major artistic differences between Leyden and Marais become evident. Whereas in Leyden’s cartoons African people are portrayed in a paternalistic but essentially benign and empathetic way, a similar sense of empathy is absent from Marais’ portrayals. Perhaps it is simply a question of drawing ability: Leyden was a consummate artist whose drawings brim over with a natural humanity. Marais lacked Leyden’s drawing

FIG 79 DAVID MARAIS, CAPE TIMES, 1958

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ability and his draughtsmanship is more workmanlike, tending towards graphic symbols rather than naturalistic portrayals. In his drawings of black people he often had recourse to the conventions of racial caricature. This is apparent in a 1958 drawing in which Verwoerd is seen riding a black man as though he was a racehorse. (Fig 79) The way Marais drew the black man’s face, with the telltale exaggerated white lips of the Black Sambo stereotype, is typical of his early cartoons. While the cartoonist’s intention was to critique Verwoerd’s race policies, the effect of the cartoon, seen from today’s vantage point, is to demonstrate the currency of a demeaning racial stereotype. Even though Marais was a committed opponent of the human rights abuses of the Nationalist government, he did tend to slip into this usage from time to time. But Marais should not be singled out in this respect. The liberal cartoonists of the period generally concentrated their critiques on the white political arena and seldom attempted to give expression to the realities of life experienced by black people under apartheid. And when they did, their portrayals tended to display the conventions of racial caricature, often without a necessarily conscious intention to denigrate African people.

Figs 77-78 A RADICAL EDGE Marais’ work had a tougher, more radical edge than Leyden’s, as seen in this portrayal of Minister of Justice BJ Vorster in a fascist military outfit, hurling threats at NUSAS (the National Union of South African Students).

Fig 79 RACIAL CARICATURE Especially in his earlier work, Marais’ portrayals of African people tended towards the stereotypical conventions of racial caricature.

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what’s so funny?

ABE BERRY’S JO’BURG LIBERALISM

There were two notable exceptions to this tendency: Len Sak and Abe Berry. Berry, who drew for The Star and other English papers from the 1950s until the 1980s, had the ability to portray in an empathetic way the tribulations of ordinary African people entangled in the web of apartheid legislation. His Day By Day strip in The Star, and his wonderful 1980 cartoon collection, South Africa and How It Works, brilliantly exposed the contradictions of apartheid policy and often portrayed political developments through the eyes of black people.16 Born in Johannesburg in 1911, Berry grew up in the rural town of Ermelo, and his affection for the country life is very evident in his work. He was largely self-taught – his art training amounted to a few months at the Johannesburg Art School. While Berry was best known for his work in The Star, especially his strip Day By Day, he also drew for a wide range of other publications, including the Sunday Times, the Natal Witness, and the Jewish Times. He also drew for Drum, where he published a township strip entitled Auntie, about the adventures of a township shebeen queen, and for the black weekly newspaper, City Press. He was an accomplished fine artist, and like many other cartoonists, was particularly adept at watercolour. Berry was a liberal of the radicalised Johannesburg variety – more streetwise than Leyden, Marais and the other liberal cartoonists of his day, and certainly more aware of the economic underpinnings of apartheid society. This enabled him to portray the realities of black life with more insight than his contemporaries. His ability to do so – and his suave Jo’burg sense of humour – come through strongly in South Africa and How it Works. In this book he purports to provide a schematic that will enhance the reader’s understanding of some of the riddles of South African life, but it is really just a vehicle for his pet hates and favourite witticisms. The book begins with a pointed and hilarious ‘Anatomy of a South Effrican’ and continues at a cracking

pace with fragmented maps, overcomplicated diagrams, crowded cityscapes,fanciful contraptions and catalogues of absurdity. All these give a real sense of apartheid South Africa as a political superstructure of ridiculous complexity whose sole function was to conceal or at least obscure the basic economic reality of racial exploitation. Ironically, it is in the middle of the book, where the cartoonist lends an ear to the talk of the townships and presents some atmospheric portraits of township life, that the pace slows down and the cacophony of self-justificatory obfuscation is momentarily stilled. The message is simple: white people may be confused and deluded by all these legislative arrangements and semantic quibbles, but the black people who are on the receiving end of it on a daily basis are the ones who really know what’s going on. Berry was probably the best informed and most incisive of the mid-century liberal cartoonists, and his international reputation is testimony to that. His humorous investigations into the absurdities of apartheid society appeared in Punch, The Times of London, The Washington Post and other leading publications, and he won several international awards for his work. If it seems something of a slight to call him a liberal, this is because the word itself is tarnished by its more venal manifestations and has acquired a pejorative connotation in the South African context. There is another sense of the word, however, which points to the necessary underpinnings of democracy – human rights, economic fairness and the rule of law – and Berry’s work is saturated in these values. His work shows that, like so many leading intellectuals of his generation, he trod a fine line, as a white bourgeois progressive individual, between the apartheid state and its capitalist infrastructure on the one side, and black nationalism coupled with Marxist-inspired political radicalism on the other. And Berry no doubt knew as well as anyone that as the political crisis deepened, the ambivalent ‘wishy-washy liberal’ position, so well portrayed by the mid-century English cartoonists, would become increasingly untenable.

Fig 80 GENUINE EMPATHY Berry showed an understanding of and genuine empathy for the lives and viewpoints of African people that was absent from the work of most other apartheid-era cartoonists.

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FIG 80 ABE BERRY, ‘DAY BY DAY’, a cartoon strip, undated

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the liberal dilemma

Fig 81 CATALOGUE OF ABSURDITY Berry’s brilliant 1980 satire, South Africa and How It Works, from which these pages and those overleaf are taken, is a catalogue of the absurdities of grand apartheid.

65 FIG 81 ABE BERRY, PAGES FROM ABE BERRY’S SOUTH AFRICA AND HOW IT WORKS, 1980

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the

what’s so funny?

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FIG 82 ABE BERRY, PAGES FROM ABE BERRY’S SOUTH AFRICA AND HOW IT WORKS, 1980

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CHAPTER SEVEN

The Jojo Enigma

‘Jojo became a part of black life, and by the rhythms that guide the artistic impulse, of all life.’ Aggrey Klaaste, Sowetan editor (1991)

THE MYSTERY OF GOOMBI

In 1956–57, an intriguing strip entitled Goombi: Private Detective appeared in Drum magazine (Fig 84). The strip tells the story of Dolly (presumably a reference to Dolly Rathebe, the Sophiatown singer and pin-up girl) who is kidnapped while performing at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre, and after a long string of mishaps, is eventually rescued by the daring detective. The strip is notable for its faithful renditions of street life and architecture in a variety of locations – Johannesburg’s Sophiatown, Vrededorp and Alexandria; Cape Town’s District Six, Hout Bay and Malay Quarter; and Durban’s Casbah district. Actual buildings such as the Alabama Cinema in Cape Town, the Victory Lounge in Durban and the Crescent Restaurant in Vrededorp, all popular landmarks of black culture, feature in the action, reinforcing the strip’s local flavour. The strip was brought to my attention by Neil Napper of the Storyteller Group, who had been trawling through old Drum magazines in search of comic strips by black artists of yesteryear. The style of Goombi is an odd combination of slapstick action and lyrical location sketches and the writing combines township vernacular with the hard-boiled Americanese of detective novels. Although the stories are formulaic and inconsequential, the ambience is very much that of the legendary Drum era. No artist or writer was credited, and as we scratched our heads about whom it might be, I immediately thought of Len Sak, who had been active as a cartoonist in the black press since the 1950s. Although I was fairly certain that it wasn’t his work, I was sure that Len (or Lennie as he is known to his friends) would know whose work it was. When I first met Sak he was already in his seventies (he was born in 1931, in Port Elizabeth) and my first impression was of an old-world gentleman with fine manners and a self-effacing, humble nature. But behind this reticent humility is one of those irrepressible people for whom tomorrow always represents another day filled with new opportunities. Even as a veteran cartoonist with half a century of work behind him, Lennie shows no desire to retire, and is always

Fig 83 TOWNSHIP HERO Jojo, seen here in a panel celebrating the 20th anniversary of the popular cartoon character, was invented by Len Sak in 1959.

FIG 83 LEN SAK, MAGAZINE ILLUSTRATION, 1969

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FIG 84 WILLIAM (BILL) PAPPAS, A PAGE FROM GOOMBI – PRIVATE DETECTIVE, SERIALISED COMIC STRIP, DRUM MAGAZINE, 1956-7

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the jojo enigma talking, sometimes conspiratorially, about new projects and opportunities. He immediately informed me that Goombi was drawn by Bill Pappas, a highly accomplished cartoonist who worked as a freelancer for Drum between 1956 and 1959 before emigrating to the United Kingdom.1 I replied that I was disappointed that the Goombi artist had turned out to be white: I was hoping that Napper had stumbled upon an unremembered black comic artist. Lennie gave a long sigh. No chance of that, he said. He had worked as a cartoonist in the black press for many decades, and if there were any black comic artists of this calibre during those years, he would surely have known about them.

Fig 84 LOCAL COLOUR Goombi – Private Detective, published in Drum magazine in the mid-1950s, combined an American-stye detective yarn with closely observed local detail.

Fig 85 ENIGMATIC INGENUE Renowned Drum-era author Alex La Guma produced the intriguing strip ‘Little Libby’ for New Age, an oppositional weekly paper.

portaits of the ‘50s

Shortly thereafter, Neil Napper turned up another intriguing comic strip from the 1950s. Although nowhere as accomplished as Goombi, and published in a relatively obscure weekly paper, this strip was of great interest because it was in fact produced by a black comic artist. But not only that. This comic artist also turned out to be one of the most highly regarded writers of the Drum era. Entitled Little Libby: The Adventures of Liberation Chabalala (Fig 85), the strip was written and drawn by Alex La Guma, who is famous for his novel A Walk in the Night (1962), banned by the apartheid government. Little Libby appeared in the oppositional weekly paper, New Age, in 19592. Libby, the heroine of this naively drawn strip, is an innocent buffeted variously by callous authority, the competing demands of the workers’ movement and a street gang. The action is set against the real-life background of the Congress Alliance campaigns of 1959. Posters frequently appear in the backgrounds of the panels containing slogans such as ‘Stay Home April 14’, referring to the stay-at-home campaign; ‘Don’t Buy Nat Goods’, referring to the boycott of Nationalist government-linked products; and ‘Eat No Chips’, referring to the Potato Boycott. But La Guma’s strip was highly unusual and unlikely to have been widely seen outside the relatively small readership of New Age. La Guma, to the best of my knowledge, did not publish another strip, although one of his stories, A Glass of Wine, was adapted into comic form by the Storyteller Group in 1993. Another artist who produced cartoons for ANC publications was George Pemba (1912–2001), one of South Africa’s most famous black painters. In the catalogue of a 1996 retrospective exhibition of Pemba’s work, his friend Raymond Mhlaba, an ANC activist, recalls how, as part of his involvement with the ANC-led resistance movement of the 1950s, Pemba contributed cartoons to an ANC newspaper, including a caricature of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, which is

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FIG 85 ALEX LA GUMA, ‘LITTLE LIBBY: THE ADVENTURES OF LIBERATION CHABALALA’, COMIC STRIP SERIALISED IN NEW AGE, 1959.

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extraordinary empathy

FIG 86 GEORGE PEMBA, CARTOON, ISIZWE, THE NATION, CIRCA 1950

Fig 86 SATIRICAL RARITY This hilarious portrait of an Africanised Hendrik Verwoerd, penned in the mid-50s by George Pemba for the ANC-linked paper Isizwe: The Nation is a rare instance from that period of a black artist producing a caricature of a white politician .

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published in the catalogue. Mhlaba recalls: ‘We decided, Govan [Mbeki], myself and other young fellows, to produce a newspaper known as Isizwe, The Nation, and then we asked George to make cartoons for our paper. I remember one very clearly depicting Verwoerd with a knobkerrie in his right hand and a Bible in his left.’3 (Fig 86) Sarah Huddleston’s 1996 biography of Pemba, Against all Odds, reproduces a number of illustrations produced by Pemba for the Lovedale Press, attached to Lovedale College in Alice, where he studied. In later years, Pemba also illustrated literacy publications for the South African Institute of Race Relations and the Bureau of Literacy and Literature, but no other cartoons are recorded, except for some cartoon-like sketches in his sketchbooks.4 Pemba’s illustration work is stylish and there is no doubt that he could have produced wonderful comic strips if he had put his mind to it. But he didn’t.

The truth of the matter is that neither in the world of editorial cartooning nor in the world of graphic storytelling were there any significant black cartoonists prior to the emergence of the alternative press in the 1970s. Cartoons and comic strips did appear in the black press, but with one or two possible exceptions, these were produced by white cartoonists and illustrators. And of the white cartoonists who worked in the black press in the mid-century years, the most prolific and enduring was Len Sak. Sak became a freelance cartoonist in 1956, working variously and sometimes simultaneously for The South African Jewish Frontier, Die Brandwag, Bantu World, Golden City Post, Drum, the Cape Argus and the Sunday Times. His character Jojo appeared in Drum for the first time in 1959, and went on to appear regularly in The World, Weekend World, Post, Sunday Post and later the Sowetan until the end of the century. In 1965 he began working as a full-time cartoonist and illustrator for The World and Weekend World, also drawing at that time for Post, Sunday Post and Financial Mail.5 By 1970 his style had become definitive – a uniquely ‘black’ cartooning style associated with the stable of black newspapers in which his work appeared. Although he seldom ventured out of what he called the ‘splendid isolation’ of his Johannesburg flat into the townships where his cartoons were set, his work completely transcended the limitations of his personal experience. Through the force of a remarkable imagination and extraordinary powers of empathy, he succeeded in documenting the social, cultural and political life of black South Africans for more than four decades. Like several other leading South African cartoonists, Sak is of Eastern European origin, and his experiences of marginalisation as a child growing up in wartime Port Elizabeth contributed to his powers of empathy. Although he has been criticised for his moralising and sermonising tendencies,6 his ability, as a white artist, to invent and sustain credible black cartoon characters, portray township life in an authentic way and demonstrate a sense of style and a perspective with which black readers were able to identify, over such a long period, is a remarkable achievement. At the time of writing, Lennie was 76 and still going strong, still working and still buffeted by the vicissitudes of the freelancer’s life.

THE SEMIOTICS OF RACIAL CARICUTURE

The most intriguing aspect of Len Sak’s oeuvre is his character, Jojo, arguably the most popular black South African cartoon character of the twentieth century. Jojo originated in 1958 as the result of a commission by Tom Hopkinson, then editor of Drum, who asked Sak to invent a South African cartoon strip whose hero was to be ‘a little guy living in a typical black dormitory township … [who would] transcend hardships, mishaps and disasters with dignity and humour

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the jojo enigma

Fig 87 A LOVABLE CHARACTER The character of Jojo – lovable, helpful, long-suffering, energetic and flexible – was created by Len Sak in response to a brief from Tom Hopkinson, the editor of Drum, in 1959. Hopkins asked Sak to draw an African Everyman who would ‘transcend hardships, mishaps and disasters with dignity and humour – and have the last laugh’.

FIG 87 LEN SAK, CARTOON, SOWETAN, unDATEd

– and have the last laugh.’7 What is remarkable about the character that Sak invented in response to this brief, is that, despite Jojo’s thick lips, button nose, and exaggerated tuft of frizzy hair – all well-known conventions of racial stereotyping – Jojo was apparently not regarded by readers as a racial stereotype, but rather as a much-loved icon of the struggle of ordinary black people. According to Aggrey Klaaste, who was editor of the Sowetan in 1991 when Sak’s collection of Jojo cartoons, entitled Jojo’s World, was published, ‘Jojo was held in awe by young and old people. Jojo became a part of black life, and by the rhythms that guide the artistic impulse, of all life.’7 In order to be able to analyse a cartoon character more objectively, it is helpful to follow the advice of the great American underground cartoonist, Robert Crumb, who, after penning one of his more offensive cartoons, reminded his

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readers: ‘It’s only lines on paper, folks!’ To gain the level of objectivity required for analysis, it is necessary first to distance ourselves from those aspects of the character that either appeal to us or repel us, to stop seeing the character as a person. It is simply a drawing, a set of marks made in ink on paper according to generally accepted graphic conventions. When we look at Jojo in this way, we immediately notice some interesting things. For a start, both the head and body are egg-shaped, a comfortable shape if ever there was one. We also notice that Jojo’s braces are usually partially undone, which suggests he is quite a relaxed character. His upper body, under the casual open-necked white shirt with its rolled-up sleeves, is chubby, and one gets the same kind of comfortable, chubby feeling from his forearms and hands. But his legs are spindly and super-flexible. These details are all important. They are elements of a visual syntax, a sign

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what’s so funny? are used, the effect of the mask is to represent or stand for a general idea or set of characteristics rather than a specific individual. Generic characters, argues McCloud, are easier for people to identify with, and the character’s mask provides an opportunity for the reader or viewer to don the mask, to inhabit the character behind the mask, in effect, to become the character. This, suggests McCloud, is why the world of cartooning is filled with simplified mask-like faces and masked characters, and why so many millions of people are able to identify with them.

An AFRICAN EVERYMAN

FIG 88 LEN SAK, UNPUBLISHED PENCIL SKETCH FOR EDUCATIONAL CARTOON STRIP FEATURING JOJO, circa 1990-1994

Figs 88-89 ENDEARING SCAMPS These pencil scamps for an educational Jojo strip, produced in the mid-1990s for an envisaged pro-democracy media campaign, demonstrate Sak’s robust optimism, perennial good humour and continued belief in the currency of his beloved cartoon character.

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language intentionally employed by the artist in order to create a certain impression. The character’s general chubbiness tells us that he is well-fed and comfortable in his skin, the rolled up sleeves indicate his ability to get down to hard work when the need arises, and his flexible legs suggest that he has the ability to roll with the punches in times of hardship. Jojo’s face is even more interesting. As has been noted, it is a comforting egg shape, without the angular features that are normally associated with anger or unpleasantness. His frizzy topknot may or may not be offensive, depending on your viewpoint – it could either be interpreted as a racist snipe about African people’s hair, or a positive statement of blackness. The lips are broad and thick, but they are friendly, kissable lips, not the tumescent, rubbery lips of the ‘coon’ stereotype. Most interesting of all are Jojo’s eyes. Set very close together, they are presented as unvarying oval dots with no indication of pupils or eyelids. In the world of cartooning there are a great number of famous cartoon characters who have simple dots for eyes. Tintin has oval dots, and Charlie Brown and all the other Peanuts characters have round dots. In some forms of visual storytelling the eyes function as windows of the soul, but in cartoons where the eyes are unvarying dots, other strategies, like exaggerated body language, must be employed to convey emotion. According to comics theorist Scott McCloud, removing the eyes from the cartoon face and replacing them with dots has the effect of turning the character’s face into a kind of mask.9 In ceremonies, performances or rituals where masks

McCloud’s theory about the simplified, mask-like cartoon face clearly applies to Len Sak’s Jojo. In assembling the set of visual signs that constitute the character of Jojo, Sak was concerned, not to ridicule African people, but to create an African Everyman with whom the township-based readers of Drum would be able to identify. What raises Jojo above the level of racial caricature is, quite simply, the intention of the artist. Without direct first-hand experience of township life, Sak drew on his personal store of humanism – an optimistic, if rather naive and Romantic humanism – to create a character who, despite the material poverty and hardship of

FIG 89 LEN SAK, UNPUBLISHED PENCIL SKETCH FOR EDUCATIONAL CARTOON STRIP FEATURING JOJO, circa 1990-1994

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the jojo enigma township life, is blessed by a wonderful richness of spirit. The enigma of Len Sak’s Jojo poses some intriguing questions about the whole question of racial caricature, and of racial stereotyping, to which it gives graphic expression. We are surrounded in our daily lives by stereotypes of all kinds, whether they are racial, ethnic, religious, gender-based, or based on wealth or class position. But stereotypes are not always offensive. They can also be used fondly, as in a marriage where the spouses are from different cultural backgrounds and stereotypes are used as terms of endearment. The characteristic quirks that set people apart from each other on a group basis – the raw material of stereotypes – are often exaggerated for the sake of comedy. Racial or ethnic comedy relies on the exaggeration of these quirks, and where the intention of the comedian is benign, he or she can usually get away with it. As a general rule, the severity with which an insult is regarded will depend on context, on the existing relations between the group that the cartoonist or comedian belongs to and the group being insulted. If these relations are cordial, the insult is likely to be accepted lightly. But if interpersonal relations are charged with historical anger and hurt, fireworks can be expected. Where the animosity between groups is based on religious differences, things can get really ugly, as demonstrated by the furore surrounding the 2005 publication in a Danish newspaper of cartoons satirising the prophet Muhammed. Likewise, when cartoonists deliberately target specific religious or cultural beliefs, as Zapiro has done from time to time, strong negative feedback can be expected. In countries like South Africa where people have suffered for centuries under the yoke of colonialism and oppression based on race, racial caricatures, however benign, tend to carry with them a cargo of historical anger, and for that reason may be regarded in a more serious light than in countries where relations between people of different national groups are not so highly charged. Jojo’s World continued to appear in the Sowetan until the end of the century, and, Sak told me, no explanation was offered to him when it was eventually dropped. But it is safe to assume that the racial caricature embodied in the character was no longer considered appropriate in the new South Africa. The space that had been allocated to Jojo’s World and Sak’s political cartoons was filled by Sifiso Yalo and Themba Siwela. In the work of these post-apartheid cartoonists, the issue of racial caricature loses its primacy, even when, as they sometimes do, they employ the conventions of racial caricature in their own work. For, as we have established, there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to racial caricature. Its acceptability depends on the intention that lies behind it, the context in which it appears and the attitudes of those who are on the receiving end.

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FIG 90 LEN SAK, CARTOON, SOWETAN, unDATEd

FIG 91 LEN SAK, CARTOON, SOWETAN, unDATEd

The context of reception in which Sak’s work initially appeared has changed irrevocably, and his humanistic intentions are no longer sufficient to shield the character of Jojo from criticism. It was therefore appropriate that Jojo’s World should have been retired from public life, to be replaced by Yalo’s Pantsula and Siwela’s Mzansi. While we can perhaps excuse the cartoonists of yesteryear for their use of the conventions of racial caricature on the grounds that they were creatures of their historical context, this kind of stereotyping is no longer permissible, and where demeaning racial caricatures continue to appear, people who feel insulted by them have every right to get annoyed.

Figs 90-91 INHERENT HUMANISM Whether he drew in a naturalistic or cartoony style, Sak’s drawings always displayed an inherent humanism.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Humorous Natives ‘I am very far from wishing to decry or disparage the native people in any way whatever.’ Monty Wilson, author’s note to H umorous Native Stu di es (circa 1941).

THE ORIGIN OF THE RHUMBA

In 2004, during the heyday of the Durban Cartoon Project, I was in the studio with Sifiso Yalo, Themba Siwela and other project members, working on the creation of a set of characters for a series of educational comics, when a colleague arrived in the studio with a book she had found while sorting through her aged mother’s possessions. ‘You might find this interesting,’ she said. It was one of the strangest little books I had seen, in a genre typified by strange little books. Entitled Monty Wilson’s Humorous Native Studies (2nd Series), it was printed and published by the Central Press (Pty) Ltd., Durban. As is so often the case with cartoon collections from yesteryear, no publication date was listed on the flyleaf, but the paper was yellow and the cover cracked and faded. It looked about fifty or sixty years old. The book contains a collection of what can only be described as racist cartoons of domestic workers, originally published in the Natal Daily News. But the drawings are rendered with such style and energy that each turn of the page was greeted by exclamations of astonishment from the young cartoonists who had gathered around to look at it. ‘Hey, this guy can really draw!’ exclaimed Sifiso. ‘Who is this dude?’ asked Themba. It was a good question.

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Turning to Murray Schoonraad’s Companion to South African Cartoonists, I found a few paragraphs about Wilson, although no examples of his work. However, the previously published Afrikaans edition of the book includes two drawings from Humorous Native Studies, originally published under the title The Adventures of Intambo and Mafuta. According to Schoonraad, Wilson was well known for ‘a series of humorous drawings about a black family and their introduction and reaction to Western life’. Wilson’s strip about this family appeared in the Daily Tribune in the late 1930s, and two books entitled The Adventures of Intambo and Mafuta were published in 1941, as were the two volumes of his Humorous Native Studies. Drawings by Wilson on the subject of ‘black life’ were also published in a supplement to a London weekly,

The Sketch.1 Although his birth date is not listed, Wilson died in 1958. Copies of his books are rare, and are prized as examples of racist South African art. It puzzled me that even though Wilson’s work is technically accomplished, packed with closely observed detail and wittily executed, this was the first time I’d ever heard of him. Why, in all the articles I’d read and conversations I’d had about South African cartooning, had nobody mentioned him? It was as though, with the exception of the small entry in Schoonraad’s book, he’d ceased to exist. It may simply be that he disappeared from view because nobody wanted to remember him. Not so much because his drawings are so racist, but because they are so truthful. Wilson’s work lays bare the attitudes of English-speaking white South Africans towards African people in the pre-apartheid years – and who wants to remember that? Each cartoon in Wilson’s book is appended by an anecdote sent in by a reader – the cartoons are in fact illustrations of reader anecdotes. Because they were produced with the active collaboration of the readers (and the editors) of the Natal Daily News, we can be fairly sure that the mocking tone of racial superiority revealed in these cartoons was typical of white English-speaking people who lived in Natal sixty years ago. The whole Monty Wilson episode had a weird feeling about it, and as I dug deeper, the weirdness did not let up. In a strange coincidence, I discovered that the first drawing in Wilson’s book, entitled ‘The Origin of the Rhumba’ (Fig 92), was almost identical to a drawing by Len Sak that I had often used in my training course to demonstrate the semiotic codes embedded in the figure of Jojo (Figs 87, 93). In both drawings, the main character is polishing the floor with his feet, while a woman looks on approvingly. In Sak’s drawing, the woman is Jojo’s friend Rosie, whom he is helping with her work so she can ‘knock off nice and early’. In Wilson’s drawing, the woman is the floor polisher’s employer. While Jojo is dressed in normal civilian clothes, Wilson’s domestic worker is dressed in a ‘kitchen boy’ suit and apron, and on his head he is wearing what looks like a maid’s cap. Under the drawing is this caption:

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humorous natives

Figs 92-93 DANCING FLOOR POLISHERS Monty Wilson’s satirical drawings of domestic workers, penned in the late 1930s, are undeniably racist. But what exactly is it that separates Wilson’s drawing of a dancing floor polisher from Sowetan cartoonist Len Sak’s treatment of the same subject?

FIG 92 MONTY WILSON, ‘THE ORIGIN OF THE RHUMBA’, MONTY WILSON’S HUMOROUS NATIVE STUDIES, CIRCA 1940

Jim, having seen such labour saving devices as the washing machine, invented a device of his own for polishing the floors. He tied a brush on one foot and a polishing cloth on the other. To balance himself, and as a final touch to the polishing process, he had in his hands a mop. Seen by Mrs J Reynders [of] Winterskloof and Miss P Russell [of] Mooi River.

I was particularly intrigued by this discovery because of the light it throws on the whole issue of racial caricature in South African cartooning. The fact that both Sak and Wilson produced the same drawing is a good starting point. It is not unusual for cartoonists, independently of each other, to produce different versions of the same drawing, but in this case the intentions that lay behind the drawings seemed, at first sight, to be diametrically opposed. Or were they? The more I thought about it, the less sure I became. While Wilson’s drawings exhibit all the conventions of racial caricature in one form or another, they are nevertheless

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closely observed and accurate in their representation of clothing and hairstyles, buildings and interiors, vehicles and machines, and other details of everyday suburban life. In this respect they have an ethnographic quality about them. In some of the drawings, the features of Wilson’s African subjects are exaggerated according to the conventions of racial caricature, but in others his portrayals are naturalistic. In this respect his work is similar to Sak’s. However it needs to be strongly stated that in not a single drawing does Wilson display Sak’s humanism or his empathy for his subjects. The universalism of Sak’s viewpoint is nowhere to be found in Wilson’s work, and Wilson’s depictions of African domestic workers are in every sense representations of the Other. Wilson’s observations of the amusing attempts of domestic workers to mimic the behaviours required of European civilisation serve one purpose and one purpose alone: to confirm and reinforce the sense of racial and cultural superiority felt by his readers.

FIG 93 LEN SAK, ‘JOJO’S WORLD’, SOWETAN, 1991 (DETAIL)

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what’s so funny?

FIG 94 MONTY WILSON, ‘THE SHORT CUT’, MONTY WILSON’S HUMOROUS NATIVE STUDIES, CIRCA 1940

FIG 95 MONTY WILSON, ‘A DOG’S LIFE’, MONTY WILSON’S HUMOROUS NATIVE STUDIES, CIRCA 1940

Figs 94-95 INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS Many of Wilson’s jokes arose out of misunderstood instructions or the invention of innovative solutions to unfamiliar tasks.

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Many of the incidents that are the subjects of Wilson’s cartoons are the result of misunderstood instructions. Other jokes arise out of innovative methods applied by domestic workers to the solution of problems, usually where they are unfamiliar with the conventional way of performing a task, or of the particular technology used. Thus in one cartoon, a ‘native office boy’, trays in both hands, operates a lift by pressing the button with his nose. In another, a ‘native nursemaid’ carries a pram, with a baby inside, on her head over a rough path (Fig 94). And in another, a ‘native house boy’ uses an electric washing machine to wash his employer’s dog (Fig 95). As I studied these drawings it struck me that while they are undeniably racist, Wilson’s caricatures are, on balance, more benign than malicious. The reason for this is that Wilson’s attitude – and the attitudes of his readers – are saved from maliciousness by a paternalistic attitude that laughs at the mistakes made by servants in the way one would laugh about mistakes made by a child. Likewise, their ingenuity is celebrated in the same way that parents celebrate the ingenuity of their children. One often hears about paternalism as a feature of the colonial mindset, but I have seldom seen it so graphically demonstrated as in the cartoons of Monty Wilson. It occurred to me that the paternalistic racial attitudes embedded in Wilson’s work might be structural rather than emotional, arising not so much out of fear, hatred or contempt, as out of the very structure of the relationships that existed between white and black people in the 1930s and 1940s. In an authorial note appended to the book, Wilson wrote: ‘I am very far from wishing to decry or disparage the native people in any way whatever. Too deeply do I appreciate their many fine gifts and attributes. It is, in fact, largely due to a sincere sympathy with the natives and their aspirations that I have devoted myself to this special work.’2 Earlier, in looking at Len Sak’s Jojo, it was argued that an important factor to be taken into consideration in the interpretation and evaluation of racial caricature is the intention of the artist (in as much as we are able to ascertain it). In Wilson’s case, I think we can take his protestations about the ‘sincere sympathy’ that underlies his ‘special work’ with a pinch of salt. His authorial note reveals that he in fact did receive letters critical of his work, and acknowledged that ‘the gravamen of such criticism is that I am “making game” of the native, that in caricaturing him I am making him “a figure of fun”, and, as one writer does not hesitate to say, “holding him up to ridicule”’. In answer to these criticisms, Wilson sincerely assured his readers that this was not his wish or intention. However, considering that some of his own readers suspected

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humorous natives

FIG 96 MONTY WILSON, ‘a zululand cameo’, MONTY WILSON’S HUMOROUS NATIVE STUDIES, CIRCA 1940

his intentions, I think we may do so too. With regard to the historical context of Wilson’s work, it is clear that he was very much an artist of his time and place. The fact that his drawings were based on reader submissions confirms the complicity of the readers – and editors – of the Natal Daily News in the propagation of these jokes, which, once published, would presumably have been repeated by readers to their friends, thus translated into a more broadly disseminated oral form. The paper’s readers were almost exclusively white and English-speaking, and while there were a few who felt that his work was racist and demeaning, the majority of Wilson’s readers obviously felt that his cartoons were jolly good fun. One may therefore assume that jokes like these were part of the everyday lexicon of South African life. The fact that Wilson’s work is so hard to find today

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suggests that historians and publishers, particularly the publishers of the Daily News (previously the Natal Daily News), probably feel that Monty Wilson’s Humorous Native Studies are best swept under the carpet and forgotten. And who can blame them, since these cartoons reflect so poorly on the paper, its editorial staff and its readers? But the cultural historian should have no such sympathies. With the benefit of hindsight, I am tempted to suggest that Wilson’s Humorous Native Studies might more accurately have been titled ‘Humorous Studies of the Attitudes of White Suburban Employers towards their Domestic Workers’. Like Cruikshank’s cannibal cartoon, Wilson’s cartoons remain an important and revealing source of documentary evidence about racial attitudes, in this case the attitudes of middle-class Englishspeaking white South Africans in the years leading up to the long period of National Party rule that began in 1948.

Fig 96 ETHNOGRAPHIC QUALITY Despite the element of racial caricature that renders them objectionable, Wilson’s drawings are packed with closely observed historical detail and thus possess an ethnographic quality.

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what’s so funny?

FIG 97 ZAPIRO, CARTOON, independent newspapers, 2007

THE TINTIN CONTROVERSY Fig 97 HISTORICAL BAGGAGE Zapiro, a lifelong Tintin fan, grapples with the controversy surrounding the republication, in 2007, of Hergé’s controversial Tintin in the Congo (1931).

Fig 98 Scathing Parady Joe Dog (Anton Kannemeyer) recycles the racist depictions of Herge’s Tintin in the Congo in a scathing parody.

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In 2007, a British human rights lawyer, David Enright, walked into a London bookstore and encountered a copy of the recently published English translation of Tintin in the Congo by Hergé (Georges Rémi). His irate response precipitated a furore that soon made its way to South Africa. The attention drawn to this book is important, because the book unashamedly portrays the racial attitudes of the European colonial nations in the first half of the twentieth century, and demonstrates that the portrayal of black people in a demeaning way was not a South African invention, but was typical of the colonial period in general. Tintin in the Congo, the second of Tintin’s many adventures, was first published in serialised form in the children’s magazine Le Petit Vingtième in 1930 and published in book form, in black and white, the following year. (An English edition of the original black and white book was finally published in 1991, making it the last of the Tintin books to appear in English).3 In 1946 it was reissued in a revised and coloured French edition4. It was the English translation of this

full-colour edition, released in 2005, that caused the furore, which the publishers anticipated. In the foreword to the book, they state that the reason for republishing the book was to complete the series, making it ‘an essential volume for collectors’, but they do acknowledge that there are two aspects of the book – Hergé’s stereotypical treatment of the Congolese people, and his gung-ho approach to big-game hunting – that today’s readers ‘may find offensive’.5 Certainly, as a repository of symbolic tropes that reveal European attitudes towards African people in the late colonial period, the book is exemplary. It’s all there: the plucky white explorer striding through Africa with his pith helmet on his head, his rifle in his hand and his faithful, barefooted black servant, portrayed with stereotypical golliwog hair and thick pink lips, by his side. Alternatively, when not striding, Tintin is being carried in a sedan chair by subservient black porters. According to Harry Thompson, author of a 1991 biography of Hergé: ‘In 1930, the victims of Hergé’s early attempts at

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humorous natives

79 FIG 98 ANTON KANNEMEYER, ‘pappa in afrika’, ACRYLIC on canvass, 2009

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what’s so funny?

Figs 99-100 ENDURING STEREOTYPES Anton Kannemeyer’s parodies of Hergé’s black warrior figures, re-introduced into the postcolonial African context, draw attention to the tenacity of these enduring stereotypes.

FIG 99 JOE DOG (ANTON KANNEMEYER), ‘GREETINGS FROM SOUTH AFRICA’, POSTCARD, 1996

caricature were the Africans, and in later years Hergé found himself profoundly embarrassed by these drawings.’6 Years later, he told an interviewer: ‘I was fed on the prejudices of the bourgeois society in which I moved ... It was 1930. I only knew things about these countries that people said at the time: “Africans were great big children ... Thank goodness for them that we were there!” Etc. And I portrayed these Africans according to such criteria, in the purely paternalistic spirit which existed then in Belgium.’7 Hergé is celebrated for his refinement of the deceptively simple ‘clear line’ (sometimes called the Belgian clear line). The apparent simplicity of this line disguises the enormous amount of invisible preparatory work that went into the construction of Hergé’s panels. In his fascinating study of Hergé’s methods, Michael Farr shows how many of Hergé’s famous panoramic scenes were copied or adapted from photographs. During his career Hergé amassed a vast archive of images, which he painstakingly compiled in the process of researching his books. Tintin in the Congo, however, was his second book, and is nowhere near as intensively researched as his later books. Because it is more juvenile, more spontaneous and less self-conscious than the others, it is also more revealing. If English and European readers are embarrassed by it, this may well be because it is such an accurate portrayal of the way their forebears felt and thought about Africa. Behind Hergé’s clear line lies more than just physical and geographical detail – there is plenty of sharply observed ideological detail as well. For all the criticisms that have been levelled against it, Tintin in the Congo remains a faithful depiction of the 1930s colonial mindset. However cringeworthy they may be, Hergé’s caricatures of African warriors are not going to go away. They are too potent. Recognising this, Anton Kannemeyer (Joe Dog) and Conrad Botes, the Bitterkomix artists, have toyed repeatedly with them. In a 1996 Kannemeyer screenprint (Fig 99), for example, figures from Tintin in the Congo are rearranged into an image of compelling urgency. Tintin is running for his life, chased by three spear-brandishing warriors. In his hand is a treaty (a reference, perhaps, to the contested treaty between Dingane and Piet Retief). Superimposed on the image is the ironic message: ‘Greetings from South Africa’. Kannemeyer has exploited Hergé’s clear line style, his warrior figures and other Tintin figures in several works (see Chapter 15), and both he and Botes have produced reversals featuring black Tintins and white warriors, literally milking Hergé’s stereotypes for all they are worth. In doing so, they confirm the enduring quality of these stereotypes, captured in the indubitable veracity of Hergé’s clear line.

FIG 100 ANTON KANNEMEYER, ‘i love the white middle class’, ACRYLIC on canvass, 2008

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PART two

Ink and Blood

ZAPIRO, CARTOON, SOUTH, 1987

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CHAPTER NINE

Growing up with the Comics: A Memoir ‘The whole of world history often seems to me nothing more than a picture book which portrays humanity’s most powerful and senseless desire – the desire to forget.’ Hermann Hesse, Jou r n ey to th e East (1932)

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s a schoolboy growing up in the coastal suburb of Durban North in the mid-1960s, I read a lot of comics. On Saturday mornings with my pocket money burning a hole in my pants, I’d cycle to our local corner café to buy my weekly supply. There were plenty to choose from in those days: Harvey, DC, Marvel, Archie, the pocket-sized British war and romance comics, the British weeklies like Lion, Tiger and Hurricane, Valiant, The Beano and The Dandy, and of course the ubiquitous Disney comics.1 Most of my friends loved comics too and we’d spend many an afternoon lying on the mock Persian carpet in the living room, listening to Springbok Radio on the huge old radiogram, surrounded by piles of comics, awash in a sea of graphic storytelling. It was a great time to be a comics fan. The early-to-mid 1960s, often referred to as the ‘silver age’ of American comic book publishing, were dominated by super-powered ‘caped crusaders’ who, as has often been noted, usually wore their underpants over their leotards. A few years earlier, Marvel’s Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had launched the famous series of comic books that grew into the Marvel Universe, and the Marvel titles from this period, especially the ones written by Lee and drawn by Kirby, had a compelling vigour that was impossible to resist.2 Tucked away in what many English-speaking South Africans still regarded as a last outpost of the British Empire, and deprived of access to television,3 we were culturally isolated, but we did enjoy the benefit of both the British and American comic publishing traditions, whose products were displayed with equal prominence on the shelves of the corner café. I was fascinated by the intriguing differences between the parallel universes of British and American comics. The British comics, published weekly and printed in black and white with colour covers, had a rough newsprint feel and a zigzagged trim on the outer edges of the pages. The American comics, by

contrast, were smaller and slicker, printed in full colour with glossy covers, and published monthly. 4 In general, the British comics were grittier, more realistic, wider-ranging in their subject matter, and often quite robust in their depictions of war, violence and anti-social behaviour. The American comics, by contrast, were sanitised. They presented either a Manichean fantasy of noble (if flawed) superheroes versus diabolical super-villains, or an unashamed celebration of the post-war American dream, with super-clean Archie, Jughead and their curvaceous girlfriends hanging out at the soda fountain. The popular Harvey Comics likewise presented a deodorised fairy tale world in which the archetypal denizens of the European folktale tradition were transformed into cute witches, friendly ghosts and endearing little devils. Most of the American comics carried on their covers the seal of the Comics Code Authority, a signal to parents that the comic was safe for children and free of any unsuitable content.5

TRUE AFRICA IN THE SUBURBS

Into this boy’s world of imported popular literature, only one local product penetrated, as far as my memory serves me. I used to visit the khaya behind a screen of bougainvillea at the back of our garden, where our Zulu domestic worker lived.6 There I would avidly devour True Africa, a large-format, locally-produced magazine featuring lurid photo-comics about characters like Samson the Lionheart and Chunky Charlie. There were many other photo-comic titles in those days, with titles like Condor and Kid Colt, but we tended to look down on them, disdainful of their tacky production values and clichéd storylines. Despite our snobbish attitude towards them, photocomics flourished throughout the 1960s, and remained popular until the 1990s. However, an accompanying local comic

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book publishing industry failed to emerge. Photo-comics, published in black and white with colour covers, generally in the economical A5 format, demanded minimal levels of expertise to produce, compared to the rigours that would have been required to produce full-colour hand-drawn comics of sufficient quality to compete with the readily available British and American products. In those days white Englishspeaking South Africans had very little to choose from in the way of locally produced culture, whether it be literature or popular music, and were quite content to consume imported cultural products from the mother country and the USA. English speakers regarded all things English as their own, and disdained local products.7 South African photo-comics, like the Latin American fotonovellas on which they were based, were from the beginning aimed at mature readers and did not shy away from the adult themes of crime, violence, sex and politics. Comics, by contrast, were traditionally aimed at the juvenile marketplace. They were regarded with contempt by the literary and educational establishment. Being caught reading a comic book in class was a serious offence. But the same disapprobation was not applied to the work of South Africa’s political cartoonists, with whom the country was well served during that period. Editorial cartoonists were highly regarded by our teachers for their ability to convey complex political ideas in a single image, and our history textbooks were peppered with cartoons by great South African cartoonists of yesteryear, like Daniel Boonzaier, Mac (Herbert W MacKinney), Wyndham Robinson and TO Honiball. Sixties Durban, still very much a whites-only colonial city,8 maintained an umbilical connection with the metropolitan world of London and the gracious English country life, but also had an appetite for the glossy pop dished up by Hollywood and New York. Our fathers were Allied soldiers who had returned from the Second World War to participate enthusiastically in the baby boom. Mine was a committed rock and surf angler who captained the Natal light tackle angling team and served for many years as the honorary secretary of the Natal Coast Anglers’ Union. His duties included the production and distribution of a monthly newsletter, which he used to print in our garage on an inky old Roneo machine. My first published cartoons appeared in this newsletter and this was where I first fell in love with the alchemy of print, and the possibility of self-publishing. Our local cartoonist was the brilliant Jock Leyden, a Scotsman whose portrayals of Durban’s social and cultural scene embodied a nostalgic yearning for everything British (see Chapter 6). Like many cartoonists of his day, he was strongly influenced by the legendary British cartoonist Giles, and created his own Gilesian typology of barrel-chested military men, sinuous socialites, scurrilous bookmakers,

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FIG 101 JOCK LEYDEN, CARTOON, DAILY NEWS, 1963

FIG 102 JOCK LEYDEN, CARTOON, DAILY NEWS, 1963

buxom pram-pushing ‘native girls’ and big-lipped, barefooted ‘garden boys’. I was able to recognise Leyden’s indebtedness to Giles because the annual Giles collections were popular Christmas gifts amongst the older generation. I first came across piles of these old Giles annuals at a family beach cottage near Mtwalume on the south coast of Durban, where we spent our summer holidays. The cottage was in a forested glade overlooking a pond surrounded by curving strelitzia palms, and inside, under the cool thatch, were the remnants of a bygone world of rocking chairs and paraffin lamps – and an ancient glass-fronted cabinet piled with old books and magazines. These publications fascinated me. Amongst

Figs 101-102 LEYDEN’S DURBAN Jock Leyden drew for the Daily News from 1939 to the mid-1980s. His work provides a vivid cartoon documentary of changing lifestyles and attitudes in South Africa from the Second World War to the last decade of apartheid.

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what’s so funny?

FIG 103 DAVID MARAIS, CARTOON, CAPE TIMES, 1964

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them were yellowing copies of Punch and The Illustrated London News, and it was here that I got my first taste of the great British tradition of satire and caricature. Tattered old Giles annuals can still be found in secondhand bookshops all over the country, but collections by South African cartoonists of yesteryear are more difficult to come by. Some South African editorial cartoonists were more entrepreneurial than others, and, in particular, the two great Cape Town cartoonists of the 1960s and 1970s, David Marais and John Jackson, both produced several collections, as did Jock Leyden (see Chapter 6). These collections tell us a great deal about those times, and, paging through them, one is struck by the way in which the cartoonists had the knack of drawing attention to blips on the cultural radar that would later emerge as major trends. In the early 1960s, one such blip was the emergence of the international youth movement that would become synonymous with the decade. Long-haired beatniks adorned with peace signs and waving ‘Ban the Bomb’ posters were a popular subject of newspaper cartoons. These and other images of the hippies registered an assertive blip on my prepubescent radar.

FIG 104 RICK ANDREW, A PAGE FROM THE BALLAD OF JEFFREY’S BAY, SELF-PUBLISHED COMIC, CIRCA 1978

ARE YOU GOING TO SAN FRANCISCO?

By 1967, the year I went to high school, the hippies had invaded the public imagination. Sergio Aragones’s classic hippie character with his floral tunic, unkempt beard and peace sign pendant wandered dizzily along the margins of Mad magazine, Scott McKenzie’s ’San Francisco’ – with its injunction to ‘be sure to wear some flowers in your hair’ – was all over the radio, the Beatles were on a spiritual quest to learn transcendental meditation from the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and the Rolling Stones were arrested for possession of marijuana. And, of course, swirling through all of this, were the incandescent lyrics of Bob Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. There was a new spirit in the air, and as I grew into my teens it became apparent that we had a far wider range of choices than our parents’ generation, especially when it came to music, the pervasive teenage obsession of those years. From my rock-obsessed school friends I learned about the legendary music shop, Record King, located in Ajmeri Arcade, an alley deep in the heart of Durban’s Indian precinct. Here, at bargain basement prices, you could buy records by Jethro Tull, Uriah Heep, The Who, led Zeppelin, Iron Butterfly, Black Sabbath, The Moody Blues, Deep Purple and Pink Floyd. These records were deemed to be ‘underground’, whereas anything that met with parental approval was ’commercial‘. And, I discovered, a similar distinction applied to comics. I noticed that not all American comics were subject to the censorship of the Comics Code. In the bookstore bargain bins where remaindered comics were sold, or tucked away on dusty corner café shelves, Code-free gems could be found. As a teenager, I only dimly apprehended the deep ideological fissures that lay behind these different kinds of comics, and had no idea that behind the innocuous emblem of the Comics Code Authority lay a battleground littered with dead titles. From the bargain bins I got my first glimpse of the gory horror and madcap satire associated with EC Comics and began, with a growing sense of excitement, to piece together evidence of an intriguing prehistory of iconoclastic American comic book publishing. In 1954, the year I was born, Dr Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent was published in the USA. This book set in motion a chain of events that was to change the face of comic book publishing in the English-speaking world.9 Wertham, a well-known psychologist and author, argued that comic books were a major cause of juvenile delinquency in America, and zeroed in on horror titles such as Tales from The Crypt and Vault of Horror, published by EC Comics. These were the early years of what came to be known as the McCarthy era, and Wertham’s book was eagerly received by the guardians of the moral majority. A series of court actions followed, the outcome of which was the establishment by the mainstream American comics publishers of the

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FIG 105 N.D. MAZIN (ANDY MASON), DETAIL FROM THE VITTOKES, COMIC STRIP SERIALISED IN MAMBA COMIX, 2003-2007.

self-regulating Comics Code Authority, represented by the ubiquitous ‘Approved by the Comics Code’ stamp. EC Comics went to the wall, but William Gaines, EC’s publisher, was resourceful enough to keep alive one title – Mad – which became the highly successful Mad magazine. Featuring the inimitable work of Don Martin, Mort Drucker, Dave Berg, Sergio Aragones and ‘the usual gang of idiots’, Mad magazine during its mid-1960s heyday was considered by schoolboy critics to be the ultimate in humour (with the possible exception of the BBC’s The Goon Show). An Alfred E Neuman sticker on a satchel or pencil case was an unmistakable sign that the owner was ‘switched on’.

THE FURRY FREAKS

When I arrived at university in the early 1970s my interest in comics was re-ignited by the discovery, in the chaotic office of the student newspaper, Dome, of underground comix by Gilbert Shelton and Robert Crumb. Crumb’s satires of American society – in his eyes, a society gone mad – blew my mind.10 And in Shelton’s The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers I found an exemplar. Here, in contrast to the slick, professionally produced comics that I had grown up with, were scribbly, untidy comics

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whose authors were visibly present in their work.11 They made me want to draw my own underground comix. Like other English-language campuses during the early 1970s, the Durban campus of the University of Natal was a hotbed of student radicalism. NUSAS (National Union of South African Students) – a thorn in the side of the Nationalist government – was highly active on campus, while the Woodstock festival of 1969 still exerted an enormous influence on dress codes and musical tastes. But while the student body was virtually all white and middle class, attitudes were far from homogeneous. NUSAS controlled the SRC (Students’ Representative Council), but there was strong opposition from conservative student groups, who equated left-wing thinking with communism, decadence and dagga (marijuana) smoking. The cultural extremes on campus were typified by the ‘rugger buggers’ on the conservative side, the ‘lefties’ on the radical side and the ‘freaks’ on the cultural periphery. While I sympathised with the political ideas of the lefties, I was enthralled by the smoky aura of the freaks. The typical freak habitats of the day were dilapidated communes tucked away on the jungled backside of Durban’s Berea. The inhabitants

Figs 103-105 CELEBRATING THE SIXTIES Jokes about The Beatles appeared in a number of cartoons by Cape Times cartoonist David Marais during 1964, heralding a new era of popular culture. Some sense of how the international counterculture movement impacted locally in South Africa is provided by underground comics like Rick Andrew’s Ballad of Jeffrey’s Bay and N.D.Mazin’s The Vittokes.

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what’s so funny?

Fig 106 UNDERGROUND ORIGINS Vittoke in Azania by Pooh, which appeared in the university student newspapers Dome (Durban) and Varsity (Cape Town) in the late 1970s, drew its inspiration from US underground cartoonists Gilbert Shelton and Robert Crumb.

of these dingy dwellings spent their time smoking, listening to music, playing guitars, making leather sandals, reading Hermann Hesse novels and, of course, poring over underground comix smuggled, at some risk, from abroad. This sedentary lifestyle was punctuated by occasional bouts of ideological fervour in response to government atrocities, and by sporadic surfing safaris to the Wild Coast or Jeffreys Bay. The style and ethos of this period were wonderfully captured in the underground comix of Rick Andrew (Fig 105), a multitalented artist and teacher with whom I was to establish an enduring friendship. The political consciousness of the freaks was more influenced by the seductive mythology of the counterculture and the rhetoric of the American civil rights movement than by an in-depth understanding of the South African situation. But while somewhat spaced-out, it was not necessarily naïve. It had a gritty soulfulness informed by cross-cultural music-making, forged in the risky underworld of dagga smoking. With impecuniousness in common, the freaks and lefties often shared communal living spaces, and in these intimate contexts a deeper level of social and political education took place.

THE PASSIONATE LEFTIES

Figs 107-108 (overleaf) WITS STUDENT SATIRE Wits Student, the Wits University student newspaper, featured work by a number of excellent student cartoonists during the 1970s, such as Olly (‘Big Mr Westernman’) and Franco (The John Burger Saga), shown overleaf.

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Culturally aligned with the freaks, but highly disdainful of their hedonistic ways, the lefties were a small but highly vocal group who controlled the SRC, were heavily involved in NUSAS, and who tended to berate their fellow students for apathy in the face of the evils of apartheid. NUSAS was going through its Africanisation phase, during which it attempted to come to terms with the challenge of Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness writings and the increasing assertiveness of SASO, the black students’ organisation.11 The lefties derived their theoretical inspiration from Britain and Europe rather than America. Their international influences were the writings of the British New Left and European Marxists like Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci, but their obsession with theory was legitimated by a preoccupation with ‘praxis’ – the mobilisation of political theory through direct political action. The most influential leftwing figure at the University of Natal at that time was Rick Turner, a political scientist who was banned by the government in 1973. Between 1971 and 1973 Turner was instrumental in setting up a research project in which groups of students entered factories to gather information from workers on wages and conditions. Dubbed the Wages Commission, this organisation played a formative role in the emergence of organised trade unionism in the 1970s. Turner was assassinated in 1978, but his book The Eye of the Needle became a textbook of the antiapartheid movement.12

The most progressive NUSAS campuses during the 1970s were the University of Cape Town (UCT), the University of

the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg, Rhodes University in Grahamstown and the University of Natal campuses in Pietermaritzburg and Durban. Each had its own student newspaper.13 As soon as I arrived at the Durban campus I

signed up for NUSAS and Dome. As far as I was concerned, the Dome office was the nexus of student life. Here, amid a jumble of paper and ink, we had ‘control of the means of ideological production’. Not only did we write and produce our own student newspaper, but we also printed it ourselves, on a ramshackle machine that was forever breaking down. It was in the shambolic archives of the Dome office that I discovered the work of the Wits Student cartoonists Olly, Costas, Franco and Richard Smith, and was inspired by their rip-roaring critique of the South African political establishment and their unbridled caricatures of National Party politicians (see Chapter 15). In addition to the work of these local cartoonists, Wits Student also published occasional unlicensed excerpts from Robert Crumb’s Zap Comix and Gilbert Shelton’s Fat Freddy’s Cat. Rooting around in the Dome archives, I also found counterculture publications featuring the work of other underground cartoonists. Despite being roundly vilified by the critical establishment of the day, the underground comix genre has subsequently been acknowledged as one of the most important artistic movements of the twentieth century. Its influence on the subsequent development of alternative and independent comics publishing worldwide is undisputed, but it also had a wider impact. It established self-publishing as a realistic option for artists and writers whose work was too challenging or extreme for mainstream publishers and distributors, thus creating a platform for previously unimaginable levels of self-expression. Inevitably perhaps, while it demonstrated the literary, artistic and educational dimensions of the comic book medium, it also dipped into the mire of pornography. Another important contribution was to emphasise the concept of creator-owned copyright, previously unheard of in mainstream comic book publishing. These distinctive features proved so liberating to aspirant comic strip creators that the genre spread rapidly around the world, including to South Africa, where underground comix were clandestinely circulated. As soon as I became aware of underground comix as a genre, I was hooked. It became an addiction from which I have never been able to recover. I studied the underground comix movement with passionate enthusiasm, and, deeply inspired, set about creating my own comix. My first serialised strip to be published in the student press, a satire on the countercultural lifestyle of Durban’s freaks and lefties, was entitled Vittoke in Azania. Drawn under the nom de plume Pooh, it was unashamedly derivative of Gilbert Shelton and Robert Crumb.14 (Fig 106)

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87 FIG 106 POOH (ANDY MASON), detail FROM VITTOKE IN AZANIA, COMIC STRIP SERIALISED IN DOME AND VARSITY, 1978-1979

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what’s so funny?

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FIG 107 FRANCO FRESCURA, PAGE FROM THE JOHN BURGER SAGA, COMIC STRIP SERIALISED IN WITS STUDENT, 1973

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growing up with the comics

FIG 108 OLLY (REAL NAME UNKNOWN), ‘BIG MR WESTERNMAN’, COMIC STRIP, WITS STUDENT, CIRCA 1972

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what’s so funny?

THE PEOPLE’S WORKBOOK

Fig 109 RADICAL TROUBADOR The counterculture spirit of American protest music, transplanted into the antiapartheid context, is evoked on the cover of Roger Lucey’s first LP record, (below).

Figs 110-112 HISTORY COMIC ‘Vusi Goes back’, a comic strip about South African history, written by Dick Cloete, edited by Rob Berold and illustrated by Andy Mason, appeared as an introduction to People’s Workbook, published by EDA in 1981. It was also selfpublished as a comic book under the Prezanian Comix imprint.

In the increasingly combative post-1976 period, anti-apartheid activists were casting around for media opportunities that would allow them to disseminate their revolutionary messages. Television and radio were firmly in state hands, and the white-owned mainstream press was tainted by accusations of collaboration with the apartheid regime. The situation cried out for independent radical media. It didn’t take long for the activist community to pick up the media cudgel. A vigorous alternative press soon came to the fore of the struggle. It consisted of a range of oppositional weekly newspapers, monthly magazines and educational publishing projects staffed by committed political activists and ex-student press journalists, and funded by international agencies determined to contribute to the demise of apartheid.15 One of the key challenges facing alternative press editors was how to communicate effectively with communities where low levels of functional literacy were the norm. A number of the alternative press editors had grown up reading comics and to them it seemed logical that comics could be used as a medium of political education for the semi-literate masses. That there was no local tradition of

FIG XX AUTHOR DATE

FIG 110 JOHN MUAFANGELO, COVER ILLUSTRATION FOR PEOPLE’S WORKBOOK, ENVIRONMENTAL AND DEVELOPMENT AGENCY (EDA), 1981.

comics publishing in South Africa, and that very few comic strips had ever appeared in the black press, did not dampen the enthusiasm of these new champions of political and educational comics. Before long alternative press activists were busily if inexpertly attempting to manipulate various kinds of political propaganda into comic strip form. While this local experimentation was still in its early stages, an exemplary prototype appeared on the international scene. In 1976, the year of the Soweto uprising, the groundbreaking comic book Marx for Beginners by the Mexican cartoonist and activist, Rius (Eduardo del Río), was published in English translation, and went on to become one of the most successful and most imitated educational comic books of all time.16 The book was widely circulated in leftwing circles, and, in the context of the social and ideological ferment unleashed by the Soweto uprising, led to a sudden local demand arose for artists who could draw political comics. This was great news for me, and as I contemplated life after university, the prospect of producing underground-style comics for a living did not seem completely unrealistic. My first commission came while I was working as a graduate assistant in the English department at the University of Natal. The Environmental and Development Agency (EDA), one of the new donor-funded anti-apartheid organisations that had sprung up in the aftermath of Soweto, wanted a 20page comic strip about the history of South Africa to serve as an introduction to their People’s Workbook,17 a kind of Whole

FIG 110 POOH, RECORD COVER ILLUSTRATION FOR THE ROAD IS MUCH LONGER BY ROGER LUCEY, 1979.

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growing up with the comics Earth Catalog18 for rural communities trying to scratch out a living in the impoverished bantustans. At around the same time, I received another brief, to design a cover for the first LP record album by Roger Lucey, a radical young Durban folk singer who had recently moved to Johannesburg and was making waves with his anti-government songs. I knew Lucey well – we had lived in the same communal house in Durban with a bunch of wild characters, including his close friend Steve Fataar.19 The record, entitled The Road Is Much Longer, was produced by David Marks of Third Ear Records, one of the few truly independent South African record labels in those days.20 My cover design, rendered in pencil crayon, was heavily influenced by R Crumb’s famous cover for Cheap Thrills by Big Brother and the Holding Company.25 (Fig 110) Shortly thereafter, I left the English Department at Natal University for a job at Ravan Press, in Braamfontein, Johannesburg. Founded by the Christian radical Peter Randall, Ravan had just come under the directorship of the visionary editor and publisher, Mike Kirkwood, who had taught in the English department at Natal University. Kirkwood was responsible for conceptualising and launching Staffrider, now recognised as one of the most influential small magazines of the late apartheid period. He invited me to join him there, which I eagerly did. I secured a room in an old miners’ cottage occupied by Roger Lucey and his girlfriend Sue Cullinan in Crown Mines, a decommissioned mining village situated between the city and Soweto. Peacock Cottage, as the house was called, was the headquarters of the Crown Mines Veggie Co-op, where the community of lefties and cultural activists who occupied the village experimented with socialist approaches to food production. I still have a vivid picture in my mind, seen from my bedroom window one Sunday morning, of a gorgeous bare-breasted radical feminist, clad in nothing but sawn-off Levi’s and a pair of combat boots, tilling the soil – a real-life enactment of a famous R Crumb comic about a group of California hippy farmers who called themselves the Diggers. Within walking distance of Peacock Cottage were several disused mineshafts. Adjacent to them were abandoned mine compounds, where black mineworkers had been squeezed onto uncomfortable shelf-like beds in concrete dormitories black with soot and etched with layers of enigmatic graffiti. The compound nearest our house, to which it was easy to gain access through a hole in the fence, was a sombre place to wander through, soaked as it was, quite literally, in the sweat and blood of the workers who had lived there. I spent hours in these buildings, making sketches for the mine compound scenes in my history comic, (Fig 112) and it was impossible not be overwhelmed by profound feelings of empathy for the men whose working lives were spent either here or underground.

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During my stint as an editor and production coordinator at Ravan Press, I worked on a number of books about the history of South Africa, including Luli Callinicos’s Gold and Workers, for which I provided the cover design and several cartoons.22 In this book Callinicos laid bare the economic realities that underlay South African society. She also gathered a fascinating collection of old photographs, illustrations and cartoons, several of which I used as references for historical scenes in my history comic. It was in these two interlinked projects that my twin interests of cartooning and history first coincided.

FIG 112 DICK CLOETE (SCRIPT), ROB BEROLD (EDITOR) AND ANDY MASON (ILLUSTRATION), PAGE FROM ‘VUSI GOES BACK’, PEOPLE’S WORKBOOK, 1981

FIG 111 ANDY MASON, cover ILLUSTRATION, VUSI GOES BACK, 1981

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what’s so funny?

PRE-AZANIAN COMIX Figs 113 SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT The 1980s comix magazine PAX (Pre-Azanian Comix) paved the way for the use of underground comix-style comics and cartoons in pro-democracy publications, such as the Street Law series, published by the Association of Law Societies of South Africa in the late 1980s.

After a few busy years in Johannesburg, the birth of my first son brought me back to Durban, where, faced with the joys of suburban life and effectively cut off from the Jo’burg alternative publishing scene, I began itching to launch a Durban-based comix ’zine. The main source of this itch was my desire to get back into underground comix. After a long layoff during which I’d been drawing educational comics for NGO publications like Upbeat, Learn and Teach and New Ground, I’d begun a new comic of my own, a depressing suburban saga about a deranged philosophy lecturer pursued by vindictive security

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cops. But there was nowhere to publish it. The only thing to do was to launch a new ’zine. Luckily there were a number of like-minded cartoonists in Durban, such as Rick Andrew, Jeff Rankin, Rod Prynne, Savyra Scott and Chris Moon, who became founder members of the Durban Comix Circle. Our ‘korterly comix-zine’, PAX (Pre-Azanian Comix), (Fig 113; Fig 185, p138) had a very limited circulation and was distributed mainly by subscription, because most local retail outlets refused to carry it, but it nevertheless generated an enthusiastic response amongst aspirant cartoonists across the country. It demonstrated that there was indeed an underground comic art community, albeit very small, in South Africa. In the absence of any other dedicated South African comic art publications, a new crop of comic artists, including Enrico Schacherl (later to achieve fame as Rico of Madam & Eve), Wild Beast (Joanne Bloch), Mogorosi Motshumi, Percy Sedumedi, Ralph Nolte, Grant Cresswell and Bill O’Connor, began submitting their work to PAX, which survived for six issues before it collapsed in 1988. An unexpected outcome of this underground comix activity was a commission from the South African Association of Law Societies to produce a series of student-friendly textbooks on South African law.23 The series, entitled Street Law, (Fig 114) provided the opportunity to establish a cartooning and publication design studio in Durban. The studio, optimistically called Artworks, grew over the next few years into a bustling agency with a staff of ten. The years leading up to the country’s first democratic election in 1994 were filled with frantic activity as we pumped out educational propaganda in support of the transition to democracy. Our clients were mostly NGOs, such as the Street Law Programme, the Centre for Socio-legal Studies, the Community Law Centre, Lawyers for Human Rights, the Trade Union Research Project and the Legal Resources Centre. They were all members of a vigorous, well-resourced, externally funded arm of the NGO sector, and all wanted popular educational materials that combined cartooning and illustration with clearly written messages about human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Producing educational materials in this context demanded new ways of looking at the combination of images and text. Our books, with titles like Human Rights for All, Democracy for All and Amalungelo Oluntu/Human Rights, were all attempts to bring written texts alive by combining illustrations and comic strips with active learning techniques that encouraged participation, discussion and debate.24

FIG 113 N.D. MAZIN, PAGE FROM THE BIG CHILLUM, SERIALISED IN PAX (PREZANIAN COMIX), 1985-1986

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FIG NUMBERS OUT FROM HERE, MINUS 1

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growing up with the comics

DAZED AND CONFUSED

At first, this educational publishing work seemed innovative and experimental. It was very exciting to toy with new approaches to visual communication and build up a team of skilled writers, editors, designers and artists. But eventually, driven by budgets and deadlines, it became repetitive and formulaic as aesthetics gave way to the imperatives of production, turnover and revenue generation. To make matters worse, everything suddenly went very quiet in the aftermath of 27 April 1994. Some of the activists who had driven the preelection education projects went into government, others seemed dazed and worn out after years of frenzied political activity. Many of the NGOs we’d served were funded by overseas agencies with the specific intention of supporting the transition to democracy. In the post-election period they were either closed or trimmed down. International donors transferred their funding from the NGOs to the public sector, where they rightly believed the real work needed to begin. In 1999 I went back to university to do an MA degree in cultural studies. In the twenty years since I’d left, the University of Natal had experienced a profound transformation. Student enrolment had gone from almost all-white to predominantly black, the lofty heights of Marxist critique had been abandoned for the glitzy malls of neo-liberalism, and campus fashions had shifted to bling. In the realm of academic theory, a handful of diehards mourned the demise of Marxism, which had been replaced by a host of ‘posts’ – post-colonialism, post-imperialism, post-industrialism, post-Fordism, postmodernism and post-structuralism. Together, in the post-apartheid context, they added up to what could best be described as cynicism on steroids. I plunged into the new texts of cultural studies with an enthusiasm that was unmatched by comprehension. Whereas the theoretical reading of my youth was mostly translated from the ponderous German of writers like Hegel, Marx and Engels, the new theory was translated from the scintillating French of the post-structuralist avant-garde, who had a slippery, elusive way of writing that was very difficult to get a grip on – one was always chasing after the endlessly shifting signifier. I slipped and skidded through the world of Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida and Baudrillard until all my dearly held certainties had been well and truly deconstructed. A desperate craving for something more substantial to get my teeth into – the literary

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FIG 114 ANDY MASON, COVER ILLUSTRATION, STREET LAW BOOK 2: CRIMINAL LAW AND JUVENILE JUSTICE, 1987

equivalent of a steak and kidney pie with chips and gravy – led me back to the writings of the British New Left, who had been ascendant when I left university in 1979, and via them I discovered the writings of the vociferous Jamaican-born philosopher and activist, Stuart Hall. Reading the famous series of essays, written in the mid-1980s, in which Hall tried to get his anglicised head around the exasperating discourses of post-structuralism, was like finding a light switch in a darkened room.25 The research upon which I embarked, focused primarily on the cartooning that arose out of South Africa’s dramatic transition from apartheid to democracy, led ultimately to the waiting of this book.

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CHAPTER TEN

The Staffrider Generation ‘We will have to donder conventional literature: old-fashioned critic and reader alike. We are going to pee, spit and shit on literary convention before we are through; we are going to kick and pull and push and drag literature into the form that we prefer.’ Mothobi Mutloatse, I ntroduction to Forc ed Lan di ng: Afr ica South: Contemporary Wr iti ngs (1980).

ONCE IN A LIFETIME

How did I get here?’ The line from the Talking Heads song ‘Once in a Lifetime’ kept looping through my brain as the car nosed carefully through the dark, crowded, smoky streets. It was 1980 and I was on my way with a group of Staffrider comrades to a poetry workshop at a community hall in Katlehong. It was my first visit to this bleak Witwatersrand township and I was filled with trepidation. A day or two before, my boss, Mike Kirkwood, had called me into his office. An expansive man with rugged good looks and a hearty laugh, Kirkwood waved me into a chair and observed me with one bushy eyebrow cocked, his face framed on both sides by piles of manuscript.

Fig 115 BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS GRAPHICS The pencil drawings of Fikile, a number of which were published in Staffrider, evoke a mythological Africanism. This particular image was popularised as the logo of the Staffrider Series.

‘Ingoapele and some of the other guys are holding a poetry workshop in Katlehong,’ he said. ‘Would you like to go along and lend a hand?’ I hadn’t been at my new job at Ravan Press for very long, and for the last few weeks I had been battling my way through Forced Landing, a literary text that presented what seemed like insurmountable editorial problems.1 I was

excited at the prospect of something new and different. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘What do I have to do?’ ‘You’ll know what to do,’ said Kirkwood with a twinkle in his eye. ‘It’s just like an English department tutorial, but on a bigger scale.’ As we headed down to the community hall, lit by towering spotlights that bathed the area in an ominous glow, I patted my jacket pocket, just to make sure that my notes were still there. I had stayed up half the night reading back issues of Staffrider and preparing for the workshop, and the sheaf of notes in my pocket felt reassuringly substantial. But as we pulled up in front of the building, I was startled by how many people were there. The parking lot was abuzz with activity and inside the hall almost every seat had already been taken. The event was nothing like what I had imagined – it was less a poetry workshop than a political rally, and I couldn’t see another white face in the hall. I felt very conspicuous as we walked down the aisle to seats that had been held for us near the front. Scrunching up my notes, I jammed them deep into my pocket and sat transfixed as Ingoapele Madingoane, the people’s poet renowned for his powerful performances at Soweto’s Regina Mundi church, marched up and down the aisle, attired in a white dashiki with a white embroidered skullcap on his head, delivering in a sonorous voice the lines of his epic poem, ‘Africa My Beginning’. At the end of every stanza, the crowd repeated the chorus: ‘In Africa my beginning, and Africa my ending.’

FIG 115 FIKILE, LOGO GRAPHIC FOR THE STAFFRIDER SERIES, RAVAN PRESS, 1980

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The poem talks about how the oppressors came in their tall ships to colonise and steal the African heritage, and each word struck me like a hammer blow. The discussion after the poetry presentations was passionate and occasionally heated, but I ventured not a single word. It was from Madingoane that I got my nom de plume, N.D. Mazin. A short, powerful man with a wide face and a huge grin, Ingoapele would pace the Staffrider office with his finger in the air, intoning in his deep voice the enigmatic warning: ‘When the revolution comes, Endee Mazin, when the revolution comes …’ Like Matsemela Manaka and many other courageous comrades of the Staffrider generation, Ingoapele is no longer with us, tragically consigned by the forces of history to an early grave. And the revolution of which he so wistfully spoke has also come and gone. Or has it? Maybe, as many South Africans believe, the historic transition of 1994 was just a rearranging of the deckchairs on the doomed vessel of global capitalism. If so, it may be that the true meaning of Ingoapele’s enigmatic warning is still to be revealed.

FIG 116 FRED MOUTON, CARTOON, DIE OOSTERLIG, 1986

THE EXISTENTIAL CHASM

In his book What is Literature? Jean-Paul Sartre described how French writers of the 1930s felt called upon to respond to the political events that were shortly to result in the outbreak of the Second World War. ‘The detachment which our predecessors were so fond of practising had become impossible’, he wrote. ‘History flowed in upon us... we had no choice but to produce a literature of a historical character ‘.2 These words could just as well have been written about the intellectual milieu in South Africa after the Soweto uprising of 1976, when many artists and writers were caught up and swept along by powerful currents of moral outrage and ideological commitment. It was as if, like Sartre, they had no choice – history demanded that they abandon all notions of artistic detachment and become embroiled in the unfolding drama of the anti-apartheid struggle. The struggle brought together people from all walks of life. Communists stood shoulder to shoulder with churchgoers, Muslim radicals with Jewish intellectuals, in the campaign to rid South Africa of the hated apartheid system. Several writers of the day have described how they experienced the challenge at the core of their being, and felt themselves called upon to make some sort of contribution, however limited it might be, to the liberation struggle. The result was a remarkable flowering of art against apartheid, which led, in turn, to a vigorous debate within the arts community about artistic quality versus commitment, aesthetics versus propaganda. As far as most white South Africans were concerned, it was communism, rather than apartheid, that was the cause of South Africa’s problems. Communism, we were

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FIG 117 ANDY (DAVE ANDERSON), CARTOON, THE STAR, 1988

repeatedly told, threatened every aspect of our Western, democratic way of life. Communism was evil, and communism was behind the anti-apartheid movement. This viewpoint, vigorously propagated by the state and accepted as common sense by the majority of white South Africans, is well expressed in the work of Fred Mouton, the best of the Afrikaans cartoonists of the period (Fig 117). Mouton took up

TO Honiball’s seat at Die Burger in 1970, and immediately set about producing a steady stream of brilliantly drawn anti-communist cartoons. The events of 1976 had revealed that blacks and whites lived on opposite banks of a deep existential chasm. The

Figs 116-117 COMMUNIST BOGEYMEN The apartheid government’s ‘total strategy’ posited a ‘total onslaught’ by Soviet forces against the ‘South African way of life’, as demonstrated in Fred Mouton’s telling 1986 cartoon. From the other side of the fence, The Star’s Andy wryly commented on the state’s strategy of linking all its critics, (in this case Bishop Desmond Tutu), to communism.

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what’s so funny? realities of their lives could not have been more different. But while domestic work provided black men and women with intimate insights into the bourgeois world of their employers, there were no equivalent opportunities for white people to experience the realities of township life.This physical and social separation dwelt heavily on the minds of many of the country’s intellectuals. The need to offer up one’s creative talents to the struggle was a key theme for many white artists and writers. There was a feeling that as a white activist you had to reconstruct your identity, to try to see yourself not as a white person, but as a South African. The resistance politics of the day were dominated by the rise of Black Consciousness, which had yet to give way to the nonracial ethos of the Mass Democratic Movement, and white activists were confronted by issues of credibility and legitimacy – they felt they needed special permission to speak on behalf of the oppressed black masses. The malaise of identity experienced by white artists and writers was exacerbated by the tone of much Black Consciousness writing, which had little sympathy for the white liberal predicament:

Fig 119 PORTRAIT OF ANGST Richard Smith’s portrait of Magda, the female protagonist of JM Coetzee’s In The Heart of The Country, published by Ravan Press in 1978, evocatively captured the angst of white South African intellectuals in the period following the 1976 Soweto uprising.

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FIG 119 RICHARD SMITH, COVER ILLUSTRATION FOR THE RAVAN PRESS EDITION OF IN THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY BY JM COETZEE, 1978.

The young black writer cannot afford the ‘white’ luxury of indulging himself in art for art’s sake as if it were a game for selfish, self-centred and hermitlike persons ... because what we are involved in is something much bigger: the freedom of humanity. And that humanity is personified in the voteless masses of South Africa.3 These words are from the introduction to Forced Landing, a groundbreaking collection of Black Consciousness writings published in 1980 by Ravan Press and edited by Mothobi Mutloatse. As a trainee editor at Ravan Press, I was given the job of proofreading and correcting the text of this book. It seemed an impossible task. From the first page of the book’s introduction, the skills and preconceptions provided by my literary training were derailed by Mutloatse’s angry, iconoclastic prose, not to mention his promise to ‘pee, spit and shit on literary convention’. Furthermore, Mutloatse’s stereotype of the white writer – selfish, self-centred, out of touch with the real world and obsessed with the notion of art for art’s sake – destabilised my sense of my own identity. Similar views were held by the young black writers and artists who worked on the magazine or frequented the Staffrider office, where the topic of Black Consciousness versus art for art’s sake was unendingly debated. I began to question my right to comment upon anything that I didn’t have direct personal experience of. These questions attained even greater urgency in my mind when I heard similar sentiments fall from the lips of the doyenne of white South African writing, Nadine Gordimer. At that time, the South African chapter of PEN, the international writers’ organisation, used to hold its meetings in the Staffrider office at Ravan Press. I was privileged to attend several of these meetings, where Gordimer, Lionel Abrahams and other luminaries of the white literary firmament sat in a circle with the emerging black writers who would come to be known collectively as the Staffrider generation. At one such meeting, I remember Gordimer arguing that it was impossible for a white writer to portray the realities of township life with any degree of authenticity. After my experience in Katlehong, I knew exactly what she meant. The literary certainties and critical edicts of the Great Tradition of English literature had all come tumbling down. A new aesthetic was being forged. I remember attending a performance of Matsemela Manaka’s play, Egoli, in Soweto. During the performance, held in a dilapidated church hall, a storm came up, making it difficult to hear the words of the actors above the rain hammering on the corrugated iron roof, the wind clawing at the scraps of plastic covering the broken windowpanes and the random wild banging of the doors. But the performance of the actors, as they sweated through their roles on the bare stage, with nothing but a few chairs, miners’ helmets and blankets as props, was mesmerising.

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BLACK POWER, WHITE ANGST

The angst of the white literary intellectuals of the day has been eloquently described by Nadine Gordimer. In her book Writing and Being, Gordimer felt that she could not write freely while her compatriots were not free, and felt it incumbent upon herself to take responsibility for what was being done ‘in the name of white skin’4. As a writer, she felt an obligation ‘to oppose and destroy the power of racism in its seat of government’. But not all white intellectuals possessed Gordimer’s steely resolve. The literary critic Benita Parry has described the white South African liberal consciousness of the day as timid and uneasy, prey to all kinds of debilitating emotions and paralysed by complex issues of identity and commitment.5 This sense of angst and paralysis is vividly expressed in a drawing by Richard Smith that appeared on the cover of the Ravan Press edition of JM Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country, published in 1978. (Fig 118) It is a portrait of the novel’s protagonist, Magda – a barren, melancholy spinster trapped in a bleak, symbolic landscape. First published in the year of the Soweto uprising, just as the fabric of white South African dominance began irreversibly to unravel, the novel offered no hope, just a spiralling descent into obsession and despair. It was a vivid symbolic portrait of the end of an era. Elleke Boehmer has noted that, for white writers, the early 1980s were years of artistic pessimism. They could not visualise the future; the end of apartheid was ‘hoped-for but as-yet-inconceivable’.6 Borrowed from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, whose Prison Notebooks had recently become available in English, was the notion of an interregnum, a moment in history plagued by a variety of ‘morbid symptoms’, when the old is dying but the new has yet to be born. This idea was taken up by writers and critics to describe the intellectual milieu of the 1980s.7 To many people, the fortress of the apartheid state seemed impregnable. It would, they believed, take decades to breach. As a result, the South African cultural landscape was barren, caught between seasons, locked in a state of inertia. According to Boehmer, South Africa in the 1980s was ‘a parched place, a society of dead-ends, closures, multiple restrictions on speech and movement, blockages of every kind, spiritual and political’, in which people’s creative thinking was blocked by ‘States of Emergency of the mind’.8 In this paranoid, unhappy time, many white writers turned to the experimental mannerisms of postmodernism to give expression to their feelings of anxiety and despair. As Parry points out, the white writing of the 1980s, epitomised in the novels of JM Coetzee, tended to be highly stylised, selfconscious and reflexive, pitted with paradoxes and punctuated with puzzling gaps and silences. But while the white writing of the 1980s flirted with the self-conscious fabrications of postmodernism, the black

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FIG 119 CHARLES NKOSI, ‘RESURRECTION’, REPRODUCED IN TEN YEARS OF STAFFRIDER, 1988

writing of the day was characterised by a militant optimism and Soviet-like commitment to realism, aimed at ‘reclaiming black history and registering black agency’. Black writers were expected by their peers ‘to commit themselves to developing a purposeful, expressive, and accessible literature depicting oppression, illuminating the struggle, and serving to raise consciousness’.9

Black writers evidently did not experience the problems of identity and legitimacy that white writers found so debilitating – they did not need permission to speak on behalf of the voteless masses. According to Kirkwood, the writers, poets and artists who contributed to Staffrider saw themselves as voices of the people: each writer was the voice of a distinct community, and the magazine was a vehicle through which these communities spoke to each other.10 In a much-quoted Staffrider essay on the role of revolutionary art, the celebrated graphic artist and activist Thami Mnyele argued that the work produced by black artists should remain faithful to the utilitarian principles

Fig 119 BLACK RESURRECTION An image entitled ‘Resurrection’ from Charles Nkosi’s powerful woodcut series ‘Black Crucifixion’, published in Staffrider, demonstrates the revolutionary spirit of Black Consciousness.

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what’s so funny?

FIG 120 RICK ANDREW, COVER ILLUSTRATION FOR EQUIANO, THE SLAVE WHO FOUGHT TO BE FREE, COMIC BOOK, sached trust, 1988

FIG 121 RICK ANDREW, PAGES FROM EQUIANO, THE SLAVE WHO FOUGHT TO BE FREE, COMIC BOOK, 1988.

Figs 120-121 LYRICAL DIDACTICISM Rick Andrew’s illustrations for Equiano, The Slave Who Fought To Be Free, published by SACHED’s People’s College Comics in 1988, negotiated the tricky path between lyricism and didacticism.

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of traditional African art, overlaid with a kind of Soviet realism. Mnyele argued that art must have a social function, just as in the old days songs were made for working and walking, chairs were functional sculptures, and the houses of the Ndebele-speaking communities were ‘majestically decorated’ with abstract motifs. Art, he said, should derive its subject matter from the daily life of the people and the community itself should be its primary audience. As if this were not rigorous enough, he called for the creation of a new, even more committed artist: We must now create this new man and woman whose visuals and songs will be informed by the most pressing needs and demands of their time, place and circumstances: they ought to be articulate but simple… with clear political insight, a skilled hand and firm revolutionary sentiment.11 It would be a caricature to suggest that the cultural scene of the early to mid-1980s was fractured into two opposing, racialised camps, separated by an unbridgeable chasm, with the flag-waving militants of Black Consciousness on one bank and the anguished white liberals – holding aloft the postmodernism metafictions of JM Coetzee as some kind of panacea for political paralysis – on the other. But there is nevertheless clear evidence of a racialised debate that continued to equate realism with blackness and postmodernism with whiteness.

PROPAGANDA BLUES

These contrasting literary tendencies were also characteristic of the cartooning of the period. There were any number of educational publications that used cartoons and comics in a style that can only be described as a local variant of Soviet realism, featuring proud, upstanding workers and demonic capitalists. In contrast, underground work that was not hemmed in by a pedagogical agenda tended to be selfconsciously postmodern and experimental. Occasionally, both of these tendencies found expression in the work of the same artist. An example can be found in the work of Rick Andrew, a Durban artist who had produced some great underground comix in the 1970s. In the early 1980s, he embarked on a postgraduate research project into what he called ‘narrative strip illustration’12. For the practical

part of his project, he undertook to illustrate a comic book published by the SACHED Trust. Entitled Equiano: The Slave Who Fought to be Free, the comic was the second title in SACHED’s short-lived People’s College Comics series.13 I had met Rick on my return to Durban from Johannesburg in 1982, and together with his colleague Jeff Rankin, who at the time was cartooning for the Sunday Tribune, and other Durban cartoonists, formed the Durban Comix Circle and launched PAX (Pre-Azanian Comix). Rick contributed a strip entitled ‘Urban Blues’ to the first issue, published in 1985. Done at more or less the same time as Equiano, it was very different in style and intention. The contrasting styles of these

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the staffrider generation

Fig 122 BLUESY RHYTHM Rick Andrew’s ‘Urban Blues’, published in PAX (Pre-Azanian Comix) in 1985, shows the artist working in his own style to produce an evocative composition in which his natural lyricism is given room to flow.

FIG 122 RICK ANDREW, ‘URBAN BLUES’, COMIC STRIP, PAX (PRE-AZANIAN COMIX), 1987

two works demonstrate how his artistic impulses were balanced against the ideological imperatives of the day. Usefully, Andrew recorded the instructions he received from the SACHED editors in charge of the Equiano project, giving us some insight into their thinking. The editors were extremely concerned with political correctness, and in their brief, the artist was instructed to refrain from a satirical approach to the script. ‘The comic is aimed at black readers (9–14 years old),’ they wrote, ‘and we require a realistic, not ironic or satirical treatment of the story’. The implication here, that irony and satire are not compatible with the task

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of educating schoolchildren, is deadening, but it is nevertheless all too familiar. It has bedevilled the field of educational cartooning for decades. The tendency to denounce satire and irony as though they were substances dangerous to children is in itself really dangerous. Given his editors’ instructions, Andrew might have been forgiven for producing a wooden, humourless Equiano, but the project was redeemed by the lyricism and appealing clarity of his drawings. Without recourse to humour, caricature or exaggeration, arguably the most important defining characteristics of cartooning, Equiano is nevertheless a

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what’s so funny?

Figs 123-124 WORKERIST PROPAGANDA This Cosatu pamphlet, produced entirely in comic form by an unknown artist, provides iconic portrayals of key South African stereotypes – the rapacious capitalist, descended from Boonzaier’s Hoggenheimer, and the strong, dignified worker, determined to overthrow the evil system of racial capitalism.

readable story that gives some sense of the history of slavery and the excitement of exploration and discovery in the eighteenth century. In ‘Urban Blues’, which Andrew described as ‘somehow more real’ than Equiano, the artist was free to pursue his own narrative path without having to satisfy a pedagogical agenda. The resulting pages demonstrated a more complex merging of formal, aesthetic and narrative elements. The underlying structure of the strip is musical – the bluesy rhythm of the musical subtext is established in the rhyming couplets of the script – and the panels are loosely arranged in an organic structure that lends the strip an unhurried, ruminative air. The negotiation between aesthetic concerns and didactic preoccupations that can be seen so clearly in Andrew’s work is also visible in many other educational comics published during the pre-1994 period. Sometimes, as in Equiano, this negotiation resulted in a pleasing compromise between the aesthetic and the didactic, but just as often it did not. It became clear to me then that editors who sacrifice aesthetic principles on the altar of didacticism imperil their own noble intentions. Cartooning without humour is like food without flavour – nourishing enough, if you can get anyone to eat it.

HOGGENHEIMER’S RETURN

Many of the educational or propaganda comics produced in the 1980s were one-off responses to particular circumstances, haphazardly circulated before disappearing as though they had never existed. But collectively they signalled an intention to exploit the comic book medium for political and educational purposes, and for this reason, though obscure, they are important. An intriguing example is a comic strip pamphlet entitled Workers of South Africa! Unite and fight for a living wage!, published by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in 1989. The illustrator of this comic strip is unknown, but the work, while naive, is fairly accomplished, and provides an appropriate vehicle for the pamphlet’s revolutionary rhetoric. A familiar figure appears on the first page – the moustachioed, bald-headed, cigar-puffing Hoggenheimer. Invented in the early 1900s by Daniel Boonzaier to satirise the Randlords, the portly figure of Hoggenheimer is, as we have seen, one of the perennial stereotypes of South African cartooning. In the COSATU comic, he is radically modernised. Instead of his customary waistcoat, fob and watch, Hoggenheimer now sports sunglasses, Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt as he reclines in an ornate garden chair next to his swimming pool, while a uniformed maid brings a tray of drinks. In the next frame he is more conventionally attired, back in his office with his feet on the desk while the maid serves his tea with one hand and polishes his desk with the other. Was the anonymous COSATU cartoonist aware of Hoggenheimer’s distinguished lineage? It hardly matters. The fat capitalist with his ubiquitous cigar is a generic code, the function of which is to vilify the lords of industry by drawing attention to their ill-gotten gains. All over the world, anti-capitalist artists have used this code – sometimes infused with antiSemitism, sometimes not.14 While the bosses and collaborators of the apartheid regime were ruthlessly caricatured in the COSATU comic, the black workers were shown as militant, long-suffering, hardworking and dignified. This kind of idealised depiction of black workers, alongside white bosses who were mercilessly caricatured, was a common feature of anti-apartheid cartooning. Sometimes it even resulted in a stylistic clash within a single work, where naturalism (to depict heroic black characters) and caricature (to depict despicable white characters) were used side by side. This can be seen quite clearly in many of the educational comics of the period, discussed in the next chapter.

FIG 123 ARTIST UNKNOWN, WORKERS OF SOUTH AFRICA UNITE AND FIGHT FOR A LIVING WAGE, COSATU PAMPHLET, CIRCA 1989 (DETAIL)

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FIG 124 ARTIST UNKNOWN, COVER PAGE FROM WORKERS OF SOUTH AFRICA UNITE AND FIGHT FOR A LIVING WAGE, COSATU PAMPHLET, CIRCA 1989

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CHAPTER eleven

Storytellers for Africa ‘Problem-posing education, as a humanist and liberating praxis, posits as fundamental that men subjected to domination must fight for their emancipation.’ Pau lo Freire, Pedagogy of th e Oppr essed (1972)

Figs 125-126 TOWNSHIP STORIES Published in Learn and Teach magazine for more than a decade, Mogorosi Motshumi’s Sloppy was the most significant graphic narrative to emerge from South Africa’s black townships during the embattled 1980s.

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he vibrant Johannesburg-based alternative publishing scene of the late 1970s and 1980s gave rise to a number of small magazines and publishing projects that espoused the ideals of Black Consciousness, liberation theology, the emerging trade union movement and the women’s movement. One of these was Learn and Teach, a literacy organisation based on the ideas of Paulo Freire, the radical Brazilian educationist. Freire’s famous text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, still one of the most-quoted works on popular education, was published in English as a Penguin

FIG 125 MOGOROSI MOTSHUMI AND N.D. MAZIN, COVER ILLUSTRATION FOR LEARN AND TEACH MAGAZINE NO.4, 1982

paperback in 1972, and its impact was both huge and immediate. Adult literacy teaching in South Africa would never again be seen as a non-political activity. Freire’s ideas were consistent with the ideology of Black Consciousness in that he insisted that liberation had to begin within the self, that true liberation was impossible without education, and that education should be seen as a ‘liberating praxis’.

MOTSHUMI’S COUNTRY

In 1981 Learn and Teach launched a monthly magazine and its editors approached me to develop a monthly township cartoon strip for it. Given the representational difficulties I had experienced with Vusi Goes Back, and with Nadine Gordimer’s words – that it was impossible for a white writer to authentically depict township life – still ringing in my ears, I was hesitant about undertaking the project. But then I met Mogorosi Motshumi, a cartoonist of my own age from Bloemfontein, who frequented the Staffrider office. Although he had not been exposed to underground comix, Motshumi was the only black artist I had ever met who was a genuine comics fan, and we soon became friends. It occurred to me that by combining our talents we could produce an authentic township strip for Learn and Teach magazine. The result was Sloppy, a four-page serialised strip that appeared in the back pages of the magazine for more than a decade (Fig 126). In the beginning, Mogorosi and I worked on it together with the magazine’s editor, Marc Suttner, and its graphic designer, Steve Rothenberg, but after a couple of years I moved back to Durban and Motshumi made the strip his own. Despite its unadorned easy English prose and the resolutely political slant of its articles, complemented by a minimalist ‘struggle aesthetic’ bordering on anti-design, there was something gonzo about Learn and Teach. It had a slightly manic edge that was perfectly matched by the rough and ready slapstick of Sloppy (Fig 125). Initially, educational messages – warnings against the dangers of hire-purchase agreements, basic information about employment contracts, and so on – were implanted in the story line, but these were soon abandoned as the strip became popular in its own right.

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FIG 126 MOGOROSI MOTSHUMI, 4-PAGE EPISODE (1987) OF SLOPPY, COMIC STRIP SERIALISED IN LEARN AND TEACH MAGAZINE BETWEEN 1981 AND 1994

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FIG 127 MOGOROSI MOTSHUMI, ‘OFFSIDE’, COMIC STRIP, CITY PRESS, 1998

FIG 128 MZWAKHE NHLABATSI, COVER ILLUSTRATION FOR STAFFRIDER MAGAZINE, 1979

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Once Motshumi took full ownership of the strip, it gained a more autobiographical flavour. Despite Sloppy’s stylistic naivety and uneven story line, its eponymous protagonist was the first fully fledged comic character to be drawn by a black South African cartoonist. Motshumi’s strip was the most sustained piece of graphic storytelling to emerge from the black townships of the Witwatersrand in the 1980s, and deserves to be recognised as such. In the first episode of his autobiographical comic strip, ‘Hard Rock: One Cartoonist’s Journey’, published in Mamba Comix in 2006, Motshumi reveals that as a youngster growing up in Batho township near Bloemfontein he read Harvey Comics and fantasised about drawing his own comics to revenge himself on people who’d humiliated him, such as an apartheid policeman who unlawfully arrested him at the age of fourteen. After he left school, he worked as a hospital clerk, drawing comics and cartoons in his spare time, until his work was noticed at a township exhibition by a reporter from Bloemfontein’s The Friend, one of South Africa’s oldest newspapers. Like other newspapers at that time, The Friend had recently launched a supplement designed for black readers, and Motshumi was invited to submit a strip for publication in it. His strip, ‘Selatsa’, begun in 1978, became a popular feature of the supplement. Motshumi continued to draw for The Friend until 1980, when he was detained by the security police for two weeks. The newspaper refused to take him back after his release and he moved to Johannesburg, where he began working for The Voice, a radical ecumenical newspaper, and occasionally submitted drawings to Staffrider. He produced cartoons and comic strips under the titles ‘Motshumi’s Country’ and ‘In the Ghetto’ for The Voice until it closed down in 1982. He was then recruited by Learn and Teach. While Motshumi produced quite a range of material for Learn and Teach, Staffrider and other publications over

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✓ the years, Sloppy remains his greatest achievement. Its popularity far exceeded the rather limited circulation of the magazine, and I still bump into people who remember Sloppy with affection. The strip’s characters began as humble proletarian folk living in Soweto, their story told through a succession of mishaps and misadventures. These included a short-lived and less-than-successful diversion into superhero territory, during which Sloppy, sporting a mask, a cape and an alter ego as ‘The Warrior’, was endowed with superpowers. Like many of the externally funded small magazines of the 1980s, Learn and Teach did not survive the transition to the new South Africa. Once the political objectives of the anti-apartheid movement had been achieved, enthusiasm for the alternative press waned amongst the international donor community. Learn and Teach was one of several magazines whose funding was cut. After a last-ditch attempt to join forces with others in the same boat to develop the marketing and distribution necessary for survival in the cutthroat world of commercial publishing, it sank, along with Work in Progress, Speak, New Ground and other titles. Eventually, Staffrider and Upbeat slid down the same road to oblivion. Not many people realise the significance of what was lost in the collapse of the alternative press, or how important these little magazines were. But there was a brutal logic to it. Few of the alternative publishers had any experience of competing in the media marketplace. As activists with strong convictions, they felt they knew what their readers needed, but they weren’t overly interested in what their readers wanted. As a result their publications lacked the popular appeal necessary for survival without funding. Their demise, in retrospect, was predictable, but with it went the loss of many cartooning opportunities. Following the collapse of Learn and Teach, Sloppy was unable to find its way into a mainstream paper. The Sowetan, which at that time had never had a regular comic strip by a black cartoonist, would have been a good place for it, but Motshumi would have had to turn it into a daily strip, and the paper would have had to recognise the strip’s importance. Neither happened. Motshumi was unable to make a successful transition to the mainstream, although he freelanced for a while as a sports cartoonist at City Press (Fig 127) and later at the Sunday Sun. Despite several attempts, he was unable to find a new home for his most popular creation. Sloppy disappeared from the scene just as the new South Africa was being born. It would be up to a new generation of cartoonists, some of whom had read Sloppy as township kids during the struggle days, to develop new comic strip characters and situations that would be relevant and marketable in the new South Africa.

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FIG 129 MZWAKHE NHLABATSI, PANELS FROM DOWN SECOND AVENUE, COMIC strip ADAPTATION OF THE BOOK BY ES’KIA MPHAHLELE, Upbeat Magazine, 1981

PEOPLE’S COLLEGE COMICS

Alongside Learn and Teach were several other Johannesburgbased non-governmental publishers of educational comics. The most prominent of these was SACHED, which published a range of educational texts as well as Upbeat, a monthly magazine for school children. I worked on Upbeat for a year or two as cartoonist and assistant to the editor, Joyce Ozynski, and it was here that I met Mzwakhe Nhlabatsi, a good-natured, hardworking illustrator with a powerful style. His drawings effortlessly exuded the ethos of Black Consciousness, and his work was chosen for the covers of several prominent anti-apartheid publications of the day, including several issues of Staffrider (Fig 128) and novels such as Mtutuzeli Matshoba’s Call Me Not A Man. His first major comic strip for SACHED was ‘Down Second Avenue’ (Fig 129-130), based on the autobiographical novel by Es’kia Mphahlele, serialised monthly in Upbeat, and published in 1988 as the first title in SACHED’s People’s College Comics series.1 In the same year, SACHED published Equiano: The Slave Who Fought To Be Free, illustrated by Rick Andrew (see Chapter 10), following this up with Mhudi, based on the novel by Sol T Plaatje, co-published with the Storyteller Group and illustrated by Grant Cresswell. Although it failed to publish more than these three comics under the People’s College Comics imprint, SACHED continued to provide opportunities for comic strip work in the pages of Upbeat magazine and in its educational publications. Mzwakhe illustrated several of

FIG 130 MZWAKHE NHLABATSI, COVER ILLUSTRATION FOR DOWN SECOND AVENUE, COMIC book based on THE BOOK BY ES’KIA MPHAHLELE, 1988.

Figs 129-130 POPULAR HISTORY Down Second Avenue, a comic book based on the autobio graphical novel by Es’kia Mphahlele and illustrated by Mzwakhe Nhlabatsi, was first serialised in Upbeat magazine and then published as the first of Sached’s People’s College Comics series, in 1988.

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what’s so funny? these, including an adaptation of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not Child, and ‘Romance at Riversdale High’, a comic written specially for serialisation in Upbeat by Chris van Wyk. Another black comic strip creator from this period whose work is worthy of mention was Percy Sedumedi (Fig 131), a talented street artist, cartoonist, poet and painter who also taught art to children in Soweto, where he lived. In the 1980s Sedumedi self-published several issues of a fanzine-style comic entitled Travels of the Free Spirit, a free-flowing metaphysical romp with a martial arts theme that matched the effervescent personality of this enigmatic artist,3 who always carried a roll of his bold charcoal and crayon drawings with him wherever he went. His shoulder bag was usually stocked with copies of his comics, ready to hawk to anyone who would buy one. In the late 1980s, Sedumedi was approached by Neil Napper, a visionary young publishing entrepreneur who wanted to produce comic books for black readers. Their meeting resulted in a short period of feverish enthusiasm, during which several ambitious projects were mooted, but sadly their collaboration came to naught. Sedumedi thereafter faded from Johannesburg’s alternative publishing scene, although occasionally, and quite randomly, I would hear his characteristic greeting, ‘Tjoeps!’ and there he would be, grinning broadly, with a roll of drawings under his arm. Always ready to share a cup of coffee and a smoke, Sedumedi would regale whoever was present with hilarious but terrifying tales of his adventures, which included a miraculous escape from a point-blank gunshot in the corridor of a speeding train (the bullet grazed his temple).

Fig 131 FREE SPIRIT ‘The Instant Poet’ by Percy Sedumedi records a township poetry session, typical of those held in the black townships of the Witwatersrand in the 1980s.

A READING REVOLUTION

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FIG 131 PERCY SEDUMEDI, PAGES FROM ‘THE INSTANT POET’, PAX (PRE-AZANIAN COMIX), 1985

Notwithstanding his unsuccessful attempt to harness the creative energies of Percy Sedumedi, Neil Napper continued in his mission to publish comic books for black readers. In partnership with Peter Esterhuysen, a thoughtful and gifted young writer, he established the Storyteller Group, which was to become a prolific publisher of educational comic books during its brief heyday in the early 1990s. Napper and Esterhuysen were a formidable team – Napper simultaneously passionate and businesslike, Esterhuysen long-haired, intellectual and self-effacing with eloquent fingers that wafted the air as he talked. They brought something entirely new to South African comics publishing: a vision of comics not just as a vehicle for entertainment, political mobilisation or life-skills education, but as a form of ‘popular visual literature’. Together with a number of excellent illustrators, notably Carlos Carvalho, Vusi Malindi and Alastair Findlay, they launched a pioneering plan to kick-start a ‘reading culture’, sorely lacking in the black townships as a result of the appalling legacy of Bantu education. They aimed to do this by providing free comic books to disadvantaged communities.

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storytellers for africa Their first great success was 99 Sharp Street, a comic strip series aimed at teenagers, illustrated by Carlos Carvalho2, serialised in a mass circulation magazine distributed free by a leading clothing retailer to black consumers. The comic was produced in full colour, and employed a creditable imitation of the clear line style pioneered by Hergé to tell bright, interesting stories. The use of colloquial language and the local references in the artwork increased the comic’s popularity. Based on this response, the Storyteller Group embarked upon an ambitious research and publishing programme that drew in schools, tertiary institutions, literacy organisations, libraries, newspapers, NGOs and corporate funders. More than a quarter of a million copies of the resulting full-colour comic book, A River of Our Dreams (Fig 133), were distributed via New Nation newspaper and participating institutions and organisations. Thereafter, a number of Storyteller Group comics followed in quick succession, dealing with a variety of social and educational themes. Most of these comics were distributed free of charge, sponsored by corporate, institutional or civil society funding bodies, and had specific messages. For example, a 1990 comic commissioned by the Soweto Civic Association (Fig 134) was designed to inform township residents of the negotiations leading up to the signing of the Soweto Accord, according to which residents would resume paying for rent and services following a long boycott. Similarly, a 1991 comic book sponsored by the International Red Cross (Fig 135) sought to convince township residents of the organisation’s neutrality in order to ensure the protection of Red Cross medics working in areas of unrest. While many of these comics enjoyed the passionate attention of skilled writers and illustrators, they inevitably bore the imprint of the financial relationships that underlay their existence, and, as is usually the case, this imprint was not limited to the appearance of the sponsor’s logo on the cover. What set the Storyteller Group’s comics apart from anything that had gone before was the participatory process through which they were designed and produced. This would usually begin with workshops where the creative team would interact with representatives of the target community, in order to test the messages and ensure the credibility and authenticity of the stories to be told. At the same time, the Storyteller Group set about identifying and training a number of talented young black illustrators, notably Vusi Malindi, to produce comic strips in a new, indigenous idiom. In 1993 the Storyteller Group published Deep Cuts (Fig 132, 136), an impressive collection of ‘graphic adaptations’ of

short stories by South African writers, in association with educational publisher Maskew Miller Longman. The measured, unhurried rhythms of these graphic narratives, each rendered in a different style with painstaking attention paid to the authenticity of location and characterisation, more

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FIG 132 PANEL FROM ‘THE COLLECTOR OF TREASURES’, BASED ON A SHORT STORY BY BESSIE HEAD, SCRIPTED BY PETER ESTERHUYSEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY LOIS HEAD FOR DEEP CUTS, STORYTELLER GROUP, 1993

than did justice to the rather oblique stories from which they were derived. The book was years ahead of its time, more akin to the graphic novels from avant-garde bande dessinée publishers in Paris, Brussels or Montreal than to anything hitherto seen in South Africa. Unlike any of the Storyteller Group publications that preceded it, it carried a (heavily subsidised) cover price of R10, a piffling amount given the quality of the product. But it was a product aimed at a public that did not read books, let alone postmodern graphic novel-style adaptations of books. Out of context, lost between genres, it sank, virtually without trace. The following year the Storyteller Group published another unusual comic. Entitled Heart to Heart (Fig 137), it was an innovative treatment of sexual themes that introspectively reflected on the process of its own creation, literally rewriting an alternative ending for itself in front of the reader’s eyes.3 However successful it may have been in generating authentic, credible and politically correct stories, the Storyteller Group’s participatory, collaborative methodology was time-consuming and expensive, and the costs involved were ultimately unsustainable. Their plucky attempt to kick-start a reading revolution in South Africa through the medium of comics – a great idea, if ever there was one – was ultimately scuppered by the economic relationships within which it was trapped. Napper and Esterhuysen were convinced that their well-written, colourfully illustrated comic books, created especially for young readers in the black townships, would unleash a demand powerful enough to stimulate the rapid growth of an indigenous comic book market. But it didn’t happen. The Storyteller Group’s comic books simply disappeared into the vast marketplace at which they were aimed, and no significant publishing, marketing or distribution deals were forthcoming.

Fig 132 DEEP CUTS The comic from which this panel is taken, based on a Bessie Head story adapted by Peter Esterhuysen and illustrated by Lois Head, is one of the finest pieces produced by the Storyteller Group. It appeared in Deep Cuts, an anthology of comic strip adaptations of short stories by black writers, published in 1993.

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FIG 133 THE STORYTELLER GROUP, 99 SHARP ST.: THE RIVER OF OUR DREAMS, COMIC BOOK, 1991

FIG 134 THE STORYTELLER GROUP, VOICE OF THE SCA: THE SOWETO ACCORD – A VICTORY FOR RESIDENTS, COMIC BOOK, 1990

FIG 135 THE STORYTELLER GROUP, RED CROSS: HELPING PEOPLE IN NEED, COMIC BOOK, 1991

FIG 136 THE STORYTELLER GROUP, ‘THE COLLECTOR OF TREASURES’, IN DEEP CUTS, COMIC ANTHOLOGY, 1993

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storytellers for africa Meanwhile, Napper had been investigating comics publishing in other African countries, and had found to his astonishment that not only were comics popular elsewhere in Africa, especially in the Francophone countries, but that there were a number of superb, internationally active African comic artists who were completely unknown in South Africa.10 Something was wrong. Why, if comics publishing had been able to flourish in countries like Tanzania, Nigeria, Zaire, Ivory Coast and Cameroon, had the same not happened in South Africa? Because the continued existence of apartheid was the major difference between South Africa and these other African countries, it seemed logical that the elimination of apartheid would be sufficient to remove the barriers preventing comics from taking off in South Africa. But in those days it was very difficult to visualise what the political economy of the new South Africa would look like. What did the future hold for popular visual literature in South Africa? What kind of social and economic shifts would have to take place before a significant local marketplace for indigenous popular comics could be established? As we shall see in Chapter 18, the innovations of the Storyteller Group were carried forward by other publishers. And yet, it’s still not possible to walk into your local corner shop, cast your eyes down the rows of South African comics on display and choose your favourite title. Whether a viable comic book industry is even possible in South Africa today is open to question, given the all-pervasive influence of television and other electronic media. However, international examples offer some cause for optimism. Although the electronic media initially had a deleterious effect on comics publishing, particularly in the USA and Britain, comics have held their own in the long run as a globally significant literary form. Taking inspiration from the remarkable rise of the tabloid press in South Africa, there is no reason to lose hope in the dream of a reading revolution stimulated by popular visual literature, as envisioned way back in the early 1990s by Neil Napper and Peter Esterhuysen.

BACK TO PHOTOCOMICS

The energy and professionalism of the Storyteller Group changed the face of educational comic publishing in South Africa, introducing a new benchmark in production values and pioneering approaches to storytelling. A number of other visual storytelling projects drew inspiration from this example, one of which was the Story Circle, established by Jonathan Shapiro (Zapiro), his photographer wife, Karina Turok, and a group of young media activists in Cape Town in the early 1990s. Zapiro returned to South Africa in 1991, after three years of study at the School of Visual Arts in New York, but his return to political cartooning – begun in the late 1980s in South and other anti-apartheid publications – was not immediate

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Fig 133-137 STORYTELLER PUBLICATIONS Some of the many comics published during the early 1990s by The Storyteller Group, a prolific comics publishing collective. The group pioneered an innovative strategy of promoting literacy through the mass dissemination of ‘popular visual literature’ in the form of comics.

FIG 137 THE STORYTELLER GROUP, HEART TO HEART: FROM DREAM LOVE TO TRUE LOVE, COMIC BOOK, 1994

(see Chapter 19). Instead, he became involved in the Story Circle. Surprisingly, given Zapiro’s successes as a cartoonist and his recent studies abroad, the Story Circle did not produce conventional comic books, but opted for photocomics, in some cases interweaving photography with hand-drawn illustration. The most influential of their publications was Roxy: Life, Love and Sex in the Nineties (Fig 138). 4 The decision of the Story Circle to revert to photocomics is an interesting one, bringing to mind the stigma that still clings to comics in the English-speaking world and the suspicion with which comic books have been viewed by parents and teachers since the anti-comics campaigns of the 1950s. In this context, it is understandable that community activists, keen to provide accurate and credible information to young people, might have shied away from the problematic associations of juvenile comics on the one hand, and sexually charged adult comix on the other, turning instead to photocomics as an appropriate medium for the transmission of their messages. Photocomics had been a popular form of locally produced pulp literature since the 1960s, and while they had more or less died out by the 1990s, the format was nevertheless a familiar one. It was arguable that a photocomic might have more impact because it would seem more real to the young readers at whom it was aimed, whereas a hand-drawn comic might be in danger of trivialising the subject matter in the eyes of readers.5

FIG 138 ROXY: LIFE, LOVE AND SEX IN THE NINETIES, PHOTOCOMIC PRODUCED BY THE STORY CIRCLE, 1991.

Fig 138 INFLUENTIAL PHOTOCOMIC The producers of Roxy chose photocomics rather than handdrawn comics for this edgy story about teenagers, love and sex, set in Cape Town’s townships in the early 1990s.

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what’s so funny?

Fig 139 MICRO MEDIA The CHAMP project uses comic stories like these, produced digitally in very small editions, to help psychologists working with groups of families to stimulate intimate discussions between family members around ‘hard to talk about stuff’ like puberty, teenage sex and HIV/Aids.

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FIG 139 PAGE FROM CHAMP: THE AMAQHAWE FAMILY PROJECT, EDUCATIONAL COMIC SERIES WRITTEN BY ANDY MASON AND ILLUSTRATED BY SIFISO YALO AND THEMBA SIWELA, 2003

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storytellers for africa

FROM MASS MEDIA TO MICRO MEDIA

The innovations pioneered by Learn and Teach, SACHED, the Storyteller Group, the Story Circle and other South African projects of this ilk have been instrumental in establishing an approach that is internationally recognised as an important contribution to the field of educational comics publishing.6 One of the key aspects of this contribution has been its emphasis on community participation, achieved through the simple procedure of including people from the communities at which educational comics are aimed in the creative process. Another local innovation has been the development of what I call ‘micro media’. Harking back to Paulo Freire’s radical theory of education, micro media – as opposed to mass media – aim for depth of impact rather than reach. Instead of trying to reach as many people as possible with a generalised, broadly accessible text, the micro-media approach uses desktop publishing technology to produce graphic stories designed specifically for workshop situations where trained facilitators are on hand to assist readers in delving deeply into the characters and situations described, and where dramatisation and role plays are used to bring the stories to life. It has been shown that this participatory approach to graphic storytelling can have a huge impact on people’s lives, helping them to evolve new forms of behaviour appropriate to changing circumstances.14 In social process work, where organisational development (OD) practitioners work with community groups, the micromedia approach has been shown to be particularly effective. For example, workshops may be organised where ordinary people participate in ‘buzz’ groups and role plays to generate story lines and dialogues for mini-comics that are then used in educational work within their own communities. Thanks to desktop publishing, this is now quite easy to do. Readers who have observed or participated in the creation of a comic about their own lives come to see it in an entirely new light. Rather than something ‘closed’ or ‘finished’, created for their benefit by outside ‘experts’, it is a living expression of their own experience and, as such, a powerful educational tool. In a sense, it is suggestive of traditional oral culture, where stories are constantly modified in the retelling, as opposed to traditional print culture, where meanings tend to be cemented in place by the mechanical processes of graphic reproduction and printing. One such project is the comic series called The AmaQhawe Family Project (Fig 139). The project, called CHAMP, evolved out

of a collaboration between the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) and a team of academic psychologists and community workers from South Africa and the USA. CHAMP works with groups of families, over a ten-week process, to develop family resilience and community bonding in the face of a cruel and dangerous world. Open-ended comic texts are used as a launching pad to get family members

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involved in the discussion of ‘hard to talk about stuff’ such as teen sex, gender discrimination, family violence and the stigma that surrounds HIV/Aids.7 The CHAMP project came on line soon after the esFigs 140-141 COMMUNITY EDITORIAL PROCESS tablishment of the Durban Cartoon Project (described in Community members involved in the Chapter 17) where rookie cartoonists Sifiso Yalo and Themba CHAMP project asked for this panel of Siwela, amongst others, cut their cartooning teeth. These the comic to be amended because they found the depiction of the deceased young artists were given the formidable task of creating a woman distasteful. comic strip for families living in squatter settlements, townships and semi-rural districts in the greater Durban area. The storyline engaged with the challenges faced by parents and teenagers in marginalised communities where traditional social structures are breaking down and the spectre of Aids, fuelled by sexual violence, stalks people’s lives. In one particularly telling episode, one of the young characters, Themba, has to cope with the death of his mother as a result of Aids. In the first iteration of the comic, he is shown looking at his dead mother’s face, crying out ‘Oh Mother!’ in horror (Fig 140). But when the community participants were given the comic to work with, they reacted strongly against the depiction of the dead woman and asked for it to be removed from the comic. In the next iteration (Fig 141), FIG 140 PANEL FROM CHAMP: THE AMAQHAWE FAMILY PROJECT, 2003 presented to subsequent groups, the panel was altered so that Themba’s mother’s face was, in effect, off camera. The end result, an aesthetically superior product with increased impact, is an excellent example of a ‘community editorial process’ in action. The CHAMP project demonstrates that the spirit of the early South African efforts to use comics to advance progressive concerns and positive social change, pioneered by Learn and Teach, SACHED and the Storyteller Group, is still alive as media-savvy NGOs exploit desktop publishing and other digital media technologies to FIG 141 REVISED PANEL FROM CHAMP: THE AMAQHAWE FAMILY PROJECT, 2003 open up new spaces for creative 111 pedagogy.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

The Fine Line ‘The English-language press in no way and at no stage colluded with the apartheid regime.’ Harvey Tyson, editor-in-c h ief of Th e Star (1993)

‘They stood accused of actively sheltering whites from knowing the full human cost of apartheid, and – even worse – charged with disorganising and disinforming members of the oppressed who read them.’ Guy B erger, h ead of th e Department of Jou rnalism and Media Stu dies, R hodes University (2001)

EDITORS UNDER FIRE

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In his book Editors under Fire (1993), Harvey Tyson, editor-inchief of The Star for many years, described how during the 1980s, many journalists were threatened, beaten up, arrested, summoned to court, convicted or given suspended sentences. Most editors were spied on, had their phones tapped and their letters opened. The government’s total strategy was beginning to express itself in paranoid militarism – the country was only a few steps away from becoming a police state. This obviously had a huge effect on the media and publishing environment. Censorship, combined with intrusive, threatening attention from the security police, was an everyday feature of the lives of those South African editors and journalists who were courageous enough to stand up to the government. The extent to which the mainstream opposition press effectively challenged the government is still hotly debated. Despite Tyson’s claim that the English-language press did not collude with the apartheid regime, some radical critics contemptuously dismiss the establishment newspapers of the 1980s as running dogs of racial capitalism. They argue that by allowing itself to be represented to the world as embattled but nevertheless free, the mainstream press served to legitimate the apartheid regime. Guy Berger, an alternative press editor in the 1980s and now the head of the journalism department at Rhodes University, claims that the establishment newspapers were regarded by the democratic movement as an arm of big business, cynically pursuing the profit motive at the expense of the democratic aspirations of the disenfranchised majority.1 While Tyson denied that the establishment newspapers colluded with the government, he did grudgingly admit that they never actually resorted to open defiance. Hamstrung by

their big business links, they held back, effectively opening a space for the aggressive young journalists of the alternative press. Given the context, Tyson reckons that, on balance, the mainstream opposition papers did fairly well: ‘History is likely to show that their combined opposition, though it varied greatly in enthusiasm and degree between papers, was durable – and far more effective than anti-apartheid activists and armchair critics believed.’2 Helen Suzman, one of the impressive list of senior editors and politicians who contributed to Tyson’s book, agreed. To their everlasting credit, she argued, the liberal papers kept up a sustained and vigorous opposition to the government, fearlessly criticising discriminatory laws and racist policies and exposing government corruption and incompetence. But the recently released Nelson Mandela, another contributor to Tyson’s book, was not so kind. While acknowledging that the establishment newspapers had played a midwife role at the birth of the new South Africa, he was quick to remind them of their own tainted parentage. In Mandela’s opinion, the alternative newspapers were much more deserving of praise than the offspring of the huge media conglomerates who ‘bestride the South African media like colossi’. The alternative press, he wrote, had played an outstanding role in injecting much-needed diversity into the print media sector. In his memoir of the early years of the Weekly Mail, the paper’s founding co-editor, Irwin Manoim, recalls how the news reported in the Weekly Mail and the news reported in the mainstream daily press seemed to come from different planets. He quotes Rex Gibson, the last editor of the Rand Daily Mail,3 who claimed that most whites no longer seemed to care very much what happened in the townships. ‘The searing shock of 1976 has gone,’ wrote Gibson. ‘What happens in

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the fine line the ghettos might as well happen on the moon …’4 According to Manoim, the English-language business community of the mid-1980s, and the newspapers that served it, were enthralled by America’s film star president, Ronald Reagan, and his co-star, Margaret Thatcher, who played an immensely popular role as Britain’s redoubtable Iron Lady (Fig 143). These larger-than-life figures dominated the global political scene of the 1980s, inaugurating the neo-conservative era in world politics. Their opposition to economic sanctions against South Africa was the strongest card in the apartheid government’s otherwise shaky hand. In this context, censorship took two forms. It was either imposed by the state, or it was self-imposed by newspaper editors and publishers who were anxious to evade banning or other legal action against them.5 In 1982 the government consolidated its press laws under the Internal Security Act and published a continually updated list of people who could not be quoted.6 By 1990 this amounted to some 500 names. In July 1985 the government declared a state of emergency over certain parts of the country, which was momentarily lifted in 1986 and then immediately re-imposed over the entire country, lasting for the rest of the decade. Under these circumstances publishing in general and journalism in particular were extremely risky occupations. The sheer risk associated with openly expressing support for the liberation movement and committing anti-apartheid sentiments to paper was undoubtedly one of the most important contextual factors influencing the cartooning of the period.7

RICHARD SMITH’S PUBLIC EYE

It has been noted that South African liberalism trod a fine line between right-wing conservatism on one hand and left-wing radicalism on the other, and this is borne out in the work of Richard Smith, one of the most versatile and highly skilled cartoonists of the apartheid era. Smith’s fine line, executed with a Hunt Crow Quill or Gillott 303 nib, first asserted itself with iconoclastic vigour in the late 1960s, but petered out in the late 1980s as the political environment

FIG 142 RICHARD SMITH, CARTOON, Undated

became increasingly dangerous and unpredictable. Born in Scotland in 1947, Smith was strongly influenced by the British tradition of satirical caricature, and in particular by the work of the Private Eye cartoonists Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe.8 Unlike the work of Abe Berry or Len Sak, Smith’s cartoons did not dwell with any marked degree of empathy on the lives of black South Africans and his renditions of the African man-in-the-street tended towards the thick-lipped coon stereotype. His contribution lay rather in his introduction into South Africa of the extreme forms of caricature for which Private Eye was infamous. According to Ken Vernon, Smith’s most important contribution was ‘to scribble a new moustache on the staid face of cartooning in the English press.’9 His early work was particularly grotesque, as befitted the iconoclastic zeitgeist of the late 1960s, but

Fig 142 HIDEOUS NATS Occasionally, as in this vicious treatment of right wing Afrikaners Eugene Terreblanche, Andries Treurnicht and Albert Herzog, Richard Smith’s work displayed real anger. Fig 143 IRON MAIDEN Richard Smith’s political comic strip, Smith and Abbot Ink, written by David Barrit. Alongside South African politicians, the strip satirised international figures like Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

FIG 143 RICHARD SMITH AND DAVID BARRIT, SMITH & ABBOT INK, NEWSPAPER COMIC STRIP, undated

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FIG 144 RICHARD SMITH, CARICATURE OF RICHARD NIXON, 1971

Fig 144-145 ICONOCLASTIC ZEITGEIST Richard Smithâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s early work, strongly influenced by Private Eye cartoonists Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe, reflected the iconoclastic zeitgeist of the late 1960s, and often dealt with international themes. Smith lived and worked in England in the early 1970s.

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FIG 145 RICHARD SMITH, CARTOON, 1971

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the fine line

FIG 146 RICHARD SMITH AND DAVID BARRIT, SMITH & ABBOT INK, NEWSPAPER COMIC STRIP, undated

was also international in subject matter, revealing the young artist’s international aspirations (Figs 144-145).

Smith immigrated to South Africa with his parents at the age of 11. He joined the Sunday Times as full-time cartoonist 11 years later, following the publication in the 1968 edition of the Witwatersrand University’s student Rag magazine, Wits Wits, of a cartoon strip satirising the famous South African heart transplant surgeon, Dr Chris Barnard, which created a public furore (Fig 148). His rise to fame was rapid, and the following year he was invited to submit work to an international exhibition of cartoons entitled ‘Mice that Roar’, at the University of Wisconsin in the USA. In 1970, he moved to Britain where he attempted to make a career for himself in the British press, producing drawings for Punch, Time Out and BBC Television. In 1972, he returned to South Africa and teamed up with writer David Barrit to create the political cartoon strip Smith & Abbot Ink, which appeared in the Rand Daily Mail and other papers (Figs 143, 146, 147). Barrit departed for the USA in 1974, after which Smith took full control of the strip, now entitled Richard Smith Ink. Smith’s caricatures turned the leading politicians of the time, as well as international figures like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, into cute puppet figures with large heads and stunted bodies. The strip was a kind of political Punch and Judy show, each three- or four-panel episode ending with a witticism in which the characters would invariably be hoisted on the petard of their own behaviour. Smith was often fiercely critical of the apartheid government, but despite the sharp wit he frequently displayed, his work, like that of the liberal cartoonists who preceded him, generally concentrated on the internecine conflicts of the white political arena and did not align itself with the liberation struggle. While purporting to criticise the politicians of that era, Smith & Abbot Ink actually satirised them in a rather gentle way.10 Two key characteristics of the work of the English-speaking liberal cartoonists of this period were their tendency to indulge in racial caricature, particularly the big white lips of the coon stereotype, and their treatment of the politicians

of the day, which purported to be critical, but was quite often empathetic. In Smith & Abbot Ink and his more mature work for the Sunday Times, Sunday Express, Leadership, Financial Mail and other publications of the mainstream press, Smith’s caricatures tended to humanise rather than demonise their subjects, and the laughter they provoke is not unsympathetic.

Figs 146-147 BRILLIANTLY DRAWN Returning to South Africa in 1972, Smith teamed up with writer David Barrit to launch the brilliantly drawn Smith & Abbot Ink, which appeared in the Rand Daily Mail and other papers. After 1974, the strip was named Richard Smith Ink.

115 FIG 147 FRONT AND BACK COVERS OF SMITH & ABBOT’S GREATEST HITS, 1973

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what’s so funny?

FIG 148 PRESS CUTTING, THE STAR, 1968

Fig 148 VAMPIRE SURGEON Smith’s ghoulish satire of South Africa’s famous heart transplant surgeon, Chris Barnard, published in the 1968 Wits University Rag magazine, Wits Wits, caused a public outcry.

Fig 149 FINELY RENDERED Smith produced a large number of finely rendered pen and watercolour illustrations, such as this caricature of FW De Klerk and Magnus Malan, during the 1990s, before he left cartooning to turn his full attention to fine art.

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into the tissue of South African life. The surgical dissection of the ideological assumptions that underlie social norms has remained, since then, an essential feature of South African cartooning. Over the years Smith’s style evolved, becoming more finely tuned and delicate, and his watercolour caricatures are some of the finest South African works in this genre. However, as his artistic technique became more refined, the satirical edge of his earlier work gradually became blunted; his political wit failed to keep pace with the rapid transformations in South African society. In 1998 he was unceremoniously dumped by the Sunday Times, now under the control of new post-apartheid management, in favour of Zapiro.12 Smith’s cartooning career provides a useful visual record of the liberal viewpoint across several time zones in South Africa’s political history, from the pre-1976 period when liberalism was de rigueur in mainstream opposition circles, to the struggle period when the term was generally understood to denote complicity with the apartheid regime. Whereas his early work was radical for its time, both in content and technique, the bite of his mature work was muzzled by a fuzzy liberalism buoyed less by satirical intent than by a desire to achieve artistic excellence and refinement for its own sake. Smith’s replacement was Zapiro at the Sunday Times in 1998 was emblematic of the enormous changes that were taking place at every level of South African life.

Even though Smith told me that he was ‘not that interested’ in political topics, and said on another occasion that his work was ‘not partisan in any way’,11 the demonisation of apartheid’s political elite in his early work earns him a place amongst the country’s most important opposition cartoonists. While his mature caricatures are more successful in capturing the human qualities of their subjects than in expressing a clear oppositional viewpoint, the stylistic innovations of his early work had an important influence on the more radical cartoonists of the post-1976 period. Smith’s early caricatures were an iconoclastic seed in the landscape of South African cartooning that would bear fruit, most notably, in the work of Derek Bauer and Zapiro. Smith’s first important published work, the attack on Chris Barnard in the 1968 edition of Wits Wits (Fig 148), is a case in point. Smith depicted Barnard as a vampire, eager to rip the heart from his next donor so that he could continue his grisly work. The white South African public was horrified by this denigration of a national icon. This strip is important because it revealed the existence of an important sub-genre of cartooning amongst student activists who were publishing their own campus newspapers and whose alliances with non-governmental organisations, the emerging trade union movement and radical ecumenical bodies would result in the growth of a vigorous alternative press. By targeting an apparently non-political public figure, Smith revealed opportunities for satire beyond the political arena. The popular surgeon was celebrated by the public as an icon of white South African achievement in a world increasingly critical of apartheid. By FIG 149 RICHARD SMITH, CARICATURE OF FW DE KLERK AND attacking him, Smith jabbed his cartoonist’s scalpel deep MAGNUS MALAN, undated

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Recipes for Disaster ‘He gets away with it because he treats all people as equals. He sees everyone he draws as disgusting ...’ Anton Harber, Foreword to Derek Bau er’s SA Flambé an d Oth er Disasters (1989)

THE BURNING QUESTION MARK

According to political analyst Hein Marais, the resurgence of popular resistance against the apartheid state in the 1970s was propelled by four developments.1 The first was the economic crisis accompanied by rising levels of unemployment amongst black workers, leading to a wave of strikes. The second was the successful achievement of independence by Mozambique and Angola, both in 1975, signalling the possibility of national liberation in southern Africa and contributing to ‘a growing sense of siege among whites and immeasurably boosting courage and resolve among blacks’.2 The third was the rise of Black Consciousness ideology and the emphasis on psychological liberation amongst black intellectuals, as exemplified in the writings of Steve Biko. And the fourth was a more heightened and widespread politicisation of the oppressed that tended to blame the apartheid system for all forms of discrimination, deprivation and oppression.3 As membership of anti-apartheid organisations multiplied and a wave of resistance-related activity spread through all sectors of society, the cosy ambivalence of the liberal position lost all legitimacy. It was completely overpowered by the militarisation of the apartheid state on the one side, and on the other by a hardening resolve that saw reform and revolution as mutually exclusive and argued that ‘apartheid cannot be reformed’. 4 The traumatic events of 1976 had thrown white South Africa into a state of ideological disarray as liberals and verkramptes alike attempted to come to grips with the meaning of June 16. As Ken Vernon has shown, the mainstream white cartoonists, preoccupied as they were with white party politics, demonstrated a painful lack of understanding of the history and dynamics of popular resistance. The crisis of Soweto revealed a vast existential chasm between black and white. In a particularly telling cartoon, Donald Kenyon, the cartoonist at East London’s Daily Despatch, depicted a flaming white question mark superimposed over the burning township (Fig 150). Most white South Africans, led by state propaganda to believe that black political activity

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was orchestrated by sinister Soviet-led forces bent on a total onslaught against their way of life, simply had no idea what the Soweto uprising was really about. It was necessary for cartooning, as it was for society in general, to delve beneath the symptomatic episodes of social unrest to establish their real causes. But, despite their often vehement expressions of distaste for the visible excesses of the apartheid system, the liberal cartoonists of the mid-century period generally lacked the necessary levels of gumption and political insight to be able to transcend the arena of white party politics and express support for, or even really engage with, the mass democratic movement and the liberation struggle. A new approach to political cartooning in South Africa was sorely needed. And, as if on cue, a new generation did in fact emerge from the wings to present themselves on the national stage.

Fig 150 LACK OF UNDERSTANDING As this 1976 cartoon by Donald Kenyon demonstrates, mainstream white cartoonists, like the white public in general, didn’t have a clue what the Soweto uprising was all about.

FIG 150 DONALD KENYON, CARTOON, DAILY DISPATCH, 1976.

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what’s so funny?

Fig 151 INK AS BLOOD In this cartoon produced to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death in detention of Steve Biko, Derek Bauer took the metaphor of ink as blood to the extreme edge of good taste.

FIG XX AUTHOR DATE

FIG 151: DEREK BAUER, CARTOON, THE WEEKLY MAIL, 1987.

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In the country’s mainstream opposition newspapers, the hardening of South Africa’s political arteries was matched by a toughening-up of cartooning activity.5 The work of Dov (David) Fedler, who worked mainly for The Star, took a turn towards the dark side. Fedler was responsible for some of the most chilling and resonant cartoon images of the period. Similarly, the work of Andy (Dave Anderson) in the Rand Daily Mail was characterised by sombre tones, pessimistic black humour and the evolution of a tendentious inkiness that seemed entirely appropriate to a nation embroiled in conflict and acrimony. Feverish linework, scratchy, inky, crosshatched, black and splattered, as exemplified in the work of Derek Bauer (Fig 151) and the early Zapiro, caught the mood of the day. As we saw in the previous chapter, the origins of this style go back via Richard Smith to the British cartoonists associated with Private Eye. The sense of passionate engagement displayed by South African cartoonists during this period was expressed not only in their choice of subject matter, but in the actual physical vehemence with which they committed their images to paper. Borrowed from Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe, but given a peculiarly morbid relevance in the South African context, was a recurrent tendency to splatter ink, as if it were blood, across the surface of their drawings. The politically charged atmosphere of the 1980s is evocatively captured in the heavily inked cartoons of Dave Anderson. In a 1982 cartoon, reminiscent of Leyden’s 1961

‘Winds of Change’ cartoon (Fig 71, p59), he portrayed the isolation of South Africa’s white electorate as it languished in blinkered trepidation in the path of the oncoming storm (Fig 153). Anderson began his cartooning career at the Natal Witness, followed by a stint as full-time cartoonist on the Pretoria News from 1979 to 1981. He then worked briefly for the Sunday Times before taking up the cartoonist’s position at the Rand Daily Mail, previously held by Bob Connolly, in 1982. After that paper’s demise in 1985, Anderson drew for The Star and Sunday Star. As Vernon points out, Anderson was quintessentially of the post-1976 school, not only in terms of his style, but also in terms of his political critique, which transcended the limitations of white party politics. According to Vernon, his work is noteworthy because its venom was aimed not so much at the politicians of the National Party as at the ideology of apartheid itself.6 In direct contrast to the weightiness of Anderson’s work is the much lighter and wittier cartooning of Tony Grogan, who began drawing for the Cape Times in 1974. Although Grogan’s style is very inconsistent, ranging from beautifully sketched scenes in the Giles style to messy scribbles, his robust sense of humour and political acumen produced a large number of excellent political cartoons that adeptly revealed the logical absurdities underlying the pronouncements and actions of National Party politicians.7 In 1989 Grogan produced an unusual little book entitled Grogan’s South Africa, which, despite its mediocre

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recipes for disaster

FIG 152 ANDY (DAVE ANDERSON), CARTOON, THE STAR, 1988.

Figs 152-153 DARK FOREBODING Heavily inked and redolent with dark foreboding, Dave Andersonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cartoons captured the fearful atmosphere of the 1980s, as the white minority trembled in trepidation at the prospect of a democratic future.

FIG 153 ANDY (DAVE ANDERSON), CARTOON, EVENING POST, 1982.

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what’s so funny?

FIG 154 TONY GROGAN, PAGE FROM GROGAN’S SOUTH AFRICA, 1989

production values, provides a remarkable insight into the zeitgeist of middle class white South Africa at that moment in history.8 The protagonist, Johnny Rousseau-Smit, a stereotypical white South African male (born in Brakpan, of mixed English, Afrikaans and Huguenot descent) offers the reader ‘a few thoughts about this great land of blue skies, braaivleis, boycotts, tricameral parliaments, rocketing prices, states of emergency, beer and rugby…’ (Fig 154 ) The ‘thoughts’ attributed to Rousseau-Smit are a collection of standard white South African jokes, fables and urban legends mixed with Grogan’s wry and often very astute observations of the political process, interwoven with a potted history of the country since 1652. The viewpoint that emerges is conservative but remarkably tolerant of change. Just as ‘rocketing prices, states of emergency, beer and rugby’ are grouped together in the introductory speech as though they were all of equal importance, a wide range of issues that concerned white voters at the time – economic sanctions, sport boycotts, the government’s political machinations, crime and violence, the collapsing economy and fear of the ANC – were presented as a kind of mixed grill that the average middleclass white South African had no choice but to stomach, or emigrate.

Figs 154-155 SUBJECT TO TRANSFORMATION The transformation of South African society, and the ability of the white population to cope with it, was one of Tony Grogan’s favourite topics throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s.

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FIG 155 TONY GROGAN, CARTOON, CAPE TIMES, 1994

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recipes for disaster

THE IRASCIBLE CURMUDGEON

More than any other South African cartoonist, Dov Fedler bridged the gap between postwar liberalism and the hardbitten radicalism of the post-1976 period. Over the decades of his involvement in South African cartooning, Fedler developed a reputation for irascibility, and his reputation as a political commentator was more often than not eclipsed by an oftrepeated claim that he hated politics, was uninterested in political cartooning and only drew political cartoons because he had to.9 Consequently, he has wrongly been typecast as ‘a cartooning mercenary’ and an ‘uncommitted observer’ of the South African political scene.10 This is an oversimplification, based on the public persona of a complicated, multi-layered artist who has tended during his long career to hide his real passions behind a disingenuously self-deprecating stance. In his introduction to a 1991 collection of Fedler’s cartoons, Arnold Benjamin, then assistant editor at The Star, made reference to Fedler’s ‘moods, temperament and bouts of introspection as well as periodic strokes of genius,’ describing the cartoonist as ‘a larger than life character’. Adding to the Fedler legend, Benjamin claimed that, in his early years as a cartoonist on The Star, Fedler didn’t read the papers, sourcing his ideas instead from conversations – drawing as he talked – with his newspaper colleagues. He held court either

in his ‘gloriously cluttered’ city centre studio or in a local delicatessen, where ‘he would rough out his ideas on a plastic table amid milkshakes and Mrs Plotkin’s pastrami sandwiches’.11 In the introduction to a 2001 collection of his cartoons, Fedler described how in the Lithuanian village where his father was born, the street lamps were still lit with oil. He also described how, when he began cartooning in the late 1960s, he was ‘the new kid on the block, contending with giants such as Bob Connolly, Jock Leyden, Abe Berry and David Marais’.12 These two statements situate Fedler concisely. Born in Johannesburg in 1940, Fedler began drawing at the age of three.13 As a young cartoonist, he identified strongly with the highly influential Jewish-American comics creators of the postwar period such as Will Eisner (The Spirit), Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster (Superman), Bob Kane (Batman), and Jack Davis and Mort Drucker (Mad magazine), whose influence is strongly evident in his easy, accomplished style. One of his enduring obsessions is 1930s Hollywood movies, and he told me that he would rather have grown up in New York than in Johannesburg. He jokingly complained that instead of ‘taking a left turn at Gibraltar’, his parents should have

FIG 156 DOV FEDLER, UNPUBLISHED DRAWING FROM GAGMAN, UNDATED

Fig 156 LARGER THAN LIFE Now in his 70s, Dov Fedler has always hankered after the metropolitan world of New York’s great Jewish American cartoonists. Gagman, his satirical graphic novel, as yet unfinished, pays tribute to them.

Fig 157 INNATE SCEPTICISM This early Fedler cartoon, published in The Star in 1973, demonstrates the innate scepticism with which he has always viewed politicians, irrespective of their ideology. Clockwise from top: Idi Amin, Kenneth Kaunda, Ian Smith, Mongosuthu Buthelezi, BJ Vorster.

FIG 157 DOV FEDLER, CARTOON, THE STAR, 1973

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FIG 158 DOV FEDLER, CARTOON, THE STAR, 1990.

Fig 158 BLOODY OUTRAGE Despite his reputation as an ‘uncommitted observer’ of the South African scene, Fedler has often produced angry images, such as this 1990 protest against the scourge of politically motivated train violence.

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gone on to the US. Further evidence of his hankering after the metropolitan world of American popular culture is his unpublished graphic novel, Gagman, set in an idealised New York (Fig 156). Fedler’s first published cartoon appeared in Wits Wits, the Wits University student Rag magazine, in 1958.14 Thereafter he worked in advertising, and began producing cartoons and illustrations for the Rand Daily Mail, the Sunday Chronicle and The Star. From 1963, his editorial cartoons began appearing regularly in The Star and a range of other papers.15 In the context of oppositional cartooning in South Africa, Fedler’s importance lies not so much in his espousal of any particular political tendency, but rather in his curmudgeonly outrage against the vicissitudes of a socio-political environment stalked by corrupt politicians, incompetent public servants, rapacious businessmen and ruthless criminals. The viewpoint of white bourgeois South African society is clearly expressed in his work, but it is less the viewpoint of a political group intent on maintaining power than the expression

of a thoroughly modern angst. In Fedler’s work, one often encounters the alienation of the individual caught up in a Kafkaesque world that is almost impossible to understand. Paradoxically, despite the pervasive pessimism of the 1980s, Fedler’s dystopian world proved itself to be open to the influence of the collective will of individuals who were determined to change it for the better. The powerful emotional forces brought into being by the South African transition would not allow him to maintain the kind of distanced scepticism with which he was probably more comfortable.16 There are numerous examples from his work during the late 1980s and early 1990s that display anger, passion and political engagement. In several unforgettable ink-spattered cartoons, in particular his 1990 cartoon protesting against train violence (Fig 158), his anger and engagement is expressed, in the style of the period, in ink that stands for blood. It is cartoons like these that cement into place Fedler’s position as one of the leading opposition cartoonists of the post-1976 period.

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recipes for disaster

THE IRREVERENT ICONOCLAST

In the case of cartooning, as in other areas of creative activity, the emergence of a certain form of expression may be dependent on the pre-existence of a vehicle that is able to accommodate it. The symbiosis between Derek Bauer and the Weekly Mail is an excellent example of this principle. The early years of the Weekly Mail were characterised by a fearless insouciance that brought a student press sensibility into the mainstream of South African newspaper publishing – in the beginning it even looked like a student newspaper. While playing a dangerous cat-and-mouse game with the authorities, the Weekly Mail’s editors taunted the established press, revealing them by comparison to be too tame to offer genuine resistance to the apartheid regime. The reckless and angry stance that characterised the early Weekly Mail was appropriately captured in Bauer’s cartoons, which evolved in the space provided into a powerful statement of resistance. There is no evidence in Bauer’s work of the timidity that characterised much of the white cultural output of the period, and his cartoons were consistently confrontational, unapologetic and controversial.

education. Many of these publications and publishers were repeatedly targeted by the state and subjected to bannings and other forms of harassment. However, their flexibility, strong community links, political connections and access to funds gave them a guerrilla-like elusiveness and tenacity that fitted perfectly into the embattled political environment of the 1980s. Unfortunately, the strengths that enabled alternative publications to survive in the turbulent final decade of apartheid proved to be less useful in the mercenary postapartheid period, where the lack of business skills amongst their managers and editors contributed, with one or two notable exceptions, to their demise. The most successful of the alternative publications, the Weekly Mail, survived by virtue of its strategic amalgamation with Britain’s The Guardian. In its early years, the Weekly Mail was aggressive and defiant, bursting with energy, printing pages with whole paragraphs blacked out to demonstrate the extent of state censorship of the news, ridiculing National Party politicians and valorising the liberation movement. It was the perfect vehicle for Bauer’s ink-spattered cartoons.

Fig 159 PERFECT SYMBIOSIS The Weekly Mail provided Derek Bauer with the ideal vehicle for his savage and wildly artistic cartooning style. Bauer in turn provided the Mail with a cartoonist who could be relied on to challenge and offend on a regular basis.

As has been observed, the new breed of political cartoonists called for by the events of 1976 did not come from the mainstream press, which had shown itself unwilling to openly defy the apartheid regime, but from the newly emergent alternative press.17 A relatively short-lived phenomenon, lasting from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, the alternative press consisted of a range of oppositional newspapers, magazines and publishing projects that were financially supported by external funding agencies and were an expression of both the broad-based international antiapartheid movement and the internal democratic movement. Guy Berger uses the term to refer to publications ‘which were pitted in direct opposition to racism in South African society, including opposition to racist publications,’ and points out that the alternative press is not necessarily the same as the black press, since there were several black papers that were far from alternative.18 In many cases, as we have seen in the case of Learn and Teach (see Chapter 11), external donor funding sheltered the alternative press and the NGO publishing sector of the 1980s and early 1990s from the imperatives of economic sustainability. This allowed them to become the site of a variety of bold experiments in popular communication for social change, including the use of cartoons FIG 159 DEREK BAUER, CARICATURE OF PW BOTHA, WEEKLY MAIL, 1987 and comic strips for political

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what’s so funny?

FIG 160 DEREK BAUER, CARTOON, WEEKLY MAIL, 1987

Born in East London in 1955, Bauer became the Weekly Mail’s political cartoonist in 1985 and immediately unleashed a barrage of blistering satire that went far beyond anything produced by Smith, even at his most extreme. Like Smith, Bauer had strong fine art tendencies and was adept at combining brutal ink work and savage facial and anatomical distortions with a lightness and deftness of touch that invested his work with the integrity of true wit. Alongside the obvious comparison with Steadman and Scarfe, his work harks back to the caricatures of the German satirical painter George Grosz, and through Grosz, to the fecund expressionist movement of the Weimar period in Germany. Bauer’s cartoon ‘The Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future’ (Fig 160), a metamorphosis that transforms the familiar image of a white man cooking meat at a braai into a sizzling carcass that evokes the necklace murders of the period, is also reminiscent of the work of the celebrated British painter Francis Bacon. FIG 161 DEREK BAUER, CARTOON, WEEKLY MAIL, 1986

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recipes for disaster Closer to home, Bauer’s contorted portraits and distorted anatomies bring to mind the work of several South African artists of the period, such as Jane Alexander, Norman Catherine, William Kentridge and Robert Hodgins, who turned to caricature and anatomical distortion to convey strong emotions of anger and revulsion against the brutality of institutionalised racism.19

In a critical essay on the work of William Kentridge, JM Coetzee recognised an indebtedness ‘to George Grosz and Weimar-age satire’.20 There is a similar connection between Bauer’s cartoons and Grosz’s pen and ink drawings, particularly those in which Bauer displays an obvious distaste for the ignorance and depravity of the human animal.21 In the work of both artists there is a sadistic enjoyment of the unspeakable, but whereas Grosz’s work tends towards existential despair, Bauer’s humour tends to mock, if not trivialise, the emotions it arouses. In a 1986 cartoon (Fig 161), for example, the National Party’s Chris Heunis, then Minister of Constitutional Development, literally forces a pile of shit down the throat of a black man bound in a chair labelled ‘KwaNdebele’. The faecal matter symbolises the gift of independence, and the spurious substance, brilliantly depicted in an evil spray of ink, is vomited straight back at the politician. Bauer’s flippancy, as much as his style, secures him for cartooning rather than the fine arts. His opinions were as impudent as his style was unrestrained, and his frequent subversion of political correctness, particularly in his use of the racist ‘Black Sambo’ code, speaks of an irreverent iconoclasm unconcerned with consequences.22 It was not uncommon for Bauer’s cartoons in the Weekly Mail to prompt howls of public outrage. Bauer’s work was well suited to the violent 1980s, a time when extreme opinions and confrontational actions were the order of the day. But the very attributes that made him the ideal cartoonist to document this period counted against him in the 1990s, when the evolution of new discourses and alliances demanded a more nuanced and analytical approach. By 1994, when Zapiro replaced him at the Weekly Mail, Bauer’s restless intellect had taken him on to new interests and activities, and his contribution to South African political cartooning came to an end. He was tragically killed in a car crash in December 2001.

Bauer’s reputation as one of the most brilliant and influential cartoonists of the late apartheid period is secure, but it is nevertheless worth interrogating. His work is important not only because he gave graphic expression to a bloodstained period in South Africa’s political history, but also because it vividly demonstrates the principle that the form of an artistic work is indivisible from its content. Nevertheless, Bauer was a white cartoonist of the apartheid era, and his work still demonstrated stronger links with the tradition that it brought to an end than with the tradition that was to emerge in the post-apartheid period. Like the white liberal cartoonists who preceded him, Bauer concentrated mainly on the white party political arena and his cartoons – certainly those collected in SA Flambé (1989)23 – demonstrate no deep understanding of or real affinity for the politics of the townships or the mass democratic movement. Black people were frequently depicted as the Other. For example, in an undated emergency-era cartoon entitled ‘The dreaded Marxist forces strike again!’ (Fig 162) a barefooted black youth is shown hurling a rock while a township shack burns in the background. While the text of the cartoon critiques the state’s strategy of labelling every act of popular resistance a communist act, the stonethrower’s hideously caricatured face with its bulbous nose and long doglike tongue adds an ambivalence to the image that is typical of Bauer’s work.

Figs 160-162 STRONG EMOTIONS Bauer’s cartoons arouse strong emotions because they operate at a visceral rather than intellectual level, and often contain an ambivalent subtext that complicates the message.

FIG 162 DEREK BAUER, CARTOON, WEEKLY MAIL, CIRCA 1987

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what’s so funny? their opinions about anti-South African sanctions are worthless. This cartoon is not only interesting because it expresses a mainstream white viewpoint, but also because of its depiction of Kaunda and Mugabe. Both are given sharp dangerous teeth, while Kaunda is shown barefoot, his prehensile toes curling around the edges of the soapbox. In terms of the code of barefootedness, which is usually used to signify primitiveness, this could be interpreted as racist, but Bauer’s use of codes is often inconsistent. In a 1987 cartoon (Fig 165), for instance, PW Botha is given the

FIG 163 DEREK BAUER, CARTOON, WEEKLY MAIL, CIRCA 1986

Figs 163-165 SUBVERTED CODES Bauer’s use of cartooning codes is bafflingly inconsistent. In the two cartoons below, for example, he gives both Kenneth Kaunda and PW Botha simian feet with prehensile toes, while the Black Sambo figure in front of Botha makes a mockery of political correctness.

In another cartoon of the same period (Fig 163), PW Botha is shown ramming the elongated muzzle of a handgun up the nose of a black man, while another black man lies across the table with a knife in his back. Botha’s words are: ‘Luister kaffir, I only talk with moderate black leaders.’ Bauer unmasks the Machiavellian brutality of the regime, while at the same time subjecting the black characters to the same savage caricature as is meted out to the white characters. In a 1987 cartoon about sanctions (Fig 164), Kenneth Kaunda and Robert Mugabe are shown holding hands and standing on a soapbox, the word ‘rhubarb’ coming out of their mouths and piling up around them, suggesting that

FIG 164 DEREK BAUER, CARTOON, WEEKLY MAIL, CIRCA 1987

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same simian feet, thus subverting the code. Such inconsistencies make it very difficult to form an opinion about the intentionality that underlay Bauer’s use of iconic codes and symbols. The spontaneity and directness of Bauer’s work suggests that his approach might have been less analytical than visceral, and that sometimes the pure enjoyment of drawing might have eclipsed the primacy of the political message. The power of Bauer’s work resides in its instinctiveness, and if he was not the most analytical of South Africa’s great cartoonists, his images are certainly amongst the most vehement and memorable ever produced in this country. It would take a political cartoonist of great stature to take the stylistic vehemence of Bauer and combine it with a complex and nuanced understanding of South African politics. As the epic year of 1994 dawned, a political cartoonist with the required stature was in fact waiting in the wings. But before we look at the re-emergence of Zapiro on the South African stage, it is necessary first to take in some of the other developments that were simultaneously changing the landscape of South African cartooning.

FIG 165 DEREK BAUER, CARTOON, WEEKLY MAIL, CIRCA 1987

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