South Africa’s most famous cartoonist, Zapiro, says the upcoming elections brought an unexpected gift — the surprise comeback of his favorite subject, former South African president Jacob Zuma.
The caricaturist has depicted the 82-year-old politician with a shower head poking out of his skull for almost two decades and has no intention of stopping.
“The shower man is giving us trouble,” he said. “I have huge fun drawing Zuma.”
Photo: AFP
Zapiro came up with the shower gibe in 2006 after Zuma infamously told a rape trial he took a shower after having unprotected sex with an HIV-positive woman to avoid contracting the virus.
The depiction is known to irritate the graft-accused former president who has sued Zapiro several times with little success.
Thirty years after democracy ended decades of apartheid regime censorship, political satire is alive and kicking — and scandal-tinged Zuma remains a source of inspiration to many.
“Zuma is giving us amazing material, this is a very exciting time,” said 34-year-old cartoonist Nathi Ngubane, who was born a month after former South African president Nelson Mandela was released from prison.
Forced out of office under a cloud of corruption in 2018, Zuma has returned with a bang as head of a new opposition party, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK).
The move has shaken up South African politics, with polls showing MK could pull off an upset on May 29, winning more than 10 percent of the vote. That could see his former political party — the ruling African National Congress (ANC) — return its worst result in three decades and lose its parliamentary majority.
Ngubane said his parents, who are Zulus like Zuma, were initially shocked at his irreverent depictions.
“In black South African culture, you are expected to respect your elders,” he said.
Yet, he was unmoved.
“Because I can, I pressed on,” he said. “We have to use our freedom.”
In one of his recent drawings, Zuma is seen wearing traditional Zulu garb as he spikes his ANC rival, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
The latter was a tough nut to crack, said Zapiro, whose real name is Jonathan Shapiro.
“Cyril took me ages,” he said in an interview in his sunny Cape Town studio, his dog Captain Haddock lying under the desk. “He is the most reluctant president we have ever had.”
Ramaphosa came to power on largely unfulfilled promises of stamping out corruption. Zapiro now draws him as “spineless” or as a “faux superhero.”
Getting a cartoon right takes a lot of pondering, he said.
“I never start out with a joke or a drawing. I use my left brain. I look at what are the issues, what is in the news and how I react to it,” he said.
Recently he drew himself reflecting about whether artificial intelligence (AI) threatened his work in a series of vignettes for the Daily Maverick newspaper where he works.
After an analysis of the current state of political play, including Ramaphosa interrupted by a blackout during a speech outlining progress in tackling outages and a Zulu nationalist party using its late leader as the face of the election campaign, his character concludes it does not.
“Cartoonists will be the last to go,” said Zapiro, who sports a neat goatee, explaining AI does not “see irony in stuff.”
“I’ll never run out of material in a place like South Africa,” he said. “We have wild politicians.”
For tragic events like a wave of xenophobic violence that killed dozens of people in 2008, he uses Mandela and late archbishop Desmond Tutu, shown side by side, to represent the nation’s moral conscience.
“Critical thinking is what cartooning is about,” he said. “I point out the anomalies to help things get better.”
Yet, as South Africa struggles with high unemployment, rampant crime, failing infrastructure and widespread graft, he sometimes feels a “dissonance” between his role as a satirist and as a citizen.
“We are absolutely at a tipping point,” he said. “The next five years are going to be unbelievably scary.”
As the sun sets on another scorching Yangon day, the hot and bothered descend on the Myanmar city’s parks, the coolest place to spend an evening during yet another power blackout. A wave of exceptionally hot weather has blasted Southeast Asia this week, sending the mercury to 45°C and prompting thousands of schools to suspend in-person classes. Even before the chaos and conflict unleashed by the military’s 2021 coup, Myanmar’s creaky and outdated electricity grid struggled to keep fans whirling and air conditioners humming during the hot season. Now, infrastructure attacks and dwindling offshore gas reserves mean those who cannot afford expensive diesel
Does Argentine President Javier Milei communicate with a ghost dog whose death he refuses to accept? Forced to respond to questions about his mental health, the president’s office has lashed out at “disrespectful” speculation. Twice this week, presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni was asked about Milei’s English Mastiff, Conan, said to have died seven years ago. Milei, 53, had Conan cloned, and today is believed to own four copies he refers to as “four-legged children.” Or is it five? In an interview with CNN this month, Milei referred to his five dogs, whose faces and names he had engraved on the presidential baton. Conan,
French singer Kendji Girac, who was seriously injured by a gunshot this week, wanted to “fake” his suicide to scare his partner who was threatening to leave him, prosecutors said on Thursday. The 27-year-old former winner of France’s version of The Voice was found wounded after police were called to a traveler camp in Biscarrosse on France’s southwestern coast. Girac told first responders he had accidentally shot himself while tinkering with a Colt .45 automatic pistol he had bought at a junk shop, a source said. On Thursday, regional prosecutor Olivier Janson said, citing the singer, that he wanted to “fake” his suicide
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”