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.”
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
BOMBARDMENT: Moscow sent more than 440 drones and 32 missiles, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, in ‘one of the most terrifying strikes’ on the capital in recent months A nighttime Russian missile and drone bombardment of Ukraine killed at least 15 people and injured 116 while they slept in their homes, local officials said yesterday, with the main barrage centering on the capital, Kyiv. Kyiv City Military Administration head Tymur Tkachenko said 14 people were killed and 99 were injured as explosions echoed across the city for hours during the night. The bombardment demolished a nine-story residential building, destroying dozens of apartments. Emergency workers were at the scene to rescue people from under the rubble. Russia flung more than 440 drones and 32 missiles at Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy
Indonesia’s Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki yesterday erupted again with giant ash and smoke plumes after forcing evacuations of villages and flight cancelations, including to and from the resort island of Bali. Several eruptions sent ash up to 5km into the sky on Tuesday evening to yesterday afternoon. An eruption on Tuesday afternoon sent thick, gray clouds 10km into the sky that expanded into a mushroom-shaped ash cloud visible as much as 150km kilometers away. The eruption alert was raised on Tuesday to the highest level and the danger zone where people are recommended to leave was expanded to 8km from the crater. Officers also
RSS