Jonathan Shapiro – better known to readers of this paper as Zapiro – has been lampooning the powerful for years. He spoke to GLYNISO’HARA
T O interview cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro at his Johannesburg friend’s Auckland Park home is to enter into a richly chaotic life. A tiny mouse runs across the kitchen floor, causing embarrassed consternation and resulting in a rodent rescue by this intrepid journalist. Large dogs keep throwing themselves fondly at us, their tongues seeking our ears and sending pens skittering across pages. And a toddler wanders through the garden, happily heading straight for the pitfalls of life under the watchful, distracted gaze of his father, the man we know we can rely on to deliver subtly pointed barbs in his newspaper guise of Zapiro.
It was hot – so hot we felt as if we’d been shot through by the sun, like glass. But under a shady tree, the brain cells switched back on and Shapiro’s book, The Madiba Years (David Philip, R42,95) came under discussion. A collection of his Zapiro cartoons for the Mail & Guardian and the Sowetan from 1994 to 1996, it’s a sure-fire winner in the Christmas market. After all, Giles is no more, so what next?
So nuts is Shapiro about cartooning in fact, that he tracked down Uderzo, of Asterix fame, in Paris. “At 11 o’clock at night I rang his doorbell. He was very nice, although he couldn’t speak English and his daughter had to translate. But he asked me in, sat me down, and made tea. He was so unassuming and he must have demands pouring in from all over the world.”
He also tried to meet Herg, the creator of Tintin, an even greater hero, but was unable to do so before the Belgian’s death.
Yet Shapiro is not just a man obsessed with getting the cross-hatching right. He comes from a background of political activism, having joined the United Democratic Front when it began in 1983. He eked out a living doing pamphlets, posters, invitations, logos and cartoons.
Gradually the jobs got bigger and the political stuff more focused. “In 1987 I did a calendar that got me into a lot of trouble with the police. It was one huge picture and became a bit of a cult thing. It was banned, I think for furthering the aims of the African National Congress. It had `Free Mandela, Viva Tambo’ in it as well as a bus in black, green and gold. The police were all depicted as pigs.”
When South newspaper started, it employed Shapiro. “That’s where I cut my teeth in newspaper work. I was also in Die Suid Afrikaan and did covers for them too.”He was the first cartoonist to depict PWBotha as a crocodile.
In 1988 he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship, which enabled him to do two years of media studies in New York, learning from people like legendary cartoonist Will Eisner (“credited with the first graphic novel”) and Art Spiegelman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel Maus. “He’s as near to a cartooning god as you can get.”
The ferocity of another famous cartoonist, Ralph Steadman, “hasn’t worked for me. I prefer something a little more restrained. You lose people with too much savagery. They get tired of it, especially with finer nuances in the political scene, as is happening in our country now.”
Asking him to choose his favourite cartoons in the book was a bit like asking a mother to choose her favourite child.
Me, I love the one where Archbishop Desmond Tutu quietly walks on water in the background while others haggle. Or the one where a genial President Nelson Mandela pats PW Botha on the head, saying, “Nice tiger.” The one-time crocodile is sporting a child’s tiger costume, having recently warned the ANCgovernment against arousing the “tiger” in the Afrikaner.
Last week, Shapiro got to the heart of the matter once more by depicting both Bob Dole and Bill Clinton as whingeing lame ducks. Now what is he going to do about Terror Lekota, I wonder?
15