Two Danish artists said advertisements they created that ran in a Zimbabwean newspaper on Friday were meant to poke fun at Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.
Jan Egesborg and Klaus Rohland said they presented the ads as art work to business weekly the Zimbabwe Independent, but did not mention the intended message in order to avoid being censored.
”The point of our art is to make global political art and to make fun of despots,” Egesborg said, adding two more ads are set to be published in Sunday’s edition of The Standard, another Zimbabwean newspaper.
The ads look like bank notes carrying the text ”Try a foreign bank account”, which the artists said is a reference to allegations that Mugabe and his closets associates have transferred large sums of money abroad.
They also featured drawings of cocks — a symbol associated with Mugabe in Zimbabwe.
The artists declined to say how much they paid to get the ads in the paper.
The media in increasingly autocratic Zimbabwe is tightly controlled and criticism of Mugabe and his government is often quickly and harshly suppressed.
The political crisis has been accompanied by the worst economic crisis since independence in 1980. Mugabe claims the country’s financial woes result from sanctions imposed by the West in the wake of his government’s seizure of white-owned farms.
The European Union, the United States, Australia and New Zealand have imposed sanctions on Mugabe and about 200 of his closest associates and their families, denying them the right to visit or operate personal bank accounts there. — Sapa-AP