In South Africa black newspaper cartoonists appear thinner on the ground than a size zero ramp model chucked out on her angular bottom from Fashion Week. Which inspires the question: Why have not very many people heard of Nanda Soobben?
It is a question that makes the usually laid-back and affable cartoonist a little grumpy too. Blame it on having his work restricted to a few independent newspapers and the Indian-niche Post during apartheid when he was the sole published black cartoonist. Blame it on being based in the ”backwaters” of Durban.
Soobben appears to garner more recognition outside South Africa than in it. Earlier this month the 57-year-old was in San Francisco to receive three awards: an Amnesty International Award for ”speaking the truth through cartoons”, a Special Congressional Recognition Award at the World Affairs Council and a Certificate of Honour ”for showing leadership through his work” from the mayor of San Francisco. Soobben also held an exhibition titled Cartoonists Don’t Lie, We Only Exaggerate the Truth in the city where he spent time during apartheid.
Soobben feels the awards were for his work disseminated through The New York Times Syndication: ”Most cartoonists in America are embedded; they don’t attack the reality of George W Bush’s America and they don’t strike a chord with people. It was about how people from the outside see America,” says Soobben, whose ”Mess-opatamia” cartoon on the invasion of Iraq featured on Jon Stewart’s Comedy Central show after it appeared in The New York Times.
While Soobben’s pencil draws on ”what’s topical from around the world now”, he was admittedly very ”caught up” by the shenanigans of the tricameral parliamentary system during the Eighties: ”There was a lot of ammunition, but sometimes we were so caught up with the [Indian pseudo-parliament] House of Delegates [HOD], that you occasionally forgot about PW Botha, the killings in the Midlands, issues like that,” says Soobben, who continues to draw for the Post and as a sports cartoonist for The Mercury in Durban.
An ironic highlight for Soobben was undoubtedly getting a congratulatory call from Amichand Rajbansi, then the slithery face of the HOD, after the publication of his first collection of cartoons in 1987, The Wizard of HOD: ”I used to get regular calls from friends pretending to be Rajbansi and threatening to hash me up because of some cartoon or the other. Once I got a call, and as usual I told them to F-off. The caller laughed and said it was actually Rajbansi.
”He thought it was fantastic because of the ‘wizard’ in the tile. He thought I was praising him, but it was actually taken from The Wizard of Oz — where the wizard was a bit of a madman,” says Soobben, laughing.
A trained graphic artist, Soobben found working as a cartoonist difficult in the late Seventies and Eighties. With the job market closed to blacks, he worked as a sign-writer ”to pay the bills” and drew for the Post from 1978 until 1987, when, disenchanted with the status quo ”and the censorship and senseless reworking of cartoons by white editors”, he left for Brazil.
In Rio de Janeiro, where he completed a mural — which is still standing — for the 1987 Earth Summit Conference, he found an invigorating space where creativity, and not skin colour, was appreciated.
Soobben then moved to New York where he studied at the Parsons School of Design before interning at the San Francisco Art Institute. He returned to South Africa after the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990.
In 1994 Soobben set up the Centre for Fine Art, Animation and Design in Durban and has consistently been producing artists and cartoonists, mostly black.
”Until recently there has been a dearth of black cartoonists in the country, mainly because of a lack of opportunity, but I’m hoping this will change,” says Soobben, who lists City Press‘s Wilson Nghobozi and Isolezwe‘s Qaps Mngadi among his graduates.