Asked by Jonathan Zapiro’s publisher to help him get going with his Mandela book, I escaped with him to a little cottage at Hermanus. Our plan was for him to dictate his narrative into a tape recorder and for me to transcribe it. From this laborious process, the book was to emerge.
It had been conceived as a tribute to Madiba, timed to coincide with the great man’s 90th birthday, but was becoming much more — a paean to the myth of the Rainbow Nation and a fascinating portrait of the cartoonist as a young man.
Our days began with a brisk stroll through the fynbos, Zapiro talking non-stop as we walked. Anecdotes, memories, family history, theories about what had happened in our country over the past 30 years, feelings about what was happening now — it all came pouring out. I realised that I was in the presence of a man who was going through a profound, life-changing experience. He had suspended his cartooning activities and hadn’t listened to a news bulletin for days. Nor had the TV been switched on since we got there. This was Zapiro unplugged.
For the moment, the day’s headlines had disappeared from view. History had invaded the present and his mind was focused entirely on the past. Each of the cartoons pasted into the work in progress, a bulky lever-arch file sitting on the table amid a pile of Mandela biographies, Zapiro annuals and reference books, was, I realised, a window into the past.
Delving beneath these inky surfaces, he had in a sense become an archaeologist of his own history, rediscovering the events that prompted each cartoon, re-experiencing the feelings that coursed through his heart and brain as he conjured up his ideas and transformed them into ink.
Screeds have been written about the Mandela years, but few if any written texts can match Zapiro’s popular cartoon annuals for an accessible narrative of that momentous period. Here, writ large, is the story of South Africa’s dramatic political transition and the Rainbow Nation myth that emerged to sustain it. The main characters of the saga are instantly recognisable, thanks to Zapiro’s mastery of the art of caricature.
The best known of these is Zapiro’s Madiba caricature, with its huge smiling mouth, extra-wide cheeks, benevolent lidded eyes and jaunty posture. Perhaps the greatest of these cartoon portraits appeared on the epochal Freedom Day, April 27 1994. The cartoon depicts Mandela as a sun rising over the sea, while on the land in the foreground the shameful dustbin of history is stuffed with the old South African flag, along with a few old fish heads and other items of garbage.
What a pity that, 14 years later, Zapiro would feel called upon to recycle the dustbin metaphor to refer to the new government, this time replacing the towers on the government buildings in Pretoria with two stinking bins, symbolising the miserable legacy of the Mbeki years.
What went wrong? This question hovers in the background as the story of the Madiba years unfolds. In his book, Zapiro retraces the historical ground of the past decade and a half, dipping into Mandela’s own writings and those of other commentators to verify his conclusions. The warning signs, he points out, were there from the beginning, and there are a number of cartoons from those years in which he graphically presented these warning signs to the public.
As I watched him trawl through his memories, reliving the emotions that were engaged in the creation of these cartoons, the source of his anguish became clearer to me. The lustre of the Rainbow Nation, which shone so brightly during Madiba’s heyday, had dimmed alarmingly. As one of the nation’s great jesters, Zapiro had been on hand to celebrate what seemed to be a magical transformation from oppression to liberation. But this idea, necessary at the time to buoy the nation’s hopes, has since proved to be all too illusory. In one of his cartoons, Zapiro depicted the rainbow as a cardboard cut-out propped up on a desolate patch of veld, scratched, damaged, tarnished and torn, with a few dispirited technicians half-heartedly trying to patch it up.
After the xenophobic attacks on African immigrants, Zapiro produced a plaintive cartoon that was reproduced in full colour on the front page of the Mail & Guardian. It shows Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu looking on in despair as the new South African flag, the symbol of Tutu’s beloved “rainbow nation of God”, runs with blood.
This was one of a series of cartoons that graphically expressed Zapiro’s despair at the turn that events were taking in South Africa. Several hard-hitting cartoons were to follow in the M&G and the Sunday Times, culminating in the three historic “rape of justice” cartoons.
The furore unleashed by these cartoons has catapulted Zapiro’s work into the forefront of the national debate, and the publication of The Mandela Files provides a timely source of contextual evidence about this crucial moment in our nation’s history, alongside rich insights into the Madiba years.
But perhaps most fascinating of all is the light it sheds on the life and contribution of South Africa’s most courageous cartoonist.
This is an edited excerpt from Andy Mason’s forthcoming book, What’s So Funny? Under the Skin of South African Cartooning, to be published in 2009