Of dancing beer bottles and talking cartoonists — a chat to Zapiro

Used with kind permission of the artist

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I immediately recognised him. He was darker than the photo on the back of his book, but better looking than the cartoonist in his work. We made the regular noises of two people being happy to meet one another, sat down at a table next to Kloof street with Table Mountain towering over us and ordered two Black Labels.

ID: How did it all start?


Zapiro: I started drawing at the age of six or seven. I even participated in art competitions at that age.

ID: Cartoons?


Zapiro: I have always been interested in cartoons. I used to read a lot of them — Peanuts, Casspir, Tintin ... All apolitical. The typical stuff white kids grew up with…

By then the beers have arrived and the wind has increased in speed. As if participating in an animated cartoon movie, our bottles crept across the table — all on their own.
    Zapiro, on the other hand, started talking — all on his own.
    I scribbled furiously, grabbed my bottle every now and again to stop it from rolling down Kloof Street, took a gulp when he did and scribbled some more.
    His first drawings always started at the feet and moved up. As a youngster, Zapiro often spent so much energy and space on the feet that the rest of the body was totally out of proportion. There simply was no space left for much else.
    As the bottles grew emptier, they moved faster. I scribbled on. This guy knows how to handle hacks.
    Don’t get me wrong. He spoke from the heart and his hands disclosed a passion that was touching.
     “I have always been against the grain,” he said at one stage. “I used to have lots of arguments with my classmates.”
    I scribbled.
    He did not do art at school, not even at university. No, it was architecture, because he had to study something “useful”. But by the fourth and practical year of his study, he realised that he wanted to do something about his original passion — drawing.
    Zapiro decided to tour Europe for a while.
    Being unable to speak French, he managed to get lost in Paris. At 11pm he finally stood in front of the door he was looking for — the one belonging to Albert Uderzo, the man who sketched Asterix and Obelix.
    Uderzo could not speak English. “It was rather awkward for a while, but then his daughter arrived. She could speak English and she interpreted for us.”
    Uderzo’s interest in Zapiro and his work was “quite phenomenal”. He listened to the younger man, looked at his drawings and made suggestions.
    Zapiro also went to see Hergé, the creator of Tintin. Hergé was sick, but his staff gave Zapiro a tour of the studio.

Back in the South Africa, Zapiro tried to use a technical loophole in the UCT calendar to start studying graphics in order to stretch his degree. There were two reasons. His passion for drawing was an obvious one, but so too were his call-up papers.
    PW Botha was in charge of the South African apple cart and the man who was later to immortalise the image of a finger-wagging crocodile found it impossible to get yet another extension for his call-ups.
    The army won that round and Zapiro had the horrible choice: prison or boots.
    He started explaining to me why he chose not to go to prison.
    This passionate plea for understanding made me gulp another mouthful of my Black Label. This guy is not bullshitting.
    How often had yours truly not to explain my two years as a “journalist” in the army to folks in the townships, or to the trendy girls from England with their far-away looks and their kikois wrapped around their delightfully slim, aerobics trimmed buttocks?
    It’s life man. It’s life in South Africa. This here journalist chose to write monthly newsletters for 5 Signals Regiment in order not to go the border. Zapiro went one step beyond and openly declared his unwillingness to carry a gun.
    Sulke ouens is moffies genoem in the brown squad and we know what the status quo was like in those days.
    He got into trouble and found himself facing prosecution once again. And so another fight started. He decided to be defiant. He could draw, he could design slogans. And so he did. Suddenly End Conscription Campaign (ECC) stickers started appearing all over the army base.
    Yes, folks, that famous ECC emblem was created by a troopie and more than likely was designed on SADF paper.

After two years of national (dis?)service, Zapiro continued to offer his talents to the struggle.
    He spent his nights working on causes, doing posters and calendars for the UDF for virtually no pay at all. But he needed money and started freelancing for various companies as a graphic artist. “The commercial side taught me a lot. It taught me the importance of deadlines.”
    He also landed his first job as a cartoonist for a newspaper. South recruited him. The Zapiro signature became known, but his unfulfilled dream — the desire to do a degree in graphic arts — never left him. He applied for a Fullbright Scholarship.
    In 1987 the Fullbright was awarded to him and in 1988 he flew to New York for a year of non-degree studies at the School of Visual Art in Manhattan.
    There he studied under Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman. A very successful exhibition of his works followed and the head of the school wanted to know from the talented South African whether there was something he still wanted to do in New York.
     “Study under Art Spiegelman” came the reply. Spiegelman is the author of the much-lauded, Pulitzer prize-winning book Maus. He used to teach at the School of Visual Arts up until the time that Zapiro arrived. Spiegelman’s absence came as quite a blow to the South African, as he was one of the reasons Zapiro chose the school. Zapiro’s wish was fulfilled and he thus spent a second year in Manhattan to learn from Spiegelman.
    Fittingly, the most important thing Zapiro learnt from Spiegelman was the way in which a narrative, or story, should be constructed. “If you look at the American movies,” Zapiro explained, “you’ll find very good plots. The French can create mood, but the Americans can tell stories.”

At this point I interrupted him. I really did appreciate the tremendous amount of information he was offering, but the facts only provided half the story.
    I do the same when I am being interviewed — giving journalists loads of data is a solid ploy to keep them away from my person. Now I was being fed my own medicine, so I asked a very contentious question:

ID: Virtually all the artists you have just mentioned are Jewish. You are Jewish. Do you think there is a link between the Jewish conscience and the number of great cartoon artists that you have just mentioned?


Zapiro: Well, there are a lot of Jews in New York.

ID: Granted, but ...


Zapiro: Yes, you are right. There may be a kind of Jewish humanism. Even in our family. Here in South Africa my mom got involved in the struggle, my sisters did too. In ’85 my oldest sister was detained, in ’86 they held my mom and in ’88 they detained me for a while… Those were difficult times.
    Not all of them were political cartoonists, though. I admired Will Eisner, but I did not share his political views.
    And take something like Mad magazine. It was not political, but it did make people question the world they lived in. The Americans could question Vietnam, because the were taught to question by Mad ...
    About being Jewish ... I like challenging religion in my work.

ID: Like the cartoon of Robert McBride being resurrected from the grave [p79]?


Zapiro: Oh, yes. I knew I was going to get reaction… And it was Easter as well!

We ordered another Black Label each and I took him back to the early days of cartooning.

ID: The original meaning of “cartoon” is the drawing a painter would make on paper before he would commit anything, even a sketch to canvas. Karta is the Italian for paper.


Zapiro: That’s right.

ID: One of my sources touts Leonardo da Vinci as the father of the modern cartoon. Apparently he would sometimes use the cartoons as images in their own right, using disproportionate figures to poke fun at well-known people.


Zapiro: That’s interesting. It is debatable, though. But da Vinci, what a great guy. If I have to choose a man of the millennium, it would be da Vinci.

Great, I thought. This is something other than a pre-prepared story, but Zapiro sensed it as well and dipped back into the narrative.
    He was part of a sub-committee that helped with the organisation of the big bash for Mandela on his first visit to New York after his release from prison.
    A group of South African activists living in New York was going to meet Mandela, but the meeting was cancelled, because Mandela had to rest. Another time Zapiro and a few friends were queuing elsewhere, hoping to be let in, but they waited in vain. The wait did, however, produce an unexpected bonus: Thabo Mbeki. He arrived at the same venue and was also refused entry. It was 1990, Mbeki was not well known and the US security forces in charge of Mandela’s safety, took their jobs very seriously.
    Zapiro recognised him and they shook hands. “I actually reminded him of that a while ago…”

ID: I was going to ask you — is it difficult to criticise people like Mbeki? It must have been easy to be critical of Botha, but Mbeki? These are the people you have struggled for. Now they are in government and they make mistakes. How do you find that?


Zapiro: You are right. It is difficult. Especially when it is people with whom I have worked with in the ’80s, people I knew well. But the ANC is a political machine. And I have to ask whether it is doing what it is supposed to do.
    I actually got a phone call from Mandela one day. I thought someone was playing a practical joke on me and I made a rather silly remark. But then I realised it was him and he actually complimented me on my work.
    I then told him that I have not always been complimentary of the ANC. “Oh, but that is your job!” was his response. Mbeki on the other is very sensitive to criticism ...

A flash of soul before dipping back into the narrative… He returned to South Africa in the early ’90s. By then Chip was with South and Derek Bauer was still with the Weekly Mail.
    Zapiro joined forces with a couple of educationists and produced the highly successful Roxy, a photo-strip on Aids awareness. More such publications followed, including Môre se mense, a strip to educate people about the 1994 elections.
    Die Suid-Afrikaan approached him and he started producing those memorably colourful front pages for them.
    Not everybody was equally humoured by everything he produced on those covers. Zapiro once asked Breyten Breytenbach to autograph the “Voetsek Breyten” cover (a phrase attributed — by Zapiro — to Frederik van Zyl Slabbert), and Breyten then scribbled “all sorts of porn drawings” onto it.
    Eventually he got the break with the Mail & Guardian. The rest, as they say, is history.
    Sowetan and Sunday Times followed. As did his books The Madiba Years (1996), The Hole Truth (1997), End of Part One (1998) and now Call Mr Delivery.

Our beers were empty and he had to run, but I still wanted to ask one or two questions.
    Please do not get me wrong — he was warm and friendly, it is just .... O heck, never do an interview with someone you admire. I am a fan and there is no denying it. Point is, I have spoken to great people before and I still wanted to get “behind” the cartoonist and see inside his head. I owed it to my reader.
    So, I asked him:

ID: Your cartoons are not disproportionate. Your characters are always easy to recognise. Why?


Zapiro: I call it sitcom cartoons. If the pictures are outrageous, people only look at the proportions. I want people to recognise the situation.

ID: You sometimes put yourself in the cartoons. My favourite cartoon in this book is the one on page 128 where the cartoonist is surrounded by bad news stories and then a hand pokes around the corner, holding a telephone, with a voice saying: “Your editor wants to know what’s today’s funny cartoon?”


Zapiro: I want to show people how I sometimes feel. There is the other one of the cartoonist lying on the couch in the psychiatrist’s room. Pieter-Dirk Uys always says the politicians write their own jokes, he just plays them. That might be so, but that makes it very difficult for a satirist… To me the cartoonist should always be one step ahead of reality. I look at these news items and think: Man, that is something I should have dreamt up. It shouldn’t happen in real life!”
    [Turn to page 75. On the floor are newspapers that tell the public of the police hiring a private firm to guard them and of an entire school that got stolen. The psychiatrist asks: “… and when did you first experience this feeling of uselessness?” The cartoonist: “Last week… suddenly reality seemed weirder than anything I could come up with!” — ID].

ID: How do you do it? You work with all these horrible things; you have to interact with it. And yet, you always come up with something funny, something that people can actually chuckle about.


Zapiro: There are devices that are used all over the world. One learns how to use them. One learns from others, other cartoonists that deal with the same kind of situations all over the world.

Oh, I thought. This may be the cue I have been waiting for. Our empty bottles were by now playing touch like two schoolboys, rushing up and down the surface of the table. He had to go. But I needed one more question.

ID: You talk about devices. You have told me a lot today, but somehow I got the feeling that your way of talking and talking, telling a kind of rehearsed story, is a device to keep nosy reporters like myself away from you. Am I right?


Zapiro (For a moment he seemed to duck — physically — as if I threw something at him. Then he said): You are very perceptive. I think you are right. I am a bundle of nerves. If you ask the people I work with, they will tell you I am not an easy person to work with. I overshoot my deadlines so often. I have to come up with this cartoon… I agonise about it. Then people look at it for five seconds and throw it away ...

He really had to be off.
    He signed my book, insisted on paying for one of the rounds, handed me the money and disappeared. While I paid the friendly barman, two guys in the corner called me, asking who I was. “Are you an author? Why did he interview you?”
    They wanted to shake my hand.
    I shook their hands, but I had to disappoint them: “Well, I actually interviewed him. On his new book.”
     “Oh. We thought you were famous, or something.”

Reality is strange, Mr Zapiro, you’re right.

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