Drawing blanks: Cartoons and culture
zim cartoon

Zapiro’s editorial cartoons on Zimbabwean issues are usually off the mark and distanced from facts on the ground

Editorial cartoons are principally meant to amuse readers and for the readers to understand and embrace the artworks, they need to see signs or codes that they are familiar with.South African award-winning cartoonist Zapiro is revered in his own country for witty and edgy compositions on a variety of topics, particularly political issues.

His work on South African subjects is in most cases both accurate and amusing.

But when he tries his hand on topical issues in other countries, particularly Zimbabwe, Zapiro so often fails to understand context and meaning of issues relating to our national politics.

For instance, always depicting Morgan Tsvangirai as a democrat and helpless victim of violent official crackdowns and President Mugabe as a dictatorial leader without any public support fails to tally with facts on the ground.

Zapiro spectacularly failed to read Zimbabwean sentiments when Tsvangirai’s wife tragically died in a car accident by attempting to pin the death on President Mugabe.

When Zapiro drew the President with crocodile tears on his cheeks with a badly shaken and wounded Tsvangirai in the background, he did not know what both MDC and Zanu-PF supporters knew — that President Mugabe’s speech during the funeral was sincere.

Zapiro has in the past drawn a cartoon showing the President filling out ballots and stuffing them into ballot boxes, sarcastically laughing off his victories as categorical fraud.

The cartoonist has also likened the President to a football player openly defying an inevitable defeat by running away with the goalposts as Tsvangirai chases around with a ball, ready to score.

In truth, the President has consistently won elections fairly, a fact that the opposition in Zimbabwe is only just beginning to acknowledge, along with influential think tanks like Britain’s Chatham House.

Tsvangirai’s party has been fingered as a perpetrator of violence on numerous instances.

In fact, several of the party members have been convicted of offences ranging from arson to even more serious crimes.

The opposition party leader was quoted in 2000 saying: “What we would like to tell Mugabe today is that please go peacefully. If you don’t want to go peacefully, we will remove you violently.”

For a party and leader with such violent tendencies and a known track record for ferocious behaviour, it would seem odd that an editorial cartoonist would interpret that to be defencelessness and helplessness.

The problem with drawing editorial cartoons on, and for a culture that is foreign to the cartoonist, firstly, is that the artist would struggle to interpret “news” due to lack of sufficient background and an inability to accurately read a culture.

Secondly, because the cartoonist would know little about cultural preferences, the final composition from the artist fails to connect with readers.

Semiotics, the study of signs, identifies two meanings to any composition, including editorial cartoons — denotative and connotative.

While denotative meaning identifies the most obvious message and is uncovered through a superficial inspection of the image, connotation meaning is largely arbitrary, specific to one culture.

A culture may understand meanings brought to it from other cultures, as is the case with Western or even Nigerian movies.

However, editorial cartoons are different. They are a direct mirror of a society and for people within that culture to understand them, they have to carry an identity that the readers can relate to.

Street lingo, words and phrases such as “zvakapresa”, “mahwani chaiwo”, and “wotoshaya kuti zvirikumbofamba sei” can only be understood within the Zimbabwean context and should a cartoonist include them in a composition, the primary reason would not be to alienate others but to ensure that a specific culture or demographic within it understands and embraces the message as their own.

Cartoonists assemble their work using a series of signs, and when these signs are combined they form codes which are cultural based.
Codes exist only in and through the way people use them.

They are cultural-based.

The use of the colour red brings out so many different meanings across the world, meanings that are not always shared by these communities.

When Zapiro draws a cartoon on Zimbabwean politics, the context in his compositions reflects how Zimbabwean subjects are portrayed in South African newspapers.

And when The Sunday Times is flown to Harare to be sold on Zimbabwean streets, the cartoon would hardly strike a chord with readers as the context would be parallel to hard facts.

Editorial cartoons are principally meant to amuse readers and for the readers to understand and embrace the artworks, they need to see signs or codes that they are familiar with.

Foreign-based cartoonists are out of touch with whatever happens in Zimbabwe and their work is more a reflection of personal sentiment that it is a mirror of the society that it is prepared for.

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