The Art of Criticism: How African Cartoons Discursively Constructed African Media Realities

Critical African Studies, Issue 4, December 2010 1 ISBN 2040-7211

THE ART OF CRITICISM:

HOW AFRICAN CARTOONS DISCURSIVELY CONSTRUCTED AFRICAN

MEDIA REALITIES IN THE POST-COLD WAR ERA

Lyombo Eko

The School of Journalism and Mass Communication, The University of Iowa

[email protected]

Abstract

African newspaper cartoons are critical journalistic texts that are among the most visible

manifestations of post-Cold War African political liberalisation. Since the early 1990s,

cartoons have spearheaded the struggle for freedom of expression on the continent. One

technique African cartoons have used to excoriate authoritarianism is to focus on political

persecution of the media. This article is concerned with African cartoon narratives of the

realities of the African media in the post-Cold War era. An analysis of a purposive

sample of cartoons from countries where there have been major confrontations between

governments and the media revealed that African political cartoons are irreverent

counter-discourses that use African mythic idioms to portray a sombre picture of media

realities on the African continent. The study also demonstrates that African political

cartoonists resist abuses of power through deterritorialization and animalisation of

authoritarian leaders who suppress freedom of expression. Finally, the article will analyse

the impact of the Mohammad cartoons ‘affair’, which ignited a global controversy that

impacted the African media and also reminded African cartoonists that cartooning is a

craft fraught with danger.

Critical African Studies, Issue 4, December 2010

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Introduction: Cartoons in the post-Cold War era

One of the cardinal principles of journalistic ethics is that journalists are to report the

news, not make it. They are also supposed to be impartial observers of happenings and

are not at liberty to inject themselves into the news. This lofty ideal has had a violent

collision with reality on the African continent since independence in the late 1950s and

early 1960s. In effect, the vicissitudes of African politics have, from time to time,

transformed the African media from observers to the observed. Since independence,

African newspaper publishers, editors, journalists, and cartoonists have been the subject

of countless national and international news stories. These stories have often been tales of

political victimisation of media personnel by authoritarian leaders and governments. The

phenomenon of the African media as news-makers became commonplace after the Cold

War when the wind of political liberalisation that swept across the continent gave the

African press greater freedom to criticize corruption, economic malfeasance and the

abuse of power. At times this position had dire consequences for African journalists.

For example, in 2004 in Senegal, which has traditionally had one of the freest

media regimes in Africa, private and independent newspapers and radio stations went on

a national strike code-named, ‘A Day Without Newspapers’. Newspaper and magazine

editors refused to publish, while private radio stations replaced their news bulletins with

music. The media strike was triggered by the arrest and indictment of Madiambal Diagne,

editor of the independent newspaper, Le Quotidien, for allegedly publishing confidential

government information. Diagne’s newspaper had written about corruption in the

Senegalese government (BBC 2004). While the Senegalese press resisted governmental

intimidation and censorship by refusing to publish, the media in other parts of the

continent resisted in the old-fashioned, journalistic way – through cartoons and

caricatures. Many of the cartoons were highly caustic, defiant texts that framed African

authoritarian leaders as beasts of prey in the African political jungle (Eko 2007).

African cartoonists indulging in acts of ‘graphic’ defiance and resistance against

authoritarian leadership have paid a heavy price for their methods. Here is an example:

On 29 November 1998, Paul-Louis Nyemb Ntoogué, (also known as ‘Popoli’), the

editorial cartoonist for the Cameroonian newspaper, Le Messager, and its irreverent


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satirical off-shoot Le Messager Popoli, took the unusual step of writing a front-page story

in Le Messager explaining that he had fled the country. In an article entitled ‘Why I

Fled’, the fugitive cartoonist recounted how he had received emissaries from powerful

persons in Cameroon’s feared Directorate General of National Security, ordering him to

stop drawing his irreverent political cartoons of President Paul Biya and his family or

face the consequences (Popoli 1998). When Popoli ignored the order, armed intruders

broke into his home one night in an effort to ‘persuade’ him to be ‘nice’ to the president

and his wife. Popoli was tipped off before the raid and fled the country. The armed

intruders left him an ominous message ordering him to stop drawing the ‘disrespectful’

cartoons or else face death by a thousand machete cuts. The cartoonist’s article about his

escape was accompanied by a cartoon self-portrait (Figure 1) titled ‘I Will Survive’

(Popoli 1998). Popoli ended up in South Africa, returning to Cameroon six months later.

Upon his return he was spared violent reprisals, most likely due to the enormous negative

publicity generated by his much-publicized flight.

Figure 1: Popoli, published in Le Messager (Cameroon), 29 December 1998.

The above examples of media struggles against authoritarian abuse of power in

Africa demonstrate that the African media are often at the forefront of the struggle for

democracy. In effect, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War led

to a drive towards political liberalisation across Africa and an exponential growth of


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independent newspapers, tabloids, and magazines (Eko 2007; Eko 2003; Palmer 1997;

Eribo & Jong-Ebot 1997). The political liberalization of the 1990s also saw the rise of a

relatively new category of African journalism, the satirical press. This is a free-wheeling

style of journalism which is often at odds with ‘standard’ approaches to journalism or

journalistic ethics. It combines skilful writing — satirical journalists are masters of the

clever turn of phrase — with invective, cartoons, comic strips and caricatures, creating a

combustible mixture of text and images that are designed to insult and provoke the

insular elite. Indeed, cartoons and caricatures have become the critical narrative device of

choice of the African media (Eko 2007; Eko 2003; Geslin 2002; Lent 2009). As a result,

African satire and cartoons are the most visible manifestations of the post-Cold War

political liberalisation (Gado 2002; Mason 2001; Waltremez 1992, Eribo & Jong-Ebot,

1997). Drawing upon the continent’s many artistic traditions and cultures, African

caricaturists, cartoonists and comic strip artists use humorous satirical texts to expose

African contradictions and hypocrisies, and to focus the humiliating searchlight of

ridicule and irreverence on greed, corruption, and abuse of power.

The highly caustic discourse created in cartoons is unprecedented in African

media. With the post-Cold War liberalisation of the media, independent newspapers

assumed the symbolic roles of discursive counter-powers that checked and challenged

governmental action, and their cartoons became counter-discourses aimed at the forces of

authoritarianism. Though the African press achieved a modicum of freedom in the post-

Cold War period, the democratisation and liberalisation of the 1990s did not transform all

African countries into liberal democracies. The relative freedom of the media was enough

to cause discomfort to the ruling elite, but not enough to protect journalists from arbitrary

governmental reactions and retaliation (Eko 2007; Njawé 1998). As politically battered

authoritarian leaders regained their footing and consolidated their regimes, they cracked

down on the fledgling, irreverent, independent press. This made the African press the

subject of the news and also of editorial cartoons. In effect, the difficult journalistic

context forced the African press to turn the spotlight on itself and take stock of its

realities vis-à-vis repressive governments and political leaders. This editorial

introspection enabled cartoonists to evaluate the broader social, political and legal context


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within which the African media operated and to resist governmental infringement of the

right of freedom of expression.

This article explores and explains how a purposive sample of African cartoonists

in the vortex of political controversies used the critical journalistic tools of parody, satire

and caricature to frame the reality of the African media in the post-Cold War era and

resist repressive regimes. It analyses the narratives and discourses African cartoons

constructed about the African media within the context of specific, high profile domestic

political controversies and international events.

Cartoons as critical narrative texts

Cartoons are constructed, ritualistic, interpretive texts. As narrative devices, they involve

the synoptic or sequential selection, ordering, structuring, positioning, segmenting, and

communication of happenings (Hühn 2009). These constructivist activities are performed

on slices of reality for purposes of political and social criticism, as well as ethical

evaluation. Cartoons can also be viewed as ritual texts that involve the novel distillation

and communication of ideas, ideologies, and cultural practices; they specialize in the re-

presenting or retelling of happenings or events that take place during national or

international historic turning points or what Corfield (2007, 89) has termed ‘radical

discontinuities’. Cartoons and caricature are usually considered part of the same genre

because they both display the ‘distortions and exaggerations that characteristically

puncture pretension or single out vulnerable features in a target...’ (Farwell 1989, 9).

Cartoons use symbols and visual metaphors to simplify and communicate complicated

ideas and concepts. One of the powers of the cartoon lies in ‘its ability to crystallize

complex issues into a simple metaphor’ (Harrison 1981, 14). Thus, the cartoon is a

popular, journalistic narrative paradigm and ‘like any representation, it reduces the

complexity of its reference domain to the carrying capacity of its medium and to the

processing capacity of its senders and receivers’ (Meister & Schönert 2009, 11). The

stock-in-trade of cartoons and caricature is parable and hyperbole. These literary devices

are the vectors of parody and satire. Consequently, cartoons are narrative devices that do

not, to use the expression of Meister & Schönert (2009, 11), ‘present us with information


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per se, they broker information…[and] this brokering activity…combines quantitative

reduction and qualitative (semantic) enrichment’. As visual narrative texts, cartoons take

the form of satiric political chronicles, editorials, creative cultural creations, and moral

statements all rolled into one. They are designed to present the subject of their ridicule as

adversely as possible in order to wreck as much psychological havoc as possible (Roberts

1998).

Cartoons are paradigmatic rituals of journalistic criticism. They are the reified,

ritualistic, mostly irreverent, stock-in-trade of journalistic social criticism. As such, they

are deployed from a position of power. Foucault (1994, 233) advanced the notion that

communication is an act of power because to communicate is ‘to act on the other or on

others’. Part of the power of journalism is its ability to assume a didactic posture when

journalistic ideologies and paradigms come under attack. Every attack on free speech

becomes for journalists an opportunity to assert their journalistic values. Violent reactions

against cartoons and caricatures of religious icons – as was the case during the

Mohammad cartoons ‘affair’ – pose existential threats to the journalistic paradigm of

cartooning. Berkowitz and Eko (2007) argue that in such circumstances most journalists

and cartoonists hold the view that to work within the journalistic paradigm of cartooning

is considered a sacred right; the process of defending that right from existential threats

thus becomes a sacred rite.

The critical aesthetics of African cartoons

African art is an expression of African visions and obsessions, based on African idioms

(Senghor 1964). How African arts – and specifically the visual arts – are used and

misused in contemporary African politics has given rise to scholarly debates and

speculations. Mbembe (2001, 104) asserts that the use of the ‘grotesque and the obscene’

in the political dramaturgy of the postcolony, the deployment of instruments of state

power, as well as the mise-en-scène or performance of this power as political spectacle,

transform the obscene and the grotesque from instruments of resistance against the state,

into a ‘convivial’ relationship of ‘familiarity and domesticity’. The result, he claims, is

‘mutual ‘zombification’ of both the dominant and those apparently dominated’ (ibid.). He


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therefore concludes that it ‘would seem wrong to continue to interpret postcolonial

relationships in terms of resistance or absolute domination’ (ibid.).

Mbembe’s claims do not, however, reflect the reality of the post-Cold War

African media. While he is not far off the mark when he rejects superficial binary

explanations of the posture of the powerless towards the powerful in the postcolony of

Cameroon, his ‘zombification’ claims amount to overgeneralisations that lack external or

ecological validity with respect to the cartoons and other media ‘texts’. In effect,

Mbembe ignores the role of the post-Cold War private, independent African press, which

has acted – at great risk to journalists and editors – as stridently adversarial watchdogs

against governmental, corporate and individual abuse of power in several African

countries (Eko 2007). For example, Nigerian adversarial journalism of the 1990s gave

rise to the terms ‘guerrilla journalism’ and ‘defiant journalism’ (Olorunyomi 1996, 65).

The number of African journalists and cartoonists who have been jailed, exiled or

murdered for exposing governmental or corporate corruption is testimony to African

journalistic resistance against authoritarianism. Mbembe (2001, 109) states elsewhere in

his work, The Postcolony, that ‘ordinary people locate the fetish of state power in the

realm of ridicule; there, they can tame it or shut it up and render it powerless’. It is in

fact, the contextualized, event-centred, intentional ridicule delivered by the political

cartoons and caricatures of the defiant satirical press that helped to undermine the

legitimacy of many regimes. The ridicule that Mbembe speaks of is, in fact, resistance

that dare not speak its name!

For example, Figure 2 is a cartoon in which, Le Messager cartoonist, Nyemb

Popoli, in an act of sublime ridicule – and resistance – transforms the oath of office that

President Paul Biya took after the 1997 elections (that were widely believed to have been

rigged), into an act of resistance. In the cartoon, Popoli derisively calls the presidential

oath of office a ‘hypocrite's sermon [of office].’ This is an ironic play on the French

word, serment (oath) and the Hippocratic oath. The cartoonist heaps mockery and ridicule

on the whole affair by giving it an obscene, sexual twist: He puts Biya’s excited,

orgiastic-looking wife squarely in the frame, and puts the following words into the mouth

of the President, whose glazed look exudes an air of ecstasy: ‘I do so swear that I will not

catch prostate [cancer and become impotent] like Mobutu’. To the autocrat of the


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Postcolony, the conquest and deployment of power is an obscenely grotesque and

orgiastic fetish (Mbembe 2001, 109).

Figure 2: Caricature of President Paul Biya and his wife swearing the ‘hypocrite’s sermon’ of office: ‘I do so swear that I will not catch prostate [cancer] like Mobutu.’ Popoli, published in Le Messager (Cameroon), 4 November 1997.

Nevertheless, Mbembe’s notion of ‘theophagy’ where the god is devoured by the

worshippers, does not reflect the adversarial relationship between autocratic African

regimes and the private, independent African media. To the post-Cold War African

satirical press, authoritarian leaders are not gods; they are villains and buffoons who

should be ridiculed and debased.

While Mbembe’s claims are at variance with the reality of the African satirical

press, his compatriot, Monga (1996, 110-111) more accurately observes that in the face

of authoritarianism and oppression, Africans have developed a ‘life(saving) strategy of

resistance’ that includes the development of informal ‘sites of protest’. These sites serve

as ‘powerful vectors of collective insubordination’. In the asphyxiating socio-political

context of many African countries, media texts, such as political cartoons, caricatures and

comic strips, are ‘sites of protest’ par excellence that, in the words of Monga (ibid, 111),

‘create counternarratives against the prevailing official discourse’.


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Cartoons as paradigms of ‘anti-zombification’

Just as metaphoric descriptions of individuals and events present ‘metaphoric’ truths

(Ricœur 1967), African cartoon representations present ‘comic truths’ that exist only in

the imaginary world of the cartoon. However, through the satirical work of the cartoonist,

new insights that reflect and exaggerate political and cultural realities in the real world

are presented. As such, cartoons are a critical, ritualistic paradigm in which cartoonists

summon their readers to snap out of their political stupor and enter into some sort of

complicity, a sort of ‘representational game’ (Meister and Schönert 2009, 22) against

those who abuse power. This is possible because cartoons almost always contain

localising, priming cues that are designed to trigger certain ideas in the minds of readers.

These cues set up what Meister and Schönert (ibid., 18-19) refer to as ‘local and temporal

constraints, such as ideological and linguistic frames of reference…coded into the

medium in the sense of processing instructions and controls’. Cartoons, therefore,

constrain and guide the hermeneutic responses of their readers.

The linguistic and artistic frames of reference of African cartoons are grounded in

the environing worldview. In Africa’s arena of political communication, cartoons can be

deadly critical texts. Since they can easily surmount literacy barriers, they can be lethal

counter-discourses that, in the words of Monga (1996, 110), are ‘spaces of expression

hidden behind the unsaid’. This is why many African governments are more hostile to

cartoons, and caricatures than to written editorials. For example, when Le Messager

cartoonist Nyemb Popoli fled Cameroon in 1998 after receiving death threats from the

government, his editor-in-chief, Njawé, wrote an unusual editorial in the newspaper

announcing that his cartoonist had fled the country (Njawé 1998). Njawé accused the

authorities of breaking the law with impunity, and blamed the government for

intimidating journalists. Interestingly, the government did not ban this specific edition of

Le Messager. This was perhaps a cynical attempt to send a message to other journalists.

However, an equally plausible explanation is that a cartoon whose subject was a refugee

journalist did not pose the same political problems as a cartoon that mocked the

president. The plight and subsequent flight of Nyemb Popoli, and his editor’s defiant,

public exposé of the cartoonist’s exile, illustrate the aggressive intimidation of the media


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in Cameroon and other African countries, and the equally aggressive resistance of

sections of the private, independent press against intimidation and brutality.

African cartoons and African cosmology

African cartoons are grounded in African myths and idioms. According to Maurier (1984,

34), African cosmology is anthropocentric (people-centred) and communitarian. In this

universe,

things, the cosmos, the realities of this world, supernatural beings, are too much

mingled with human realities for them to be looked upon from an objectivist and

substantialist [Western] viewpoint.

In African mythology and folklore, human beings, animals and plants are transilient

(Maurier ibid.). That is to say, they morph or blend smoothly into each other according to

the needs of community morality, ethics, and aesthetics (Senghor 1964, 77; Senghor

2001; Diop 1966; Eko 2007). Transilience has been expressed in African art through

collages of animal and human forms. Images of anthropomorphisation of animals, as well

as works that dehumanise and animalise human beings abound in African art from early

cave engravings to the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. African cartoonists consciously or

unconsciously draw on these techniques in their satiric work. However, despite the

unmistakable elements of caricature and satire that are present in African masks and other

traditional art forms, authoritarian leaders have used African culture as an excuse to

censor cartoons and reduce the margin of manoeuvre of cartoonists. In effect, some

government and religious leaders claim that cartoons and caricature are incompatible

with African tradition, culture and religion, which require that traditional, political and

religious leaders be held in high esteem (Glez 2009). The elite therefore frowned upon

political cartoons that ridicule African leaders, no matter how contemptuous the actions

of these leaders may be.

African cartoons and artistic deterritorialization

Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 222; 1980, 400) call the displacement of the locus of reality

in art and culture ‘deterritorialization’. To deterritorialize is to breakdown well-marked

political, cultural, and social boundaries or territories. The effortless, cross-species


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transilience between human beings, plants, animals and natural phenomenon in African

cosmology – and cartoons – is the art of ‘deterritorialization’. This is because cartoons

are, to use the vocabulary of Deleuze and Guattari (1980, 400), ‘vectors of

deterritorialization’. As instruments of satire, they often take their targets out of their

normal ‘territories’, or habitats, and re-present them in the highly contrived, restricted

and imaginary world of the newspaper editorial cartoon. This is a symbolic territory,

where, like fish out of water, the subjects of cartoons are at the absolute mercy of the

cartoonist’s idioms, symbolism, parody, stereotypes and archetypes. The most lethal

technique of deterritorialization is dehumanization of cartoon characters (giving these

characters animal attributes). Deleuze and Guattari also use the term ‘geo-graphism’ to

refer to graphic systems that are ‘territorial representations’ (1972, 222-3). These include

dance, design and body art. They conclude that ‘life culminates, essentially in abstract

lines of escape, spurts of creation and deterritorialization’ (ibid, 177). The focal point of

the deterritorialization perspective of Deleuze and Guattari (1980, 230) is that ‘art is

never an end, it is only an instrument for drawing the lines of life…active escapes…

positive deterritorializations…’

The ‘geo-graphic’ devices of transilience and deterritorialization require that

readers suspend belief, enter into the world of the cartoon and assign meanings to specific

cartoons from their stock of cultural cues, previous information, knowledge, experience

and ideological proclivities. Both the cartoonist and the reader therefore bring something

to the table and collaborate to construct meanings and jointly participate in the temporal

ordering of happenings, as well as the negative interpretation of slices of reality.

In this exercise in creative deterritorialization, cartoonists and their readers know

full well that cartoons are only symbolic, satirical representations that simultaneously

employ, in the words of Meister and Schönert (2009, 29), the ‘double functionality’ of

the word ‘representation’. In cartoon and other narratives, both the symbolic meaning of

the term ‘representation’, which literally means ‘being an image of, and the pragmatic

dimension of the term, which is, ‘standing in for’, are applicable (ibid., 21-29). Each

cartoon narrative is a symbolic snapshot, an ‘image’ of a slice of reality. A cartoon or

caricature is also a critical, pragmatic, ‘geo-graphic’ work of art that ‘stands in for’ the

happenings, events, and real-life characters that are being satirized. The ‘double


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functionality’ of cartoons plus their role as deliberate re-presenters of happenings for

satirical purposes, makes cartoonists exaggerators of the truth.

Cartooning and the universal human right of freedom of expression

One of the fundamental human rights guaranteed by the United Nations Universal

Declaration of Human Rights is the right of freedom of opinion and expression. This

right includes the right to impart information and ideas across frontiers. It goes without

saying that freedom of expression includes freedom to disseminate information that will

offend some people. This is the so-called right to offend. Cartoons are often instruments

of deliberate graphic offence (Eko & Berkowitz 2009). Cartoons triggered one of the

greatest geo-political and cultural clashes of the age of globalisation – the so-called

Mohammad cartoons ‘affair’. This controversy had a profound impact on the African

media and on African cartooning. The controversy began in 2005 when Denmark’s

largest newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, published twelve satirical drawings depicting the

Muslim prophet Mohammad, in an effort to promote the right of freedom of expression

which it felt was being threatened in Europe. The resulting global controversy was as

unprecedented as it was unexpected.

Publication of the satirical cartoons of Mohammad shook the ‘global village’ and

precipitated an unprecedented clash between a secularized, post-Christian Western

Europe and a largely iconoclastic Arab-Islamic world that is experiencing the pangs of

religious resurgence (Tincq 2006; Kaufmann 2006). Newspapers across Europe

eventually republished the Mohammad cartoons in solidarity with their embattled Danish

counterparts, and wrote articles and editorials in support of the right of freedom of the

press.

The controversy swept over the African media and political scene like a tsunami.

Anti-Danish and anti-Western riots that had flared up in Muslim countries across the

globe soon reached Nigeria, where riots left several people dead, and vitriolic political

and religious denunciations of the Danish cartoons cowed the Nigerian media. Muslims

also demonstrated elsewhere on the continent, and the African media were caught in the

maelstrom from Denmark (see Figure 13 below). The Egyptian newspaper, Al Faqr, was


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the first media outlet on the continent to break the story of the Danish cartoons. The

newspaper actually published some of the cartoons to illustrate the disrespect Mohammad

was receiving in Denmark. The newspaper did not face any negative consequences (Eko

& Berkowitz 2009). However, the editors of newspapers in Algeria and Morocco that had

re-published some of the Danish cartoons to illustrate the controversy, were arrested and

faced criminal charges. Newspapers in Angola (Agora), Mozambique (Savana) and South

Africa (Mail & Guardian) also republished two or more of the cartoons. As the wave of

Muslim indignation against the cartoons swept across Africa, Muslim demonstrations in

several countries forced media outlets to denounce the publication. In South Africa, the

Muslim interest group Jamiat-ul Ulama of Transvaal obtained an urgent order from the

Johannesburg High Court pre-emptively prohibiting newspapers and their printing

companies from publishing the cartoons. The editor of the Mail & Guardian, Feriel

Hafajee, who had published two of the cartoons to illustrate the story of the global

controversy, apologised to South African Muslims for publishing the blasphemous

cartoons (Tribune Reporters 2006). In Mozambique, the Supreme Mass Media Council

(CSCS), a body that was set up under the Mozambican constitution to defend the media,

succumbed to Muslim intimidation, and threatened to take legal action against the

independent newspaper, Savana, which had re-published some of the cartoons.

As the African media – and specifically cartoons and cartoonists – found

themselves in the vortex of major socio-political upheavals and problematic cultural

situations, a number of issues rise to the fore. These include the manner in which African

cartoon narratives constructed the realities of the African media in the post-Cold War era,

the manner in which African cartoons re-presented relations of power between the media

and political establishments, and the manner in which African cartoons discursively

constructed the reality and impact of the Mohammad cartoons ‘affair’ on the continent.

The following section will explore some of these issues by analysing the controversies

surrounding a selection of African cartoons.


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An overview of some African cartooning controversies

The focus of remainder of this article is on countries in which newspapers, journalists or

cartoonists had major confrontations with their respective governments and/or judiciaries.

These ‘confrontations’ can result in journalists experiencing censorship (both overt and

covert), kidnappings, beatings, imprisonment, forced exile, death threats, forced exile and

even murder.

Examples of such confrontations include: the unsolved murder of Burkina Faso

investigative journalist, Norbert Zongo, and three of his friends in 1998; the

imprisonment of Pius Njawé, editor of Cameroonian newspaper, Le Messager, for

publishing an article on the state of President Biya’s health; Gabonese government

banning of satirical newspaper, La Griffe, and its supplement, Le Gri Gri, and the

attempted murder of its publisher, Michel Ongoundou Lounda; the exile of Cameroonian

cartoonist, Louis-Paul Nyemb Ntoogué; the defamation suit filed by ANC leader and

South African President, Jacob Zuma against irreverent South African cartoonist,

Jonathan Shapiro; as well as the confrontation between the Senegalese government and

the private, independent press. I will now turn my attention to some of these

controversies and the confrontations they provoked.

Figure 3 is a cartoon by Odia, nom de plume of a cartoonist for Le Cafard Libéré

(The Liberated Cockroach) of Senegal, a country that has one of the oldest free press

traditions on the African continent. The cartoon depicts two judges who give

contradictory messages about freedom of the press in Senegal and a journalist therefore

caught between a ‘rock and a hard judge’. The judge with the club states that his job is to

keep the press in line, while the other says his job is to protect freedom of the press. This

cartoon criticizes the ambivalent attitude of the Senegalese judiciary towards freedom of

expression. As discussed above, Senegalese reporters have been tried for defamation and

for publishing government secrets, and in these cases the courts did not uphold

journalists’ right of freedom of expression.


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Figure 3: Odia, published in Le Cafard Libéré (Senegal).

Figure 4 is also a critique of governmental persecution of the press in Senegal. In this

Cafard Libéré cartoon, President Abdoulaye Wade and his Minister of Information

decide to deplume and incapacitate the journalistic bird, which was flying over their

heads–and dropping ‘excreta’ on them. The Senegalese media strike discussed in the

introduction was precipitated by a general impression that the government of President

Abdoulaye Wade was hostile to the media despite promises that he would not interfere

with freedom of the press.


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Figure 4: Caption: ‘The ‘gornement’ (government) wants to see a press with less feathers.’ President Abdoulaye Wade to Minister of Information: ‘The press certainly has the right to fly… …but not over our heads.’ Joop, published in Le Cafard Libéré (Senegal)

In Burkina Faso, where investigative journalist Norbert Zongo and three of his

friends were murdered in suspicious circumstances in 1998, cartoonist Damien Glez

published a cartoon entitled, ‘Le Marabout muet’ (The mute Marabou). The cartoon

symbolically expressed the fear and self-censorship that descended on the Burkina Faso

media as a result of the unsolved murders, and incessant threats against journalists. On

the tenth anniversary of the murders, members of the Association of Journalists of

Burkina Faso led a peaceful demonstration in the streets of the capital, Ouagadougou, to

call for an investigation into the unsolved murders. This call was made in vain as the

president of the Association of Journalists and other leaders of the march were promptly

summoned to the police headquarters for questioning. Figure 5 shows a bird, representing

the Marabout, with its beak tied by a piece of cloth. The cartoon also alludes to the

ultimate demise of Le Marabout, the newspaper.

Figure 5: Glez, published in Le Marabout, June 2002.

Figure 6 is a cartoon by Zapiro, a South African cartoonist whose work is

published in South Africa’s Mail & Guardian. The cartoon portrays Snuki Zikalala,

former Managing Director of News and Current Affairs at the state-owned South African

Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), as a giant python asphyxiating the life out of the

public broadcaster. This cartoon echoes a popular African myth from Cameroon, in

which the monstrous river serpent, Ndondondumeh, deceitfully obtains the image and

likeness of a flashy, handsome young man, incarnates him through an act of transilience,


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and woos a haughty but foolish village maiden who falls for his charms. Once the

marriage celebrations are over and the couple reach home, the serpent slouches off his

human likeness and proceeds to asphyxiate his bride. She screams for help and is saved

by the villagers. This cartoon is a symbolic reiteration of rampant accusations that

Zikalala had transformed the SABC into the mouthpiece of the ANC government. The

SABC has also been accused of self-censorship, biased coverage through deliberate

omission, framing out opposing viewpoints, and slanting the news to support the

government’s position.

Figure 6: Zapiro, published in the Mail & Guardian (South Africa), 1 February 2007.

The asphyxiating hold of the government over the media of public broadcasting is

also evident in Senegal, a country that has had a democratic system of government since

independence in 1960. It was in Senegal, however, that millions of television viewers

witnessed one of the most memorable examples of an African reporter’s demonstration of

his displeasure with excessive state controlled-journalism. Malik Guéye, a television

news presenter for Radiodiffusion télévision sénégalaise (Senegalese Radio and

Television Service, RTS), once slipped in the phrase ‘passons maintenant aux choses

serieuses’ (let’s now move on to serious matters) after an evening newscast dominated by


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sycophantic, griot-style stories of the activities of former President Abdou Diouf.

Guéye’s act of resistance and disrespect led to his being promptly taken off the nightly

news (Eko, 2003).

The cartoon in Figure 7 satirizes excessive governmental control of la

Radiodiffusion Télévision Sénégalaise (RTS). This Cafard Libéré cartoon depicts the

former Director General, Guila Thiam, munching on the RTS. This action causes

panicked news presenters to flee the studio. The cartoon is a metaphor of the

mismanagement which caused a number of journalists to resign from the public

broadcaster and seek jobs elsewhere.

Figure 7: Guila Thiam, Director General of state-owned Radiodiffusion télévision sénégalaise (RTS): ‘RTS…one munches it with gusto.’ Odia, published in Le Cafard Libéré (Senegal).

Cartooning as the art of resistance: Re-presentations of power relations

Previous studies of African cartoons have shown that African cartoonists decry the

asphyxiating political context within which the African media must operate. These

studies found that cartoons portrayed Africa as a political jungle dominated by brutal,

animalistic oppressors; a place where the law of the jungle reigns supreme (Eko 2007;

Gado 2002). At first glance, it seems that the narratives African cartoonists constructed

about themselves were mostly critical narratives of victimisation. However, a closer look


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at the cartoons that framed the African media in the post-Cold War period reveals that

some cartoons were instruments of resistance, with many African cartoonists using them

as a means to fight back against the oppressive political, judicial, cultural, and social

powers-that-be. Many cartoonists went to great lengths to deliberately (mis)take,

misperceive, misunderstand, and misrepresent real happenings and events for purposes of

criticism. Virtually all the cartoons in this study deterritorialize and animalize political

leaders who are hostile to freedom of expression.

Figure 8 is a cartoon that depicts President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe as a

rampaging, club-wielding guerrilla/gorilla attacking the judiciary, civil society and the

press. Mugabe’s government destroyed almost every democratic and economic institution

in Zimbabwe. His regime maintains tight control of radio and television and his

government has persecuted and prosecuted the press for years. The moral of these

cartoons is that high-handed violation of the right of freedom of expression is animalistic.

Figure 8: Gado, published in The Daily Nation (Kenya), 11 February 1999.

As narrative devices, each African cartoon is either a proverb, a parable or a

maxim. Figure 9 also echoes popular African serpentine myths, with the cartoon

depicting a human-serpent about to swallow a chained editor of Le Messager. The facial

features of the snake are none other that those of Cameroon’s long-serving president,

Paul Biya. This menacing cartoon was part of a series of cartoons drawn by an


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association of Cameroonian cartoonists called Coup de Crayon (Pencil Stroke), to protest

the arrest, conviction and imprisonment of Pius Njawé editor of Le Messager, for

publishing a story about the state of President Paul Biya’s health. Coup de Crayon has

also protested the habitual arrest and imprisonment of Cameroonian journalists for

criminal libel and for insulting the head of state.

Figure 9: Nyemb Ntoogué, published by Le Messager Popoli (Cameroon), 30 December 1997

South African newspapers are no strangers to accusations of publishing cartoons

that are disrespectful to the head of state and injurious to his reputation. Figure 10 is a

cartoon produced by the South African cartoonist, Zapiro, in the Mail & Guardian. This

cartoon demonstrates how Zapiro and other courageous African cartoonists undertake the

task of resisting abuse of power and violations of the right of freedom of the press. The

subject of the cartoon is the celebrated political struggle between ANC leader and South

African President, Jacob Zuma, and Zapiro. The South African cartoonist may not face

the kind of existential threat confronted daily by Nyemb Popoli and other African

cartoonists, but he is wrestling with the same political monster – an authoritarian political

leader with an acute aversion to criticism.

In effect, Zapiro’s sardonic cartoons have provoked the ire of South Africa’s

president, Jacob Zuma, whose sexual peccadilloes, multiple wives, brushes with the law,

and authoritarian instincts make him a cartoonist’s godsend and a caricaturist’s favourite

subject. Zuma is the personification of commandement; the archetypal, authoritarian

postcolonial ruler in whom ‘debauchery and buffoonery go hand in hand’ (Mbembe


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2001, 108). Zapiro’s acerbic cartoons have made him the target of Zuma and his

supporters in the ANC and its alliance partners1. One such cartoon entitled ‘Rape of

Justice’ alludes to pressure exerted on the South African judiciary to dismiss corruption

charges against the polygamous Mr. Zuma. The South African president wasted no time

suing Zapiro and The Sunday Times, where the cartoon was published, for injuring his

dignity and reputation, claiming 7 million rand (approximately $2 million) (Blair 2009).

Figure 10 is Zapiro’s defiant cartoon response to Zuma’s lawsuit. Thanks to a South

African constitution that is theoretically sound and practically hollow – it grants South

Africans sexual freedoms but does not grant the media substantive freedom of expression

– Zuma’s suit hangs like a sword of Damocles over the cartoonist. Despite this threat, the

rule of thumb of Zapiro and other courageous African cartoonists is that defiance and

offence are the best defences against authoritarianism.

Figure 10: Zapiro, published in the Mail & Guardian (South Africa), 6 July 2006.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 Among them leaders of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the South African Communist Party

and the ANC Youth League.


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The Mohammed cartoons ‘affair’ and African cartooning

The Mohammed cartoons affair rocked the media in Africa and demonstrated the fragility

of freedom of expression on the continent. In South Africa, the High Court of

Johannesburg banned the Mohammad cartoons outright. African cartoonists reacted to

the controversy and to the prior restraint that it engendered. Zapiro republished two of the

cartoons and framed the action of the Johannesburg High Court as an act of brutal

censorship (See Figure 11). In this rather mordant cartoon, Zapiro brilliantly exaggerates

the truth about the myopic, authoritarian abuse of power by the South African judiciary.

The cartoon points out the irony that South Africa, which is supposed to have the most

liberal democratic constitution on the African continent, was the only country outside the

Muslim world where the judiciary issued a pre-emptive injunction against publication not

only of the cartoons, but any other material that Muslims could find offensive (Tribune

Reporters 2006).

Figure 11: Zapiro, published in the Mail & Guardian, 8 February 2006.

In another cartoon, Zapiro framed coverage of religion as a minefield through

which cartoonists must step with extreme caution. This theme was also echoed by Daily

Nation (Nairobi) cartoonist, Godfrey Mwampembwa (also known as ‘Gado’), who


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depicted cartoonists as human specimens who work under the microscope of religious

authorities, often with the tacit approval or complicity of the judiciary (see Figure 12).

Gado’s cartoon demonstrates the reality faced by African cartoonists. They have to live

with pressure to suppress material perceived by members of the Muslim community to be

blasphemous. In addition to calls for governmental restrictions on material that may have

a potential to offend Muslims, African cartoonists also have to contend with the

censorious sensibilities of other religious groups.

Figure 12: Cartoonist under the microscope of religious groups. Gado, published in The Daily Nation (Kenya), February 2006.

Nigerian cartoonist Tayo Fatunla re-presented the widespread violent

demonstrations that took place in northern Nigeria in the wake of the publication of the

Mohammad cartoons in Denmark, as part of the monster of authoritarian irrationality,

intolerance and religious fanaticism that visits murder, mayhem and destruction on

Nigeria from time to time. His cartoon (Figure 13) implies that religious fanatics are so

prone to violence that they go into orgies of murder and destruction without any

provocation. His message is that religious fanatics in Nigeria used the Mohammad

cartoons as a cover to go on rampages against real or imagined enemies of Islam.


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Figure 13: The cartoonist as scapegoat for religious riots in Nigeria. Tayo Fatunla, 2008.

Conclusion: Cartoons as the art of criticism and the art of resistance

The cartoonist uses a narrative craft that involves the ritualized stating and restating of

principles and ideals; selecting and reselecting, constructing and reconstructing,

positioning and repositioning of slices of reality in communication texts, for purposes of

making negative interpretive interventions on happenings or assuming evaluative

postures towards events. This article has analysed African political cartoons, a mostly

post-Cold War phenomenon. At first glance, African political cartoons perform the same

functions as cartoons everywhere, namely, serving as ritual editorial components of

newspapers. However, at a deeper level, African cartoons are more than the art of graphic

criticism. They are at the forefront of journalistic resistance against abuse of power and

violations of human rights in Africa. Cartoons, however, also represent something larger:

they are symbolic demands for respect of the universal journalistic paradigm and the

freedom of expression that is its lifeblood. One of the immutable realities of African

journalistic texts is that they draw on African cosmology, mythology, socio-cultural

history, politics, and philosophy to create new critical texts and contexts. That is the case

with the cartoons analysed in this article. Their symbolic counter-discourses portray

authoritarianism as adversely as possible. Cartoons deploy myths and allegories that


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facilitate their task of deterritorializing and animalizing the agents of oppression and

censorship.

African cartoons are therefore culture-specific, critical ‘geo-graphic’ texts, to use

the expression of Deleuze and Guattari (1980), that satirize the difficult realities of the

media in the continent’s diverse journalistic cultures. African media systems vary a great

deal, but frequently the problems they encounter are similar. For example, Zapiro’s

cartoons denouncing excessive governmental control of the South African Broadcasting

Corporation (SABC) are very similar to Odia’s cartoons denouncing excessive

governmental control of broadcasting in Senegal. The cartoons imply that although both

countries have very different broadcasting systems, they face similar problems of

excessive government control of broadcast content. African cartoons are narratives which

claim that the African media are entitled to the freedom of expression set forth in the

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, no matter the politico-cultural, geographic,

religious and linguistic context in which they operate. As such, African cartoons are acts

of geo-graphic resistance against powerful political, social, and cultural forces bent on

controlling the flow of information to the public by controlling the content of the media

and of cartoons. Cartooning in Africa is thus the art of criticism and the art of resistance.

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The Art of Criticism: How African Cartoons Discursively Constructed African Media Realities

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