Illustrators use their relative freedom to go further than many of the continent’s journalists ever dare. But many satirists have come under pressure
Or so they appear in the imagination of Chrisogon Atukwasize, the man with the sharpest pencil in Uganda. Signing himself “Ogon”, he uses his cartoons in thewhich featured one of his illustrations on the front cover. They were said to have also made inquiries about Ogon. He responded with a sketch of a torturer drawn as one of the Minions—characters in “Despicable Me”, an animated-film franchise—struggling to read the offending book.
That situation holds true all over Africa, where satirists are often the boldest commentators on politics and vice. “Cartoonists use visual imagery as a kind of mask, to conceal in order to reveal,” says Ganiyu Jimoh, a Nigerian cartoonist and scholar. He compares the wit and allusions in cartoons to the traditional masquerades in Yoruba culture, in which masked performers would ridicule the powerful. As an adage has it, “Oba kii mu onkorin”: the king does not arrest a satirist.
Satirists wore their politics on their sleeves. South Africa’s most famous cartoonist, Jonathan Shapiro—better known by his pen name Zapiro—was a white anti-apartheid activist who had taught himself cartooning in the 1980s after being forcibly conscripted into the army. In Kenya, the ramparts of authoritarianism were breached when cartoonists began to draw the president for the first time.
Most African cartoonists now use the internet to share their work—especially when it is deemed too controversial to make it into print. “If it can’t run in the publication, then that’s well and good, you publish it on your socials instead,” says Celeste Wamiru, a Kenyan cartoonist. On Twitter and Facebook cartoons take on a life of their own, unmoored from newspapers and floating in a sea of memes. New kinds of satire evolve.
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