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Talking Movies: From Zap to Zapiro – Episode 3

Welcome to Talking Movies, I’m Spling. This week we begin Episode 3 of From Zap to Zapiro…

It’s hard for me to get away from the story that I’ve told so many times, that I call that I received from Nelson Mandela, when I thought it was a prank call and then, you know, when I served presence of… “Hello, is that Zapiro?”.

And when I still thought it was a prank call and then suddenly sounds like you, so it must be you. Turned out, yes, it was him. And then he said, “I’m very upset with you”.

And I wondered, you know, I said, “I’m sorry, what have I done?” So the shortest version turned out, he had seen that my cartoons weren’t going to be appearing in the Argus anymore, because the cartoons from Sowetan were appearing in the Argus. And when he was in Cape Town, in those days, in the 90s, that’s the only way he could see… there was no internet, seeing him in the Argus. Called me himself to say that.

So we had a conversation at the end of the conversation is when I said, “well, you know, I’m amazed that you called me having seen my cartoons getting more and more critical since I met you four years ago of the ANC and of government”. And he said, “oh, but that is your job”. And so that is, you know, obviously the hugest moment for me and a massive praise that I really value.

But there’s another one that I can tell you about, which I really also value. I got a call one day from a guy with an American accent in 2004. And he said, “hello, is that the cartoonist Zapiro?” And I said, “yes”.

And he said, “would you like to meet Harry Belafonte?” “I would love to meet him.” He said, “because he’d very much like to meet you”. I said, “Wow… I mean, how did that happen?” And then I said, “where?” He said, “well, where do you live?” I said, “is he in Cape Town?” So he said, “yes”. And when? And it was going to be that day. It was Christmas Day of 2004.

I was going to meet him at five o’clock that day. I went to the beach, came back and kind of got ready. And then he appeared at the gate, this chiseled, tall, good looking man, elderly already, but amazing looking and wearing a huge coat in the middle of our summer. So it was kind of strange. And he came in and as he walked up the drive and gave me a huge bear hug. And then we went into our studio and we sat down and we started talking.

A couple minutes in, he says to me, “I just have to stop you here”. And he said, “I just want to say something. God has a sense of humor. I was expecting a black man.” He had seen a particular cartoon that I had drawn where he thought I had really got the African-American experience because it was a very pointed drawing about Colin Powell. He’d been called off from coming to the anti-racism conference in Durban by George W. Bush.

So he thought, well, here’s a South African cartoonist who sort of gets African-American politics and sensibility. And so he thought I was a black guy and he’d made this arrangement to come and meet me. And then he was absolutely wonderful. And he didn’t immediately say that, you know, a couple minutes in, he says that, and then he described how he felt when he saw the cartoon.

And for me, that was massive, you know, coming from a not only from an icon like him, but I mean, an activist, an African-American, well, originally from the Caribbean, but African-American activist who kind of thought I had read that stuff well enough to understand it and convey it that he thought I was black. So that was pretty fantastic as well.

You know, your work is just so challenging and provocative a lot of the time, and you are covering some really contentious topics. But in spite of that, your cartoons often have this sense of hope. And I wanted to find out from you, where do you find that optimism? And is it quite difficult to maintain that and to sort of find the right balance in terms of your cartoons keeping the audience rapt?

Yeah, that’s a good question. And I mean, I think that, I suppose, comes from my personality itself. I’m really, really, really passionate about what’s going on. And I do have a kind of an activist core, because I sort of really developed that in the 80s.

And I think back to what that was like, I’ve described as my lodestone, was that experience doing things for the UDF that really from ’83 through to kind of ’88, that period where things were dark, but we also had that lighter side. I mean, I did that UDF calendar that a lot of people know, you know, UDF ’87, which was done at the end of ’86. And I was explicitly trying, it’s exactly what I said to my area committee is, I want to show the kind of thing that we feel involved in the struggle is not just darkness and heaviness.

Okay, I mean, I don’t have the African experience, the black experience, coloured experience here in Cape Town, I’m a privileged white person. But the sense you got out of being involved in the struggle in the ’80s, in the UDF was this incredibly multicultural, wonderful sense that there was, even though we really didn’t see that things were going to change. So, you know, by 1990, there was this overarching optimism that things will eventually change… you know, all of these people working together, doing what we all do in different ways has got to have an effect.

And that’s what I tried to show in that one drawing. And I think that’s what I still draw on when I think about problems and things that aren’t going well. There’s plenty that’s happened in the new South Africa that’s also been like that. I always had that sense that there’s always something you can find, there’s always something funny, there’s always something interesting, there’s always something optimistic, even if things look a bit bleak, I consciously try and pick that up.

Thanks for listening. For more movie reviews, interviews and previous Talking Movies podcasts, visit SplingMovies.com. And remember, don’t wing it, SPL!NG it.