Talking Movies: From Zap to Zapiro – Episode 4
Welcome to Talking Movies, I’m Spling. This week we continue with episode 4 of From Zap to Zapiro.
[The Showerhead Trailer music]
Ronnie Kasrils: Zapiro is considered one of the top 10 best cartoonists on earth.
Zapiro: I tend to really go into attack mode when people are trampling on other people’s rights. Reading with a cloud of corruption hanging over his head, Zuma suddenly has a rape trial. He was asked, what did you do after the consensual sex? Oh, I had a shower.
Why? To lessen my chance of infection. Bingo! I attached to him physical embodiments of all the different things that he’d said. I also put this shower on his head. At that time I had to write for AIDS prevention.
Mondli Makhanya: It was difficult to actually look at Zuma without thinking of the shower head.
Zapiro: He needed these corruption charges to be dropped so that he could become president. By the middle of 2008 I was angry. I came up with this idea and I got such a shock.
Mondli Makhanya: My immediate reaction when I saw the cartoon was, fluke.
And Mondli phoned me up and he said, hey comrade, comrade, comrade, this is, this is hectic. Once you’ve seen it, there ain’t no going back.
[The Showerhead trailer ends]
Can you tell us how the showerhead documentary came about?
Yeah, well, the beginning is a little embarrassing because I’m informed by Craig Tanner, the director, it certainly didn’t start just in the run-up to his first visit in 2016. Apparently he’d tried to get a hold of me for a long time before that. I’m very busy, but so are a lot of people. I’m involved in many, many different things all the time.
There’s always something happening around the cartoons, around cartoons I’m supposed to draw, or have drawn, or the ones that have caused an furore in other projects. I just didn’t see what it was. Anyway, he says that he tried to contact me for a long time, which is a bit embarrassing.
I’m not sure how many months it was before 2016, because he lives in Australia. He’s South African, but he had moved in 2008 to Sydney. So in 2016, he came here… and the reason that I responded when I did was that, unlike a couple of other people who had approached me and said that they’d like to do something as a documentary, I felt that he really had a core concept that I felt was important. He said it’s because he saw that I had these fights with Jacob Zuma. Zuma was suing me, this powerful politician, and I had said I wouldn’t back down.
And then I got involved in this fight. And eventually, in both the big lawsuits, we won, in the sense that I won, we won, the papers I worked for won, because they had to drop the lawsuits. And he said, I want to base it around the showerhead. I think it may even be called The Showerhead. So I thought, okay, he’s got a cool idea that’s going to work, and I like it. And so that’s how it started.
In my review, I described the whole concept as Moby Dick in the way that Herman Melville talks about Captain Ahab and the White Whale.
That’s great. I love that.
I thought that was spot on in terms of tracking that trajectory for the whole story. And it’s just such a wonderful golden thread that works through that documentary. So I thought that was amazing.
I wanted to find out from you if there was any thought to animating your work in the documentary. I know that might be a bit irreverent in a way, because it is a type of cartoon that’s set and might change the whole dynamic to start sort animating it. But I just was curious to know if that was ever a consideration.
I have certainly no aversion to the idea of animating my cartoons. It’s been done in a limited way before. And I think if it was something that was done throughout the movie, it would somehow, it would actually detract in a sense from what those cartoons were, and what they were doing, and how they were received.
Because it would be shifting and changing, and you wouldn’t necessarily be able to get the impact that they were making simply things initially that were really mostly about appearing in a newspaper. So I’ve got a double approach to it. On the one hand, I’m not averse to the idea. And there is talk about doing something in another project. As I say, there have been some of my cartoons that have been used in various ways on various subjects with limited animation, something happens, you know, when you see it on screen. And I think there’s lots of potential for that.
But I certainly don’t think it detracts from the way Craig has told the story in this particular documentary, that the cartoons are there in their kind of original form, and that everything is around people’s reaction, the various commentators, my sort of interaction with my editors, in particular, Mondli Makhanya, because of the Lady Justice one, described as a kind of contrapuntal way, in which he uses our telling of the story, I say something and Mondli, cuts to Mondli, cuts back to me. In a sense, that animates the cartoons in a different way. So I think that it works in this particular documentary. But yeah, I certainly like the idea of animating editorial cartoons as well.