Drawn to extremes; it is a win-lose game for many cartoonists

For the past few days, regulars at the ground floor of Nairobi’s French cultural hub, Alliance Française, have encountered a naked Yoweri Museveni stomping on homosexuals.

Nearby, Jacob Zuma has been undoing his belt as a hapless woman lies on the ground; Joseph Nkaiserry has been flying a battered airplane; and three turbaned octopuses — labelled Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda and Al-Shabaab — have been spreading their evil tentacles over Nigeria, the Middle East, Somalia and Kenya.

Controversial, some might say. Creative, others might answer them, for these are the satirical representations of these and many other public figures and situations courtesy of a cartoon exhibition organised by Alliance Française in conjunction with local cartoonists.

Among those exhibiting are Nation Media Group’s Gado, Igah, and Patrick Gathara; Victor Ndula of The Star, and The People Daily’s Celeste. They were joined by other cartoonists from Togo, Canada, Turkey, Australia, Burkina Faso, Sweden, South Africa, and Ghana.

The theme of the exhibition had been thumb-tacked on the title “Freedom and Security: Can we have both?”

However, ingeniously interwoven into it has been an intense need for political and social change, an insatiable hunger that has been seeing cartoonists use caricatures as a form of protest, especially in light of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in France in early January.

The massacre, carried out by brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, left 11 dead, including Stephane Charbonnier, editor and chief cartoonist of the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine.

POLITICAL CARTOONS

The massacre drew worldwide condemnation not only for the acts of violence, but also for the assault on democracy, violation of freedom of speech and the attack on French culture.

Celestine Wamiru, an illustrator with The People Daily under the nom de plume Celeste, says cartoonists “have an unofficial licence to offend”, even though that does not mean they should use that right to offend others.

“On the other hand,” she continues, “lampooning involves a lot of symbolism and not many people understand it. That’s why some sections of the public may get irritated as they have not understood the message.”

One of the factors that is said to have fuelled the French Revolution was satire. For instance, when non-conformists, fed up with the monarchy that monopolised power, started distributing pornographic pamphlets of Marie Antoinette, consort to France’s King Louis XVI, the elite responded by banning cartoons.

This action only agitated the embers of an extensive underground distribution chain of the explicit material. After 10 long years of struggle, the monarchy finally fell and satire as a culture thrived.

The vigour with which satire roared did not abate and remains in modern- day France, where cartoonists satirise almost everything.

However, France is not unique in its appreciation of, and respect for, editorial cartoons. In 2004, a study sponsored by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES) and carried out by the Association of East African Cartoonists (Katuni) established that respondents were not just after the news, but also the commentaries and, interestingly, cartoons.

Incidentally, most of the cartoons the respondents remembered and related with were those of a political nature, and Ms Wamiru thinks it is because “the local political space is such that there is no perceived danger”, and so cartoonists have a wide open space in which to operate.

“The change in regimes — from Moi’s to Kibaki’s — brought about drastic shifts in the political landscape,” she says. “What we feared to illustrate during Moi’s era is long gone. Today, if I portray a politician, or anyone else, in such a manner that he or she feels contravenes his or her basic rights, we can meet in a court of law to sort out the dispute.”

FEW WORDS

But Vic Ndula of The Star thinks the growth of the local cartoon industry is not just a political statement, but an indicator of Kenyans’ growing sophistication and open-mindedness.

“Kenyans really love cartoons,” says Mr Ndula, an award-winning cartoonist and member of Cartoon Movement, a global organisation for cartoonists. “It’s probably because the caricatures have the ability to condense the news into one drawing.”

Ndula and Celeste, however, have pretty huge shoes to fill, for it was Leonardo da Vinci, the Italian painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer, who first experimented with cartoons.

The transition into political satire is credited to yet another big name, Martin Luther, a religious dissenter who managed to alter caricature from a mere form of artistic expression into a genre that would propagate change and lay the foundation for editorial cartoons.

Fed up with the unreasonable demands of the Catholic Church, Luther wanted things to be different since the Catholic Church was monopolising religion while shoring up wealth.

To succeed in his quest to subdue the all-powerful church, Luther relied on three sets of people for his Protestant Reformation campaign in Germany: an emerging merchant class; illiterate peasants; draughtsmen; and artists who employed their valuable skills to champion the cause. They used posters and pamphlets to spread their message.

To get people talking and set the agenda, cartoonists use both imagery and text in their illustrations.

This, to an extent, ensures that readers who do not grasp the symbolism fully comprehend what the cartoonists want to communicate. But, is there an advantage to this?

“Cartoons use image and text fused together,” says Dr Sam Kamau, a senior lecturer at the University of Nairobi School of Journalism and Mass Communication. “Often, the image is not complete or cannot convey the full meaning without the text, mostly in the form of captions or speech bubbles. However, the text has to be minimal and allow the image to carry the greater weight in conveying meaning.

MAINSTREAM CARICATURES

“Cartoons play an important role as a form of non-verbal, non-text communication. They help to creatively capture certain realities in an imaginative way and help say in an implicit way what a reporter might be incapable or unwilling to say explicitly. In a sense, they help push the boundaries of freedom of expression without fear of the consequences associated with saying something directly through text.”

In Kenya, cartoons as a form of humour really picked up in the 1950s with E G Gitau, the mind behind the popular Juha Kalulu series in Taifa Leo. Although many cartoonists have since come and gone, two stand out: Gado and Maddo.

We will start with the latter. Paul “Maddo” Kelemba, considered a radical, was the man who did the unthinkable by drawing former President Moi as a caricature in the late 1980s.

Although such caricatures existed widely in the underground newspapers, the publication of such a cartoon was a first for both the artist and the Daily Nation.

Kelemba’s act was considered revolutionary, and with good reason. Then  President Daniel arap Moi ruled with an iron fist and “it was unthinkable for anyone to defy, let alone parody, him in a respected national newspaper”, says Peter Mwangi, an ardent reader of the Daily Nation.

“After the attempted coup (in 1984),” continues Mr Mwangi, “Moi became almost paranoid. He set out to suppress all forms of dissent amongst Kenyans, and seeing the editorial cartoon was a wake-up call that we needed political change.”

Kelemba now runs It’s a Madd Madd World in the  Standard on Saturday. The column debuted in the Daily Nation in 1989, when the country’s agitation for a multiparty system was gathering pace.

SIMPLIFYING THE COMPLEX

After running the show at the Daily Nation for years, Kelemba was replaced by Godfrey “Gado” Mwampembwa, and soon Gado became one of the region’s most celebrated cartoonists. His works, which fearlessly depict political incorrectness, have appeared in numerous international publications, including New African (UK), Courier International (France), Sunday Tribune (South Africa) and Washington Times (US).

His works locally are celebrated as much as they are ridiculed. When, for instance, he depicted Uhuru Kenyatta in cowboy gear complete with a hat, boots and a gun belt as he beckoned his Cabinet secretaries to a meeting, some people could not understand what he wished to communicate.

Mr Peter Mwaura, who would later be appointed the Public Editor at NMG, wrote in to say that “political cartoons mean different things to different people”, and that “it all depends on how they decipher the cartoonist’s message, which in turn depend on the context, the activity, the words and symbols”.

“It’s not a laughing matter,” he warned.

So, how effective are cartoons in helping highlight the single most important issue in the news?

“Cartoons help inform the reader on the most important issue of the day without having to read the full length of a story,” says Dr Kamau of UoN.

“They are effective in simplifying complex issues. Most importantly, in the Kenyan dailies, they help portray serious issues in a humorous, light way without eroding the seriousness of the subject. Although cartoons can be controversial, they help provoke and drive debate on contentious issues.”

Cartoonists have the unenviable task of communicating messages deemed too sensitive and prejudicial for many to express. Although they present us with home truths we sometimes avoid, cartoonists also empower us with pictures when we cower from words.

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You draw, we cut

IT MIGHT BE a stroll in the park for local cartoonists, but their colleagues on the international arena have had it rough.

For instance, apart from the Charlie Hebdo massacre in France, Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat, at the onset of the 2011 Syrian Civil War, had his arms broken for drawing a caricature of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

It is suspected that Ferzat’s hands were targeted as a way of stopping him from drawing cartoons that question Assad’s dictatorial regime.

Closer home, artist Kudzanai Chiurai got in trouble with the authorities in Zimbabwe after drawing a series of controversial caricatures depicting the new African Union Chairman, President Robert Mugabe, as a horned head being consumed by flames.

The posters he deemed innocuous angered Zimbabwe’s ruling class. Rather than get apprehended, Chiurai chose to leave Zimbabwe.

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Minimalism is the guiding principle of a good drawing 

OFTEN, CARTOONS PASS as comic media meant purely to stir humour.

But, while this is partly true, it does not represent the true essence of editorial cartoons, which play an important role in social commentary. Through their drawings, cartoonists are able to comment on issues they deem to be of value to society. 

Regularly, the commentaries supplied in cartoons cannot survive any other media. Risks include having the message end up as phony, and flak from the chastised individuals and institutions. 

Because of the tools they employ in their works, and especially satire, cartoonists are able to voice utter criticism of certain human behaviour and social issues. Satire protects the cartoonist from the culpability for criticism.

And, considering the growing role of newspapers and media in general in weighing in on social issues, cartoons are becoming increasingly handy.

Cartoonists are opinionated citizens determined to comment on issues that matter to them and their publics, and while op-eds in newspapers and magazines may as well serve that purpose, cartoons do it differently.

AGAINST THE GRAIN

Using their drawings, cartoonists point out the deficiencies in human behaviour and the resultant social issues. They do it subtly and in such a way that those heavy issues appear absurd and hilarious.

This way, cartoons entertain their audiences, herding them to mull over the contagious issues at hand. Consequently, the messages contained in cartoons reach a wide audience.

Besides the use of exaggeration and satire, cartoonists employ minimalism. This means conveying as much meaning as possible using minimum design elements. In their training, cartoonists are taught to conceptualise audiences and ensure they get the intended message on the first interaction with their creations. For this reason, cartoons work well, even on non-elites.

But this does not mean that cartoonists are quick to compromise on their creativity to appease the mass audience. In fact, according to Chris Lamb in his 2004 book, Drawn to Extremes: The Use and Abuse of Editorial Cartoons, cartoonists are becoming increasingly unpopular with newspaper editors because of their defiance and tendency to go against the social decorum grain.

Mr Lamb, a professor of communication at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, writes that cartoonists have been unable to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”.

Interestingly, the don calls upon “editorial cartoonist to awaken society and demand its involvement in protecting democracy.”

By employing satire, cartoons portray reality as the cartoonist chooses and this portrayal goes past the present readers into future readers.

And this points to the centrality of cartoons in influencing public opinion. Therefore, cartoons are valid means of expressing political thought, wooing support for activism and affecting social change.

--Pius Maundu