Jonathan shapiro zapiro biography sampler

If there are two people who probably shouldn’t be in the same room together, it is South Africa’s most famous political cartoonist, Zapiro (whose real name is Jonathan Shapiro), and the country’s disgraced former president, Jacob Zuma. 

Jacob Zuma was back in court on May 20. Zuma is accused of committing 16 counts of fraud, racketeering and money laundering relating to a multi-billion-dollar arms deal in the late 1990s between a French defense company and the South African military.

Zapiro has never shied away from drawing Zuma as he sees him.

“I’ve never felt sort of intimidated for scared or anything like that,” he says. 

Zapiro’s latest book is a visual coda to the Zuma years. It’s called “WTF: Capturing Zuma – A Cartoonist’s Tale.”  

In a 2006 cartoon, Zapiro drew a showerhead over Zuma to illustrate a point. A court in South Africa had just acquitted Zuma of raping a 31-year-old family friend but during the trial, Zuma admitted to having unprotected sex with his accuser, whom he knew to be HIV-positive. Zuma told the court that he took a shower afterward to cut the risk of contracting HIV. The uproar from the judge, health experts, AIDS activists and the public was immediate. (South Africa has the biggest and most high-profile HIV epidemic in the world.)

In his next cartoon, Zapiro left out th

Introduction

Political satire in the print news media is a significant part of irony that focuses on gaining entertainment from politics. In the past, it has also been used with subversive intent where political speech and dissent are forbidden by a regime, as a method of advancing political arguments where such arguments are expressly forbidden (Henderson, 1993).

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the political cartoonist plays an agenda-setting role within the South African print news media today (Koelble & 12 3. An overview of the study

The two cartoons published by the Sunday Times and Mail & Guardian depicting ANC president, Jacob Zuma, about to "rape" the justice system, unleashed a storm of controversy in the South African print news media at the end of 2008. The controversy was fuelled because of their perceived debatable nature, and because of the effects they had on freedom of expression and on the rights of the political cartoonist . This study will contribute to the field by examining the debates that followed in the print news media, as In order for the study to examine the debates that followed the Lady Justice cartoons in the print news media properly it is important to clearly demarcate the methodological context of this study.

This chapter sets out to answer the question: "What agenda-setting role did the Lady Justice cartoons play in the selected print news media in Gauteng?"

Fistly, the study investigates through quantitative content analysis whether the Lady Justice cartoons set the media and public agendas. Secondly, the study examines whether the Lady Justice cartoons stimulated debates as reflected in the editorials, columns, letters to the editors and leading news stories.

Qualitative content analysis is then used to investigate the agenda-setting function of the cartoons.

The researcher used Newsclipping Services

One of the first thing I do on Friday morning is log on to the Mail & Guardian website to see the latest from Zapiro.  Jonathan Shapiro, better known as Zapiro, is a Capetonian political and social cartoonist whose work not chronicles current events in South Africa, but also provides visual critiques of political leaders, public events, and social ills.  Take, for example, Zapiro’s latest contribution: a satirical representation of the return of eighty South Africans who died in Lagos during a church collapse over two months ago. Not only does this cartoon represent a snapshot of the moment at which the bodies were finally returned to South Africa after a long two month delay, but this cartoon also allowed Zapiro to express his opinions about TB Joshua (the televangelist who owned the church which collapsed) and his laughable credibility; for more on TB Joshua, see here.).  Zapiro’s work makes it clear that cartoons are not only meant to be humorous (which they absolutely are) but that cartoons hold the potential to serve as powerful historical sources that are as worthy of digitization as any “traditional” historical sources.

That’s where this week’s featured project, Africa Cartoons, comes in.  Africa Cartoons is, in the words of  University of Wisconsin English professor, Tejumola Olaniyan, meant to be “an educational encyclopedia of African political cartooning and cartoonists.”  The site features the work of over 180 cartoonists from throughout the African continent.  Though not every country is represented, it is an amazing collection that pulls together a wide range of artists, making their work more public and easily accessible.  The site functions through a main interactive map, through which the user selects a country and then is taken to a page containing samples of some cartoonists from that nation.  The individual pages of the cartoonists, which can also be directly accessed thro