Many people go about conducting their business in the name of pointing out social ills, some are hell burnt on challenging democracy, while some, unfortunately stoop so low that they personalise their differences with certain people.
If anyone says that the famous South African cartoonist, Zapiro is telling it as it is in an objective way, I would tell them to bugger off. In the recent past, the man whom I used to hold in high esteem in his field of making political statements through drawing has taken a totally undesirable direction, which has caused him to lose so much support.
It is understandable that everyone is entitled to their own opinions in this country and it is everyone’s duty to challenge whichever course of national interest they might think is heading the wrong direction, but there are always limits that would sway your argument from being creditable to complete hogwash.
I lost respect for Zapiro’s work two years ago after the acquittal of Jacob Zuma’s rape charges. This renowned cartoonist used that as an opportunity to run his personal agenda by drawing cartoons with more sexual undertones, a person viewing those cartoons would swear that Zuma was in fact a gurgling, brainless rapist that Zapiro made him to be. I cannot even begin to imagine how many people were influenced by those drawings, hence Zuma’s continuous protestations about being charge and tried by the media.
Alas! Zapiro’s master pieces reek of the main opposition’s “daily chorus”: bitch about the ANC at all cost. He has gone overboard—I think. What is up with the shower head? All those cartoons depicting Zuma as a man with an uncontrollable urge for coitus? The machine gun Zuma is always shown wielding? I see a great deal of “player hating”, total disrespect of Jacob Zuma as a person and in Zapiro, I see a petty person whose bitterness towards political change in this country can only be equalled to the feeling Chuck Norris gets after losing a fight. He is living in the eighties and he seriously needs to make his art more satirical in subtle way, without him revealing how much of dick he really is; it is not funny anymore.
