South Africa’s most famous cartoonist considers what to do with statues of white oppressors

South Africa's best known cartoonist, Jonathan Shapiro, is not afraid to look controversy in the eye, draw a cartoon, and endure the outrage of those offended by it.  

Known by his pen name Zapiro, he's twice been sued for defamation by South African President Jacob Zuma and he was roundly scolded in 2010 when he drew a Mohammed cartoon for Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.  

His courage, or some would say brazenness, has also made him an early observer of some of South Africa’s most vexing social-political issues, including one that has been in the news recently: What to do with the statues of figures from the country’s apartheid past?

Last week, the statue of white mining magnate Cecil Rhodes was taken down from the campus of the University of Cape Town after weeks of protest.  While the university was built on land donated by Rhodes, he was deeply racist and helped lay the groundwork for apartheid, helping to push through legislation which established “native reserves,” or specific areas in the country where blacks could own property.

“He basically invented apartheid based on that idea of so-called native reserves," Zapiro says.

The removal of Rhodes' statue has sparked a larger debate within South Africa about what to do with statues of similar figures throughout the country. It’s an issue Zapiro is deeply familiar with. He's been cartooning about it since 1994. 

Zapiro, who is white, used to walk by the Rhodes statue almost daily when he was a student at the University of Cape Town in the late 1970s. "We were aware of Rhodes. We were aware of those kinds of symbols, but I don't think, except for a few good lefties, not enough was made of the symbolic importance of what was there."

Nearly 40 years after his own time at the University of Cape Town, Zapiro is pleased that the statue has been removed, but with a caveat: "I thought perhaps the statue could move to one end of campus where it wasn't particularly obvious and then put something important in its place.

I don't believe in the destruction of any of these things."

Zapiro believes the visual artifacts from the apartheid era need to be preserved, perhaps in a museum or "tucked away in some corner" to educate future generations of South Africans about their past.

Zapiro spent the first 10 years of his career as an anti-apartheid satirical rabble-rouser. Then, after Nelson Mandela was elected in 1994,  a push begn to remove the statues of apartheid's worst oppressors, like Hendrik Verwoerd, the South African politician who brought the National Party to power in 1948.

"Verwoerd really refined apartheid into the disgusting, inhumane system that it was," he says.  

Then, in 2001, a strange force-of-nature event sealed the fate of a statue of another apartheid heavyweight: J.G. Strijdom, an uncompromising Afrikaner nationalist who served as prime minister during the 1950s.

"There was a giant, fascist, granite statue of Strijdom in Strijdom Square in Pretoria," says Zapiro. "I certainly don't believe in anything super natural or anything like that, but it was absolutely incredible. Suddenly there was this massive collapse of this old square." Inexplicably, the giant bust of Strijdom split in two on May 31, 2001. It was the 40-year anniversay of the day that South Africa was declared a republic. 

There are many statues of Mandela around South Africa (though Zapiro dislikes the quality of most of them), but none in a really prominent place. Zapiro notes that there has yet to be a direct replacement of a statue of an apartheid-era politician with one of Mandela. A statue of Louis Botha, the first prime minister of the Union of South Africa, the forerunner of the modern South African state still stands in front of South Africa's parliament in Pretoria.

"He was very much an oppressor of black people." The statue shows Botha sitting proudly on horseback. "That is the most obvious symbol as you approach parliament. And that has been seen as a huge eyesore for a lot of people."

Recently, a large bust of Nelson Mandela and a standing statue of Walter and Albertina Sisulu, huge icons of the struggle to end apartheid, have been added to the parliament grounds, but they're not prominent. "The big symbol that stands outside is still Louis Botha. And in so many respects you have this sort of thing where either the big areas haven't changed or haven't changed enough."