Iconography and Politics in South Africa: the representation of Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma in cartoons of Zapiro

Abstract

Mandela’s victory in the 1994 elections in South Africa is a reference point for South African history and represented the transition from apartheid to multiracial democracy. Since then Nelson Mandela (1994-1999), Thabo Mbeki (1999-2008) and Jacob Zuma (2009 - current), occupied the post of president of the country and led, each in its own way, the new direction of the country. During the nearly twenty years of multiracial democracy, one in particular cartoonist, Jonathan Shapiro, popularly known by the pseudonym Zapiro, portrayed the everyday life of this story. In this sense, the objective of this research is to analyze how Zapiro portrayed the political and social aspects, as well as the psychological characteristics of each of the three postapartheid presidents and which social representations are formed from their cartoon production. The choice of Zapiro explained by openly declared his opposition to apartheid and also for being the best known outside South African cartoonist. We elected to cartoon as an object of study because it is an iconographic object constituted by communicative humor, which adds to its constitution arguments transgression of the established order, enabling an analysis of South African history through a critical bias. As methods for the development of the work, we decided to gather historical research, the literature search and analysis of cartooon speech. Among the theoretical frameworks stand out Magnoli (1998, 2009), Jonge (1991) and Carlin (2009) in the South African question; reflections about social representations, we resort to Moscovici (2011) and Jodelet (1993), in the field the cartoon and humor, the references are Miani (2005; 2012), Romualdo (2000) and Eco (1989). With the completion of the analysis, we observed that Zapiro acts in different ways in the construction of the representation of each of the presidents in question and that the cartoonist presents Mandela as a competent leader marked by heroism and reference to be followed by other politicians.