Cartoonist Zapiro had a frank conversation with The Citizen about his film, The Showerhead. Picture: Wikus De Wet/Getty Images
The Showerhead which comes out today in select cinemas details Jonathan ‘Zapiro’ Shapiro’s journey from his beginnings as a liberation artist and political detainee during apartheid, to his rise as a champion of freedom of expression.
The documentary is directed by US director, Craig Tanner who first approached Zapir about the project several years ago.
“I’m not sure what year he first approached me, but we started in 2016. He lives in Sydney Australia, so he came…we had to make big plans for him to come and for me to have clear time to do these interviews and to do research,” said Zapiro.
As the title insinuates, the film speaks to what became a Zapiro trademark when depicting former president Zuma.
“Even with the name, The Showerhead, I thought that was a very strong contextual overview of something people would respond to in order to tell this story of this powerful politician and a cartoonist who was standing up to him or trying to.”
The first major interviews took place in 2016.
It was also during this time that the director had a sit-down with the other contributors to the documentary.
These include founding editor of The Weekly Mail and The Mail and Guardian Anton Harber, media lawyer Dario Milo and former military commander and minister Ronnie Kasrils.
“He came back here in 2018 to do some more and then the final one [interview] with me in a different shirt, that’s even later because things kept moving with the story.”
“So it was very difficult for him to actually bring it to its conclusion and still keep it kind of up to date, it was a tough ask for him.”
The beginning the film touches on Zapiro’s childhood; growing up in a family of activists together with his sisters, with the family’s political action spearheaded by his mother.
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The focus on his life is hurriedly and unsatisfactorily done, just touching on his personal life and not at all speaking about the impact of death threats from disgruntled powerful politicians affected his wife and children.
But this was because of his wife, Karina Turok’s matriarchal instincts of protection and rearing kicked-in during the making of The Showerhead.
“My wife was extremely concerned about issues of security because I had come under all kinds of attack, not just around this issue with Jacob Zuma,” shared the artist.
“Being a cartoonist that really pushes the boundary, I had also done other cartoons that had brought death threats and some very, very scary situations and my wife was extremely concerned about the family’s security, as was I. She tried to keep me from talking too much about the family.”
“There was so much that Craig was trying to get into the movie, that eventually or fortunately the story became very tightly wound up with events and the cartoons that were driven by those events.”
Zapiro and his wife are no longer together after 37 years of marriage.
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There’s a refreshing moment in the film where unionist Zwelinzima Vavi admits to being wrong to have defended Zuma.
Vavi says while speaking about Zapiro’s most controversial cartoon, Rape of Lady Justice which depicted him together with other politicians that supported Zuma, forcefully holding down Lady Justice as Zuma pulls down his pants to sexually violet her.
“He by virtue of him being in the most powerful cartoon I’ve ever drawn and then being somebody who publicly, very publicly recanted and said how he had been wrong and lambasting Zuma on corruption; that almost became his public persona,” said the cartoonist.
But the appreciation of the currency brought by Vavi speaking in a film about the cartoonist’s work in a manner that reflects well on Zapiro is not lost on South Africa’s most celebrated satirist.
“It was a coup that Craig managed to interview him and that he explicitly states those things in the movie. I think that was brilliant and it worked very well, it was incredibly powerful,” averred the School of Visual Arts in New York graduate.
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Having the aforementioned contributors in the film-respected media and members of civil society- gives The Showerhead a stamp of moral and societal approval money can’t buy.
It was interesting to hear former Sunday Times editor Mondli Makhanya recalling the shock of a waiter who he came to give him a copy of the Lady Justice cartoon, which was faxed to the eatery because Zapiro urgently wanted the editor to see it.
But I found the film inconsistent with its authentic contributors, and its protagonist for not touching on one of Zapiro’s darkest times in 2016 when he drew Zuma as an organ grinder and former National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) head Shaun Abrahams as the monkey dancing to Zuma’s tune.
The cartoon drew criticism for how distasteful he depicted Abrahams, a person of colour, as a monkey.
“That drawing is one that I would care to forget; I feel very strongly that there was an element of misrepresentation around that cartoon,” concedes the cartoonist.
“You know the huge figure that it was aimed at, was fully human and it was Jacob Zuma. There was no generalisation or anything like that.”
By the time the Abrahams cartoon happened, work on The Showerhead was well under way he says. In essence, the documentary’s purpose is to detail the events of 2006 to around 2012, but that moment needed to be highlighted to give viewers the whole truth.
The discrepancy is in how Vavi recanted on camera and Zapiro didn’t.
“The real substance of those court cases and fights, all of that stuff had been long before that drawing happened. My feeling was, it was gonna distract and detract,” he said.
“Personally I was kind of relieved that I didn’t have to go into that in rich detail, perhaps in the way I’m doing in this interview. I felt that, in a way overshadowed the main story and the earlier parts and the big things and the development. But I would accept criticism from others who say it should’ve been there.”
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The film is a must watch, particularly for South Africans in a year in which the country celebrates its 30 years of democracy.
The Showerhead reviews Zuma’s scandal-ridden ascent, reign, and ultimate ousting. At one point while watching, I went through what I could describe as a ‘Zuma-overload’.
The film refreshingly takes one on a jaunt into South Africa’s democratic journey.
It captures the media’s uncertainty of its place as watchdogs in a euphoric country just after the first democratic elections of 1994 and also Thabo Mbeki’s ineptness in dealing with the AIDS pandemic post the Nelson Mandela presidency.
With the variety and depth of things to cover, the film is good but one walks away from it thinking it could’ve been better delivered as a three part doccie that speaks to Zapiro as a person, an activist and as a cartoonist.
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