CSotD: I love happy endings, and conflict
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As this cartoon indicates, Zapiro has not decided to shake hands and become friends.
As the web site Africartoons says, this is a happy ending to the immediate problem and a sharp continuation of the loyal opposition:
"(D)espite the best efforts of the Zuma regime to intimidate the media and curb its freedoms, we live in a country where the freedom of expression still thrives. This is evidenced by examples of fearless investigative journalism accompanied by a culture of hard hitting cartooning, which could easily claim to be amongst the freest in the world.
"Zapiro and The Sunday Times have done South Africa a great service in defending our freedom of expression, the existence of which ironically adds legitimacy to the government of the day. Unfortunately the present government cannot be relied upon to maintain this legacy, and so it is incumbent on all of us to protect it."
You don't have to be South African, or a cartoonist, to take pleasure in this outcome.
It's hard not to be jealous of a place where passions run so high, the dialogue is so pointed and the newspapers have such a sense of mission.
People in smaller countries have more personal bonds to government than we Americans. South Africa is hardly "small" in the overall sense, but its population is about a sixth of ours, and that's enough to matter.
People in these more compact democracies tend to feel about their national leaders the way we, in this hulking, oversized, overpopulated nation, feel about our Congressional representatives. And they feel about their MPs the way we feel about our various state reps.
Democracy is more vibrant there because it is more intimate.
South Africa itself faces, I think (and I hope South African readers will chime in if I'm getting this wrong), some unique challenges that are both difficult and enviable.
Start with the idea of a democracy so ethnically and culturally and racially diverse that it has 11 official languages.
On the one hand, you've got to be kidding me.
On the other hand, it does seem to force people out of their cones of silence and make them take other points of view into some consideration, however fleeting, and also tends to make them more aware of how they may appear to others.
Which is to say that, even when they're acting like jackasses, they kind of know it, or, at least, their friends and relations know it.
Quite a contrast to our own jackasses, who have enough fellow-travelers to be sheltered against opposing points of view.
One challenge the country faces, which is more common in Third World countries than in a more advanced nation such as South Africa, is that, despite not being a new nation, its government until recently famously continued and deepened the sense of colonialism that had gone before.
The lesson of colonialism is that whoever is in charge gets everything, and the difference between sending this booty back to some distant Motherland and amassing it to build mansions on site is purely geographic.
This is not to suggest that only post-colonial nations foster this sort of thing, but, in those countries, it is stark and above-board for all to see.
This factor has been a godsend to the satiric comic strip Madam & Eve, which often refers to an incident involving ANC party members and … well, a picture is worth a thousand words …
… and readily translates to …
It is a nation in which, when the president is accused of raping an HIV-positive woman (a charge on which he was cleared), and explains that he protected himself from infection by showering afterwards, the nation's leading political cartoonist begins drawing him with a showerhead sticking out of his bald pate.
And so the president sues the cartoonist, whose newspaper, it should be noted, stands by the concept of free, dynamic commentary.
South Africa faces many challenges these days, but apathy is not one of them. I'm glad the lawsuit is over, I'm glad Zapiro is uncowed, and I envy South Africa, its cartoonists and its people, their challenges.
There are worse things than conflict, among which the worst may well be a lack of conflict.
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