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ELL Cartoon lecture 1 Race Representation in South African Comic Strips - Comprehensive Study Notes

Introduction and Scope

  • This module analyzes the history of well-known South African comic strips to critically engage with how race is represented through irony, satire, ethics, pedagogy, and literacy in visual culture.
  • Key focus areas include:
    • Paternalistic English colonial visual representations of blackness by artists such as George Cruikshank, Samuel Daniell, and Charles Bell.
    • How these early stereotypes influenced later depictions during the Anglo‑Boer War (the South African War), including Afrikaner and French portrayals of the Zulu and Dutch depictions of the imperial British.
    • How these lineage representations shaped apartheid‑period visuals in white liberal and conservative presses.
    • The contemporary context of political cartooning with figures like Zapiro and strips such as Madame & Eve, Staffrider, and Urban Trash.
  • Core aim: illuminate how cartoons enact, sustain, or challenge racial meanings and how irony and metonymy reveal private thoughts of artists and readers within politically charged moments.

Key Concepts and Theoretical Framing

  • Satire: use of humor, irony, or exaggeration to critique politics or society.
  • Irony: expressing a meaning opposite to the literal one, often to highlight contradictions.
  • Caricature: exaggerated representation of a person or trait for effect.
  • Stereotype: simplified and fixed ideas about a group.
  • Metonymy: representation of one thing by another associated thing (e.g., a collective identity or cultural symbol).
  • Hyperbole: extreme exaggeration to emphasize perceived traits or issues.
  • Visual codes and techniques: parody, exaggeration, stereotype, and caricature are not neutral; they are socially coded and reflect the cartoonist’s social world as well as audience expectations.
  • Ambivalence of cartooning: cartoons often rely on reductive methods, yet they can expose the complicity between artist, reader, and political context.

Lecture Outcomes

  • Understand artistic techniques and genres in relation to their practical use (satire, irony, stereotype, caricature, metonymy, hyperbole).
  • Grasp the historicity of cartooning and race in South Africa.
  • Debate whether cartooning should serve as a balanced forum on race or whether its contradictory nature should be acknowledged.
  • Explore how texts and images provide both authoritative truths and provisional truths.

Historical Roots: Early Cartooning and the Cape

  • The South African cartooning tradition begins with the Cape of Good Hope.
  • On September 7, 1819, two hand‑coloured prints by George Cruikshank were published by T. Tegg of Cheapside, London; these were intended for private collection, not broad public circulation.
  • These works commented on British imperialism and colonial presence, addressing class, race, ethnicity, and cultural difference.
  • Andy Mason describes Cruikshank’s cartoons as “visual texts.” He writes:
    • "If we see these pictorial representations as texts in their own right, rather than simply as adornments to the written word, it becomes clear that they should be read and interpreted as carefully as any other source of historical evidence" (Mason, 2011, 15).
  • Mason further argues that attention must be paid to how these cartoons are presented to contemporary readers.

Visual Codes and Authorial Intent

  • Mason’s key theme: beyond race/ethnicity, visual codes such as parody and exaggeration are embedded in artists’ social worlds and are intentionally coded.
  • These techniques reveal both the private thoughts of the artist and the audience, prompting a debate about whether the cartoonist reproduces prevailing social opinion or aims to shape it through satire, caricature, and related means.

Bell and Baines: Archetypes and the European Self/Other

  • Cruikshank’s cannibals are not the same as the ‘Hottentots’ they are meant to represent; Bell and Baines’ early career as illustrators and watercolour painters show a tension between depicting an African idyll and the libidinous, naked African.
  • Lola Young notes the contradiction of the naked African as a tenuous balance between attraction and repulsion.
  • Mason sees these stereotypes as archetypes—mythic, layered, and more complex than a simple “stereotype.”
  • These images function as projections of the European sense of Self and Other and connect to the British travel aesthetic of the 19th century, linked to the triumph of Reason and science in exploration narratives.

Bell and Baines: Romanticism, Ethnography, and the Cape

  • With industrialization and rural decline in Britain, artists longed for the Romantic, while Bell and Baines presented themselves as pictorial ethnographers who aimed to show the “real Cape”: its people, flora, and fauna.
  • The intent was to depict accurately, but accuracy was not always achieved.
  • Baines, in particular, leans toward caricature, emphasizing the imperial project and the development of racial stereotypes; his depictions of the Xhosa will be discussed in the next lecture.

Visual Examples: Cruikshank’s Cape Imageries (Fig. 4 and Fig. 5)

  • Fig. 4 (Cruikshank, 1819): Coloured engraving; an example of early Cape imagery.
  • Fig. 5 (Cruikshank, 1819): The embedded text includes sensational captions about emigration, civilization, and the supposed bounty of the Cape.
  • These images illustrate sensationalized tropes: the Garden of Eden metaphor, emigration rhetoric, and the promise of abundance contrasted with fears of violence and subjugation.
  • Notable excerpts from the engravings (as presented in the transcript) include phrases such as:
    • "Garden of Eden, his sex Paradise!! the Land of bromuse desord…"
    • "To be half roasted by the Sun & Devoured by Natives!!"
    • “The Bread & milk grows upon trees! what do you think of Dist Johnny !!! indeed the truck is all cream & the cream is all butter…"
    • "If your Children ask ye for Bread, will ye give them a Bullet?!"
  • These captions reveal a propagandistic rhetoric that promotes emigration narratives while normalizing violence and the commodification of colonial life.

Private vs Public Stereotypes and Cannibalism

  • A dominant stereotype in Cruikshank’s work concerns the primitive Other, often depicted in European dress, reflecting ongoing European anxieties about civilization and degradation.
  • The cannibal trope—reports of cannibalism, witchcraft, and savage superstition—were widely accepted by British audiences and exploited to provoke fear and exoticize the Other.
  • Cruikshank’s emphasis on cannibalism is not concerned with factual accuracy but with manipulating the subconscious fears and fantasies of the British public; it also engages with debates about abolition and civility in a way that questions what constitutes a “civilised society.”

The Comical Imagination: Comics as Imagined Realities

  • Comics have historically helped audiences imagine beyond themselves and to destabilize conventional thinking by turning reality “topsy-turvy.”
  • Sheena Howard and Ronald Jackson (2013) argue that comics enable readers to step outside their own experiences, enabling critical reflection on social assumptions.

Contemporary Context: From Cartoon Strips to Modern Political Cartoons

  • The module also traces how race representations persist into contemporary South African visual culture.
  • Prominent figures and strips include:
    • Zapiro (well‑known political cartoonist)
    • Madame & Eve
    • Staffrider
    • Urban Trash
  • These contemporary works continue to negotiate the ethics and politics of race, satire, and readership, illustrating the ongoing ambivalence and force of cartooning in public discourse.

Ethical, Philosophical, and Practical Implications

  • Cartooning is inherently ambivalent: it often relies on caricature, stereotype, and exaggeration, yet it can reveal the complexities of political life and public opinion.
  • Questions to consider:
    • Should cartooning provide balanced race accounts, or should we embrace its contradictory and provocative nature?
    • How do readers’ private judgments interact with published images to shape public discourse?
    • What responsibilities do cartoonists have when representing vulnerable groups or historical traumas?
  • The transcripts emphasize that visual representations are not mere adornments; they function as “texts” that require careful interpretation as historical and cultural evidence.

Connections to Foundational Principles and Prior Lectures

  • The study situates cartooning in a long history of racial politics from colonial-era imagery to apartheid and beyond.
  • It links visual representations to broader political agendas, media practices, and cultural discourses around race, empire, and nationhood.
  • It underlines the need to examine how power circulates through both the production and consumption of cartoons, and how pedagogy and literacy are implicated in interpreting these images.

Figures, Works, and References

  • George Cruikshank: early Cape cartoons (1819); Cannibalism and “Hottentots” stereotypes; private vs public messaging.
  • Charles Bell: British travel aesthetic; depictions of Africans; tension between idyll and libidinous/eroticized Other.
  • Thomas Baines: caricature­dist tendencies; imperial project and racial stereotypes.
  • Andy Mason: visual texts concept; read cartoons as historical evidence; discussion of reader spectacle.
  • Lola Young: naked African as archetype; attraction vs repulsion.
  • Zapiro, Madame & Eve, Staffrider, Urban Trash: contemporary South African cartooning traditions.
  • Sheena Howard and Ronald Jackson (2013): Comics and the imagination.
  • Key dates and figures from the Cruikshank engravings:
    • September 7, 1819
    • Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 (Cruikshank, 1819)

Glossary of Terms (Key Concepts in Context)

  • Visual Texts: cartoons read as historical documents, not mere illustrations (per Mason).
  • Caricature: exaggerated features for effect.
  • Stereotype: fixed, oversimplified ideas about a group.
  • Metonymy: representing an idea by a related symbol or attribute.
  • Hyperbole: deliberate exaggeration for rhetorical effect.
  • Ethnography in visual art: attempt to depict “real” cultures, often filtered through empire’s gaze.
  • Provisional vs. authoritative truths: cartoons can reveal or distort truth depending on context and interpretation.

Summary Takeaways

  • South African cartooning has a long, contested history in which race, empire, and political power are encoded through visual rhetoric.
  • Early 19th century prints by Cruikshank helped establish enduring tropes—such as the noble savage, the cannibal, and the idealized “Cape”—that informed later depictions in the Anglo‑Boer War and apartheid eras.
  • The same visual strategies that rely on caricature and stereotype also permit social critique and exploration of private thoughts and public opinion.
  • Contemporary strips and cartoons continue to grapple with race, representation, and ethics, underscoring the need for critical media literacy when engaging with visual culture.