Outrage over Zapiro cartoon drowns out problems

It is unfortunate one of South Africa’s most eminent satirists, Jonathan Shapiro, aka Zapiro, was forced to defend freedom of speech and his cartoon depicting NPA head Shaun Abrahams as an organ grinder’s monkey, then recant, following the usual social media outrage.  

Barely containing her "liberal" outrage in her Mail & Guardian column, Rebecca Davis asks Shapiro, "What were you thinking? Don't you know the monkey metaphor is offensive to black South Africans?".  

By the way, to be precise, Shaun Abrahams is a person of colour, expediently termed "black" to excoriate a white person of "racism", in this instance unfairly. I mention this in the context of a country where institutional racism is pernicious and entrenched - remember government spokesman Jimmy Manyi who said the Western Cape had too many coloureds". In Davis' case, though, what qualifies her to speak on behalf of ALL blacks.  Is she patronisingly suggesting all blacks are unable or not educated or sophisticated enough to interpret the metaphor?

Abrahams’ decision to appeal the “spy tapes” judgement has been condemned, and even ridiculed, as lacking legal merit, doing the president’s bidding and playing for time when inevitably either or both of the higher courts will confirm the judgement.  The Mail & Guardian reads “Shaun Abrahams shreds the NPA’s reputation.  The logic behind (Abrahams’) decisions to go to court over charges against the president is confusing, if not alarming ... he all but invited the public to mistrust him”.

The organ grinder’s monkey has long been used as a metaphor in language, literature and satire, as online Oxford Dictionaries describes it, of “being in control of another – the monkey dancing to the organ grinder’s tune”. 

This is certainly now our perception of Abrahams and, before his appointment, of his predecessor, his ethically-compromised deputy Nomgcobo Jiba and the NPA, an organisation that has gone from one self-induced and embarrassing political crisis to another.

I don’t think the cartoon was “racist”, but like most of Zapiro’s cartoons, clever and trenchant.  Someone told me the organ grinder monkey is probably unknown to many people, that is, to those now screaming blue murder – it’s an imagery from another time.  And because they don’t understand its metaphorical reference, they jump onto the superficial racism bandwagon.  I am puzzled, though, that Oxford-educated columnist Eusebius McKaiser does not see the allusion. (Is it OK that Mckaiser can give his book a title with the apartheid-era derogatory word “Bantu” in it?)

If we are to excise and criminalise innocent references in language, social discourse, art and satire, we would almost be left in an artificial, hermetically sealed world where even our thoughts are policed.  How much sooner to a situation where satirising a politician – in Parliament or outside – is not permitted.  Already this is beginning under the captured National Assembly where the Speaker is ruling opposition MPs out of order for making privileged statements about the ruling party that are true.

If we excise innocent animal imagery, as it applies to anyone who happens to be black, or any race, we would be bereft of, for example, Shakespeare who used numerous examples of animals from “ape” to “weasel” to describe characters in his plays.  We would be unable to stage his works, and prohibit their exhibition in any form, should they have in particular black actors in those roles.

Writing this week former politician Tony Leon says, “In the super-sized cabinet Jacob Zuma has constructed, ‘race’ has become a sort of one-note orchestral theme struck by everyone, as a convenient cure-all or blame-shifter for the array of problems confronting the country.”

This applies equally to the paroxysm of political correctness – the “PC witch hunt” – sweeping social media that is almost drowning the very real dangers of socio-economic decay, apparent resurgence of severe racial and tribal intolerance, extraordinarily high incidences of violent crime and rape, and not least, the erosion of democratic values and liberties under the current administration that, with its rent-seeking cronies, seeks to capture the state. 

Updated with link to Rebecca Davis' column and paragraph. See Bdlive.