Zuma's comeback an election bonanza for South African cartoonists

South Africa's most famous cartoonist, Zapiro, says the upcoming elections brought an unexpected gift: the surprise comeback of his favourite subject, former president Jacob Zuma.

The caricaturist has depicted the 82-year-old politician with a shower head poking out of his skull for almost two decades and has no intention of stopping.

"The shower man is giving us trouble," he quipped. "I have huge fun drawing Zuma".

Zapiro came up with the shower gibe in 2006 after Zuma infamously told a rape trial he took a shower after having unprotected sex with an HIV-positive woman to avoid contracting the virus.

The depiction is known to irritate the graft-accused former leader who has sued Zapiro several times with little success.

Thirty years after democracy ended decades of apartheid regime censorship, political satire is alive and kicking -- and scandal-tinged Zuma remains a source of inspiration to many.

"Zuma is giving us amazing material, this is a very exciting time," said 34-year-old cartoonist Nathi Ngubane, who was born a month after Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

Forced out of office under a cloud of corruption in 2018, Zuma has returned with a bang as head of a new opposition party, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK).

The move has shaken up South African politics, with polls showing MK could pull off an upset on May 29, winning more than 10 percent of the vote.

That could see his former political home -- the ruling African National Congress (ANC) -- return its worst result in three decades and lose its parliamentary majority.

Respect your elders 

Ngubane said his parents, who are Zulus like Zuma, were initially shocked at his irreverent depictions.

"In black South African culture, you are expected to respect your elders," he said.

Yet, he was unmoved. "Because I can, I pressed on," he said. "We have to use our freedom."

In one of his recent drawings, Zuma is seen wearing traditional Zulu garb as he spikes his ANC rival, President Cyril Ramaphosa.

The latter was a tough nut to crack, said Zapiro, whose real name is Jonathan Shapiro.

"Cyril took me ages," he said in an interview in his sunny Cape Town studio, his dog Captain Haddock lying under the desk.

"He is the most reluctant president we have ever had."

Ramaphosa came to power on largely unfulfilled promises of stamping out corruption. Zapiro now draws him as "spineless" or as a "faux superhero".

'Tipping point' 

Getting a cartoon right takes a lot of pondering, he said.

"I never start out with a joke or a drawing. I use my left brain. I look at what are the issues, what is in the news and how I react to it," he said.

Recently he drew himself reflecting about whether Artificial Intelligence threatened his work in a series of vignettes for the Daily Maverick newspaper where he works.

After an analysis of the current state of political play, including Ramaphosa interrupted by a blackout during a speech outlining progress in tackling outages and a Zulu nationalist party using its late leader as the face of the election campaign, his character concludes it does not.

"Cartoonists will be the last to go," said Zapiro, who sports a neat goatee, explaining AI does not "see irony in stuff".

"I'll never run out of material in a place like South Africa," he said. "We have wild politicians."

For tragic events like a wave of xenophobic violence that killed dozens of people in 2008, he uses Mandela and late archbishop Desmond Tutu, shown side by side, to represent the nation's moral conscience.

"Critical thinking is what cartooning is about," he said. "I point out the anomalies to help things get better."

Yet, as South Africa struggles with high unemployment, rampant crime, failing infrastructure and widespread graft, he sometimes feels a "dissonance" between his role as a satirist and as a citizen.

"We are absolutely at a tipping point," he warned. "The next five years are going to be unbelievably scary."