News

TWENTY YEARS ago South Africa's favourite comic strip made its first appearance in the Weekly Mail. Its purpose was to record the absurdities of a community huddled together on the Southern tip of Africa as it grappled with the most dramatic social change it had ever known.

Apartheid was being dismantled around it, and the community's members faced new hope and new challenges. Enter Madam and Eve, a conscientious middle class woman and her wily maid servant; as good a representation of the country's 40 million populace as you'll ever get to fit within the confines of a comic strip frame.

BOTSWANA AFRICA'S BEST PLACED, SOMALIA WORST IN WORLD.Africa maintained its reputation for corruption in the latest World Corruption Rankings released by Transparency International recently. No African country made it amongst the twenty least corrupt in the world, while Somalia has the dubious honour of being the world's most corrupt. The majority of African countries can be found towards the dishonourable end of the index, ensuring lots of material for editorial cartoonists across the continent. [Read further for a full list of African rankings]

AS SA'S FIRST EXCLUSIVELY DIGITAL EDITORIAL CARTOONIST

JERM, the political cartoonist who was famously fired last month from his government aligned newspaper "for being too political", has bounced back, landing himself a position as editorial cartoonist for Eyewitness News (EWN). His cartoons will appear twice weekly on the news service's website, making it the first news site in South Africa to feature original content by an editorial cartoonist, and breaking new ground for JERM, a pioneer of digital cartooning in South Africa. The deal will also bring editorial cartoons into the radio space, providing EWN's radio partners such as 702 and Cape Talk a rallying point around which issues of the day could be discussed.

ZAPIRO DECLINES TO RECIPROCATEAfricartoons welcomes the news that President Zuma has dropped all charges against cartoonist ZAPIRO in what appears to be a response to the best legal advice the president has received on the matter. And if recent reports of Zuma's legal budget are anything to go by, that advice hasn't come cheaply. Who knows how much of the cost of this suit is to be picked up by the taxpayer?Hopefully that issue will soon be brought to light by our thriving investigative journalists, and then duly addressed by Zapiro and his fellow editorial cartoonists. Because an important detail of this withdrawal of the president's case against the cartoonist is that Zapiro, with the backing of his newspaper, has refused to compromise in his stand for free expression.