Saluting political cartoonist Ndula

Saluting political cartoonist Ndula

Readers of the Nation newspaper woke up on Friday, April 12 to a surprise. The paper had published a cartoon on its front page. The oldest readers around town could not recall the last time they saw a cartoon on the front page of any newspaper.

Front-page photos are the preserve of big shots: Ruto, Raila, Uhuru. Occasionally, a woman’s face is splashed, especially sports heroines. Or if she is a stunning beauty who was murdered – with a sex angle to the story.

Friday’s cartoon was by Nation’s new catch – caricaturist Victor Ndula who quit the Star the other week. He lampooned former Sudanese strongman Omar Al Bashir who was deposed by a popular uprising after 30 years in power.

Bashir, sought by the International Criminal Court of alleged genocide in Darfur, is a close friend of the Kenyan government. He has been welcome in Kenya even as other nations shunned him. Perhaps Ndula was sending a message to State House?

The cartoon featured other African despots who have been forcibly removed: Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Sheikh Professor Alhaji Yahya Abdul-Aziz Jemus Junkung Jammeh Babili Mansa of the Gambia.

Ndula’s overall message to Nation readers appeared to be: Africa is rising against dictatorship, what are you doing?

Going by discussions on social media, Kenyans have been keenly following the uprising in Sudan for months. That must be the reason the Nation celebrated Al Bashir’s fall with Ndula’s cartoon on the front page.

Political cartoons are powerful tools of free expression. That is why dictators hate them. They are now commonplace in Kenya’s print media, but they have not always been.

The revered veteran journalist Pius Nyamora, publisher of Society newsmagazine from 1988 to 1992, pioneered political cartooning in Kenya. He lives in the US.

Nyamora details his contribution to media freedom and the struggle for democracy in Kenya in his 2007 MA thesis submitted to the University of South Florida under the heading, ‘The role of alternative press in mobilization for political change in Kenya 1982-1992: Society magazine as a case study’.

“Society pioneered the publication of political cartoons of government leaders in Kenya, and now the dailies use such cartoons without fear,” Nyamora writes.

The magazine’s chief cartoonist was ‘Maddo’, Paul Kelemba – one of the world’s finest. At a time when nearly everyone in the media was horribly scared of writing anything critical of former President Daniel arap Moi, Maddo sketched out Kenya’s head of state in unflattering shapes and sizes on the pages of Society.

“I launched Society to provide a forum for government critics, whose views could not be heard through the two main newspaper groups, the Nation and the Standard, because of government pressure,” Nyamora says.

Political cartoons are now a well-established newspaper tradition in Kenya, although cartoonists still face pressure.

Only last month, the Star had to publish an apology after KDF complained about one of Ndula’s cartoons.

The Observer salutes Ndula and all Kenya’s cartoonists who tell the truth laughingly.