{"id":1585,"date":"2011-01-22T08:57:18","date_gmt":"2011-01-22T08:57:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/?p=1585"},"modified":"2011-01-22T22:11:01","modified_gmt":"2011-01-22T22:11:01","slug":"gado-satire-is-a-serious-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/2011\/01\/gado-satire-is-a-serious-business\/","title":{"rendered":"GADO – satire is a serious business"},"content":{"rendered":"

An afternoon stroll through Nairobi\u2019s streets provides Kenya\u2019s top cartoonist GADO with the inspiration he needs to make the nation laugh at its contradictions and problems and then think about why<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Writer Hermann Hesse claimed that humour was \u201cperhaps the most brilliant achievement of the human spirit\u201d, with which East Africa\u2019s most famous cartoonist Godfrey Mwampembwa \u2013 aka GADO \u2013 entirely agrees, adding: \u201cT. S. Eliot said humour is a way of saying something serious.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

And the man should know. Political cartoonist since 1992 for the Nairobi-based Nation Media Group, Tanzanian-born GADO has been pressing readers\u2019 humour buttons for years, becoming in the process an acute political interpreter and arguably the most popular person with the ordinary man on the Kenyan street. Plus many of his cartoons get used around the world. First he makes you laugh, then he makes you think.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes, he does get flack. \u201cI suppose an editor or a cartoonist should be worried if he is not being \u2018flacked\u2019,\u201d says GADO, whose work runs the gamut of international comment; he presaged the infamous Danish cartoons by months with a depiction of a female suicide bomber. Closer to home, he keeps politicians on their toes with a comic genius that is unafraid to depict the children of Kenya\u2019s first leaders divvying up the spoils in a \u2018dynasty playground\u2019, or cabinet ministers involved in corruption scandals.<\/span><\/p>\n

During Kenya\u2019s appalling post-election violence in 2008, in common with his Daily<\/em> Nation <\/em>colleagues, GADO was busy defusing tensions. In one cartoon, an ominous black cloud sits over the legislature, echoing the national mood, but in another, he shows a woman with perennial demands, standing between the two disputing party leaders (Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga) who are arguing over the hot topic of the stolen election.<\/span><\/p>\n

Pillorying anti-social behaviour is GADO\u2019s specialty and he is deeply interested in learning how people react to his cartoons. \u201cI always say I have a copyright on what I do but not a copyright on the interpretation.\u201d What makes him chuckle is when people tell him: \u201cThis is what you meant.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

How does he react to his iconic status? \u201cSometimes I have difficulties with people saying you are the saviour of this society… so I tend to run away from assuming any moral high ground position.\u201d Rather, he is unafraid to raise issues, positing that he enjoys a certain leeway since he does not belong to any of Kenya\u2019s ethnic groups.<\/span><\/p>\n

Walk down any busy Nairobi street and you can watch people buying a newspaper and turning straight away to the editorial cartoon, where GADO\u2019s spare, precise and well-configured drawings of politicians\u2019 shenanigans bring a daily smile to readers\u2019 faces. These are the same streets he walks along in the afternoon, taking the city\u2019s pulse as the deadline approaches, especially if a concept is eluding him because, after all, it is the ideas that are gold. \u201cDrawing is the easy part,\u201d he admits.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI must say, I started following world events when I was very young,\u201d says GADO who, in addition to garnering myriad awards, helms the XYZ television series (an animated puppet satire of Kenyan politics in the Spitting Image <\/em>mode pioneered in the UK), for which he was made a 2007 Prince Claus laureate. GADO cites the work of Philip Ndunguru (a groundbreaking Tanzanian cartoonist who died in 1988) as an inspiration, but he also studied animation in Treviso, Italy and at the Vancouver Film School.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the philosophy of humour, GADO believes that \u201cCartoons are never about wrong or right… but are about raising issues and discussions, provoking thoughts so in the process people can talk and discuss and come up with some ideas.\u201d This is what motivates him. He is not didactic, crediting his large family in Dar es Salaam with fostering his innate sense of humour and developing his knack of looking at things from a comic perspective.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHumour helps you deal with things,\u201d he says. His wide fan base would agree.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An afternoon stroll through Nairobi\u2019s streets provides Kenya\u2019s top cartoonist GADO with the inspiration he needs to make the nation laugh at its contradictions and problems and then think about why Writer Hermann Hesse claimed that humour was \u201cperhaps the most brilliant achievement of the human spirit\u201d, with which East Africa\u2019s most famous cartoonist Godfrey […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10673,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[64,43,73],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1585"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10673"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}