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Anton Kannemeyer:

Bitterkomix

Anton Kannemeyer was a guest at the second Comica Festival in 2004 with his crony Conrad Botes and the two of them were interviewed by The Guardian‘s Steve Bell. They had to bring over with them copies of the two compilations of their best comics translated from Afrikaans into English, because neither were being distributed or sold here due to their strong contents. Five years on, Kannemeyer’s satire has lost none of its pointed teeth as his latest strip, specially created for Art Review, demonstrates.

Satire is in the eye of the beholder. The most cutting political satire, if misread, risks cutting both ways and appearing to endorse the very things it set out to assault. Might resurrecting racist imagery from the past to condemn racism today also serve to perpetuate that visual poison and feed prejudices further? Or can a postmodern re-reading give it added potency to shock and shame?

These questions cannot have escaped Anton Kannemeyer, a white cartoonist-provocateur from South Africa who has been fierce and fearless in skewering his homeland’s politicos and bigots and the broader legacy of colonialism since 1992. That year, Kannemeyer and pal Conrad Botes were students at Stellenbosch University and together started Bitterkomix, the sort of uncensored, truly underground anthology which, under the oppressive apartheid regime, could only be privately printed and circulated discreetly. Assuming the pen-name Joe Dog (which sounds like the slur ‘You Dog’ in Afrikaans), Kannemeyer looked beyond South Africa, a nation with little comics tradition of its own, and began referencing Americans Crumb and Clowes and Europeans Hergé and Moebius.

For example, in the strip below Pappa & The Black Hands, first published in the September 2009 issue of Art Review magazine, he reinterprets an old, environmentally incorrect ‘comedy’ hunting scene from Hergé‘s Tintin In The Congo, the second book in the series from 1931 when the country was a Belgian colony. Kannemeyer ages the boy-reporter into a balding, black-haired father figure and blacks up Snowy. Whereas Tintin keeps shooting at what he thinks is a single ‘indestructible’ antelope, only to find that he has killed a whole herd, Kannemeyer’s Pappa does the same, but slays not one but nine black Africans, before strolling off with a sackful of their severed hands.

Beneath the outrage in most of his racially and sexually challenging oeuvre runs a dark autobiographical current, the ‘bitter’ in Bitterkomix. Beaten by his ‘papa’ as a boy, Kannemeyer lays into the indoctrination of white superiority, conformity, masculinity, puritanism, the whole middle-class Afrikaans culture which he was raised on and rejected. In his 1999 story, “Why Bitterkomix”, he explains, teeth clenched, “In retrospect, I guess I must thank these people for my fucked-up childhood. They gave me inspiration and taught me empathy. But I will always run away from them. I will never stop.”

Today in South Africa, his confrontational work can be published by edgy book publishers Jacana Media Ltd. (Bitterkomix #15 came out last year). It’s also been compiled into the classy-looking coffee-table tome The Big Bad Bitterkomix Handbook, and exhibited in contemporary art spaces like the Michael Stevenson Gallery. Nevertheless, responding to today’s democratic Rainbow Nation, Kannemeyer sees no reason to stop antagonising anyone, no matter what colour, who abuses power.

As he concluded in March 2009, in an interview to accompany a shocking and damning new webcomic on the site Creative Time about the cover-up of prison rape in South Africa:

“I think that big corporations and corrupt governments are mainly responsible for the current state of Africa. There is often very little transparency when oil and other minerals are extracted from Africa. Corruption is rife and this needs to be exposed and challenged on all levels. But I think when addressing these issues (as a satirist) it’s important to do what good satirists do: to entertain critically. As soon as you get on a moral high horse everyone is bored to death. It’s a challenge to sustain comedy sometimes like when peoples hands are chopped off: it’s not really funny, no matter which way you look at it.”

Kannemeyer explained further about his revisiting of Tintin in an interview from October 2007 with Fred De Vries related to his exhibition at the Beam Gallery at Spier Wine Estate, Stellenbosch, entitled The Alphabet of Democracy, much of which was printed in Bitterkomix #15 the following year:

“When I was in Berlin recently I bought a copy of Tintin In The Congo for my 2-year old daughter Anna. She loved the animals and seeing all the action. But then I realized there are certain stereotypes she cannot understand. Like she calls the black people monkeys. It puts me in a position where I don’t want her to grow up with those stereotypes and the idea that some figures are better than others. It’s very difficult to explain that to her, and I find it problematic that that book is available to children without a context where it’s explained to them. So I did a parody of that cover, which triggered everything for this exhibition: looking more broadly at the white colonialist in Africa.”

Posted: August 30, 2009

A shorter version of this article first appeared in Art Review magazine in September 2009.

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My Books




1001 Comics  You Must Read Before You Die edited by Paul Gravett

Comics Unmasked by Paul Gravett and John Harris Dunning from The British Library



Comics Art by Paul Gravett from Tate Publishing




Featured Books


The Big Bad
Bitterkomix
Handbook

by Anton Kannemeyer
& Conrad Botes


Tintin
In The Congo

by Hergé