Q Toon: RIP Madiba

The death of a beloved, historic figure presents editorial cartoonists with both opportunity and challenge. Our memorial cartoons tend to be our most popular works; but for most of us, it's not enough to draw something saying that, gee, it's sad someone's gone. A cartoon that is truly worth the effort should say something unique and memorable about the person eulogized. The best do so simply and directly: Joe Heller produced his tour de 46664 within hours of the news breaking that Nelson Mandela had died.

Like many cartoonists, I often look for quintessential quotations on these occasions. At first, I wanted to draw a cartoon with Mandela's quotation that "to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others." But Scott Stantis and David Horsey used that statement from Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom in their cartoons on the AAEC web site the very next morning.

Not being on a daily deadline, I still had some time to find just the right quotation, so I wasn't worried about other cartoonists using all the good ones before mine made it to print. (Although I didn't foresee Keith Knight's memorial cartoon, for which one single quotation just wasn't good enough.) I spent several hours combing through his speeches on the African National Congress web site.

I settled on a 1998 speech marking World AIDS Day. Late in his presidency and into his retirement, Mandela became a campaigner for HIV/AIDS awareness; the disease had not yet claimed the lives of his son and daughter-in-law at the time of the speech quoted in my cartoon. I didn't get a World AIDS Day cartoon done in time for December 1 this year, so, tardy as it is, my cartoon this week pulls double duty.

No Peeking

In lieu of This Week's Sneak Peek, I offer a cartoon I drew in September of 1989. The speaker in the cartoon is South African Prime Minister F. W. deKlerk, making an announcement after months of police beatings of anti-apartheid demonstrators.

As the world celebrates the life of Nelson Mandela, it's striking to read educators and others remarking that students and young adults today do not know anything about him. And yet, trying to think back for an analogous case for my generation, I suppose some of my high school classmates had heard of the 1956 uprising in Hungary, but very few would have been able to identify Imre Nagy.

I went to college during a time when there were loud calls for colleges and university to divest from South Africa over its apartheid policies -- a hot-button issue at the time. The Soweto riots made headlines around the world, as did the death in police custody of Stephen Biko. America joined a wave of nations imposing sanctions against South Africa in 1986 only after the U.S. Congress overrode Ronald Reagan's veto.

The first cartoon I ever drew about South Africa was inspired by the film "Last Grave at Dimbaza" in 1975 or so. I no longer have the cartoon, which showed an armed white South African in pith helmet and safari gear using a dug grave as a warfare trench. I later discovered that Milwaukee Journal cartoonist Bill Sanders had drawn pretty much the exact same cartoon a few months earlier.

In spite of that sketchbook caricature of Nelson Mandela that I posted the other day -- drawn somewhere around the time that he was released from prison after 27 years -- I don't appear to have drawn him in any cartoons for publication at the time.

Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013

In memory of one of the greatest political leaders of our time:

South African President Nelson Mandela passed away today at the age of 95. I drew this caricature of "Madiba" sometime around 1990 or 1991 as an early experiment with colored india ink.

The colors in the background are of the flag of the African National Congress (ANC); I don't recall whether the current South African national flag had been created at the time I drew this in my sketchbook. Either way, it's very unlikely that I would have had a picture of that flag handy before the 1992 Olympics.