An app of Zapiro: Jiving with Madiba, which celebrates the life and contributions of South Africa’s greatest citizen, his struggle, successes and shortcomings, as portrayed by South Africa’s leading political cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro, better known as Zapiro, will be available on App Store next week.
Not just another tribute to Nelson Mandela, the app brings the global giant together with a giant of cartooning each ‘shaping’ the other. With over 330 of Zapiro’s cartoons, video and audio footage, Zapiro: Jiving with Madiba traces the life of Nelson Mandela from Prisoner to President to Pensioner. In addition to the cartoons published in several of the largest newspapers in South Africa, Zapiro’s struggle era work for the UDF and ANC from the eighties is also on display, as are dozens of drawings from his original sketchbooks including sketches for a 70th birthday card Zapiro made for Madiba while being detained at Pollsmoor Prison during Madiba’s 6-year imprisonment there.
“Drawing on my cartoons of Madiba from the late 1980s to the present, this app is my personal tribute to the great man of our times. In this one man we see the embodiment of the nation’s apartheid-era suffering and also of the struggle against racist oppression. And he has become the embodiment, post-apartheid, of our new democracy. Mandela and his generation of comrades were the architects of democracy and they represented values that the ANC is now losing,” says Zapiro.
The app is based on a popular exhibition about Mandela held at the Jewish Museum in Cape Town in 2011 and the now out-of-print publication, Zapiro’s Mandela Files.
Zapiro: Jiving with Madiba is available from 24 July onwards for R 79.99 in South Africa and is priced accordingly in other regions. The app is available world-wide on iTunes and on the Appstore.
