This Is Wild — 8 years of satire from award-winning political cartoonist Carlos Amato

In his first book collection, award-winning political cartoonist Carlos Amato takes readers on a wild ride down the corridors of recent history. Here, Amato picks eight of the best of the 180 cartoons in his book, which spans eight years of satire, and reflects on each moment. 

***

2017

This cartoon, drawn on the day of Trump’s first inauguration, landed me my first gig, at the Mail & Guardian. I drew it as a pitch demo, and it somehow happened to be a coherent drawing. 

At that point, the full baroque scope of Trump’s “Magalomania” wasn’t visible, but he certainly had a powerful whiff of tinpottery about him. Ever since that grim day in DC, he has been defeating us political cartoonists. We’re supposed to be the hyperbole merchants. But we can’t rival his turnover of absurdity. He is more ridiculous than we can ever make him, and smarter than we ever imagined. His is a base, reptilian intelligence: a gift for harnessing and directing the awesome force of human stupidity. For making dumb people feel smart, and making smart people feel dumb.  

I’ve drawn maybe 50 or 60 Trump cartoons, and none of them do justice to his infantile power. 

2018

This one was towards the end of Jacob’s long goodbye: his position was untenable in the wake of the Gupta leaks, but he was sullenly holding out like an uneaten butternut at the bitter end of a braai. 

His endurance paid off – in the long run, he got a cushy deal out of the justice system. But he got a bad deal from the Guptas, a deal which we’re all still paying dearly for, because his bargaining skills were as rotten as his morals. Had he consulted some industry-standard playbooks on power centralisation – Putin’s, or Kagame’s – Zuma could have made himself the beneficial owner of South Africa. Instead he just flogged us all to some IT guys, for a pitiful share of the loot. 

Mistake. Even his base didn’t like that – not least because the Guptas were foreigners. If Zuma supporters had to get screwed, they wanted to be screwed patriotically. But Zuma’s patriotism had been broken by his dangerous life of spycraft. He lacked any ideology beyond bog-standard transactionalism. Anybody who could sweeten him up and keep him safe was his sweetie. 

Nowadays, we talk about his “Stalingrad” legal strategy, but it’s an ill-fitting analogy. Because Stalingrad was heroic. Zuma may once have been a kind of hero: for decades, he put his life on the line for liberation, evading capture for 21 years. Then the country was liberated. And then he was captured – with tragicomic ease. 

2019

Sadly, this one is an evergreen. South Africa is alive with possibilities to do a crime and get away with it. The country sometimes feels like an uncontrolled experiment on the long-term effects of unpunished theft and violence. We have ways to let you walk – among them TRC amnesties for apartheid atrocities, slapstick law enforcement, and the way we love an overdog in underdog drag. 

Yes, a few notable felons have found themselves in orange dress-up in the intervening years – but often as a brief ritual before beginning an exciting new life out on bail. 

The wheels of justice are pap. Prosecutors and judges gave Markus Jooste so much time to get his story straight that he became gatvol and lost the will to live. Thabo Bester is appealing every charge against him with such rabid endurance that Western consumerism may crumble before his trial proper and he will have to sew his own Louis Vuittons to wear in the dock. Tender-loving tycoon Shauwn Mkhize may have lost her football club, but she hasn’t lost her best life, despite the attempted murder by two hitmen of the SARS advocate on her case, Coreth Naude. And at the time of writing, the rapacious pastors Shepherd Bushiri and Timothy Omotoso were swanning around Nigeria and Malawi as free men, and even God doesn’t know why. 

2020

This one – about three plague viruses shooting the breeze in a pub called The Rat and Bat – went viral worldwide, and Stephen Fry shared it to his 12 million Twitter followers. I’d forgotten to sign it, so he tweeted: “Don’t know who to credit for this, but well done.” Friends alerted me, and I had to pipe up sheepishly on the thread. 

My 15 minutes had come. It was actually about 45 minutes. Thank God it’s over.

At first, the pandemic was a bit exciting. We all got to play the leads in our own tedious, art-house disaster movies. We all got free crash courses in epidemiology – except all those who took the batshitology module. 

Wave after wave, variant after variant, level after level. Grief, daily clapping, pot-banging, boredom, zooming, curve-checking. And in time, countless quality-time-induced breakups. 

We all went more or less bananas. Many leftwingers became hypochondriac, authoritarian scolds. Many right-wingers became unhinged New Age paranoiacs. Nobody knew what the bejeezus was going on, least of all the world’s rulers.  

Oh, what a kak time to be alive! But we laughed like drains, if only for the lack of much else to do. Us cartoonists enjoyed a captive audience of billions. 

2021

Elon Musk devotees flamed me for this cartoon and any Elon cartoon I care to draw. They say I’m just jealous of him because I don’t have money, and not even one spaceship. But I’ve learnt to think of all this as evidence that I’m not fence-sitting.  

What the hell is wrong with these tech tycoons? Did their billions delete their souls, or do you need to be soul-free to make billions in the first place? It’s fine to be rich, within reason. Good on you if you make a nice thing and hit paydirt. But it’s extremely not fine to get rich by turning us all into narcissists, trolls and idiots. To twist elections to ward off regulators. To flog AI plagiarism as progress, and crypto snake-oil as investment. 

Even worse, tech tycoons manipulate information flows as they see fit, using algorithmic power to dial down this fact, or dial up this lie. Conspiracy theorists believe it’s the mainstream media who are puppeteering them. They should be so lucky. Musk and Zuckerberg would rather you believe in lizard lords than progressive taxation.  

And now the AI hyenas of Silicon Valley have the gall to steal the entire body of human art and intellectual labour and feed its liquidised carcass into the atrophying brains of our children. 

Apart from all that, I like technology.

2022

In this one, poor old Pravin Gordhan resorted to semantics during a spell of severe load shedding bondage. Thankfully passing of the Stage 5 Age is one of the few things to be cheerful about right now. 

To be honest, I quite enjoyed doing my first dozen cartoons about load shedding. But once I got into the nineties and a century was in sight, I started to joke-shed. Unit 1 of my metaphor generation plant went offline. I had to sketch the chimneys of Kusile power station so many times that when I recently drove past the real ones, I felt a strange mix of alarm and nostalgia.

Unfortunately, the green transition is stalling everywhere, with gas and nukes back in vogue. And what about the planet, you ask? Well, it must just put its big-girl panties on and stop whining, say the jumpy politicians making all these “big-boy” decisions.  

Because as any ANC big-boy will tell you, you can shaft an electorate for a long time in many fascinating ways – but as soon as you force people to eat from a can in a dark room, they start shafting you back. Hard. In the ballot box.

2023

Of course, elite sports captaincy is not comparable to political leadership. You have a bunch of tough, fast okes on your side who all want the same thing – to win the match – and a meritocratic selection pyramid ensures they have the talent to do that thing. But still, this cartoon about Siya Kolisi trying in vain to upskill our political power players struck a chord with lots of South Africans. Why can’t our leaders team up a bit? And grow up a bit? Just for a bit, so we can get over this little centuries-long hump in the national road?  

As a former sports journalist, I’ve always been sceptical about the power of sport to unite a nation. But lately, I have had to revise that position a bit: the Boks are doing the business for our bruised national ego.  

2024

I drew this one after Thabo Bester had made an impassioned speech in the dock about the grave injustice of the court banning him from wearing his luxury brand clothing – Gucci, Louis Vuitton, etc – when appearing in the dock. It was a short leap to imagine a certain ubiquitous Chinese e-tailer spotting a gap and supplying him with some chic customised jailwear. This one went a bit viral. If there is anything that unites South Africans right now, it is a morbid fascination with Bester and his uniquely aspirational brand of psychopathy. 

2025

In the buildup to Ramaphosa’s excruciating appointment at the White House in 2025, lots of South Africans were brainstorming our president’s best strategy to mollify the Magalomaniac. In the event, he gave him a fat golf book, but this novel gift of some genetically Trumpified fruit might have done the trick. In response to the cartoon, a Facebook friend of mine dubbed Trump the “Neo-Naartjie” – which would have been the perfect brand name for SA’s realpolitik tangerine. DM

This Is Wild: The Best of Carlos is published by Jonathan Ball Publishers. It is available at a retail price of R250.