ARTICLES
"I decided to take pencils, crayons, paints, sketchpads as my weapons to challenge the so called ‘future,'" the South African Themba Siwela once wrote of his decision to become a comic-strip artist. Mr. Siwela is one of 35 artists, from approximately 20 countries, included in "Africa Comics," a poignant and utterly engrossing exhibition at the Studio Museum of Harlem.
Most of the artists wield pencils or crayons as weapons against a miserable future or against political and social injustice. For them, the borders of a sheet of paper mark off a space in which one can express oneself with relative impunity. Not, however, with complete safety: A number of these artists do not live in the countries they represent, and one imagines that many would not be alive for long if they tried to live at home.
Tayo (Tayo Fatunla), for instance, was born and continues to live in England, although he was educated partly in Nigeria and directs his politically charged work at a West African audience. His two sheets on view, in black ink on paper, come from a didactic series titled "Our Roots." One depicts Henry Nxumalo, a South African journalist murdered in 1957; the other, the actor Paul Robeson. In each, several portrait drawings — not caricatures — accompany short biographical paragraphs written in a style similar to what one might find in a child's encyclopedia.
Tayo is uncommonly decorous. A number of the artists aim their darts with bloodier intent. The comics they draw open windows on a world of brutality and anguish: Malevolent police and soldiers populate many of the strips.
The title character of "Monster in Khaki" by the Nigerian Kola Fayemi is a "brutal district police officer" rendered with muscular menace in black ink, who illegally arrests a man and then threatens to kill him if his sister won't sleep with the officer. Mr. Fayemi's strip goes on to depict torture and an attempted assassination on a trash heap — there is nothing comic about it.
As a quick survey of the titles demonstrates, most of these comics are tragic: "O Mon Pays" ("O My Country"), "Enfant de Rue" ("Child of the Street"), "People are poor, traders raise prices too much," "Dur d'Etre un Enfant Esclave" ("It's Hard To Be a Child Slave"), "Visa Rejeté" ("Visa Rejected"). Even the instances of comedy are often sinister, as "Komerera" by the Kenyan Tuf, in which a hunter stalking antelope becomes the hunted when he is attacked by a cheetah. Two of the contributors, South Africans Conrad Botes and Joe Dog (Anton Kannemeyer), collaborate on a graphic magazine called Bitterkomix, a title that captures the tone of much the work here.