A Dissident South African Cartoonist Tells His Own Difficult Story
The day that I met the cartoonist Mogorosi Motshumi, he handed me a page of notes and told me to read them aloud.
“You have to go through the stuff, because I can’t really read whatever I’ve written,” he said, sitting in a dimly lit living room in an apartment near Cape Town. “I can’t really see.” Motshumi’s eye problems began more than two decades ago, when he lost much of the vision in his right eye to an ulcer on his cornea. “What if something happens to my left eye?” he remembered thinking. “I would be in darkness. The only thing I’ve loved doing all my life, drawing, I wouldn’t be able to do again.” Over time, his sight grew hazier; last year, he thought he felt a grain of sand in his left eye, and it didn’t go away. “I remember I bought a newspaper, because I love reading, and I couldn’t make out the words.”
Motshumi, who is sixty-two, spends most of his time in Batho, a township in South Africa near Bloemfontein, where he grew up. He has lived and worked through some of the ugliest periods in his country’s history. In 1980, he was imprisoned for two weeks as an anti-apartheid dissident. After his release, the fear of persecution in Batho led him to leave his fiancée and their child and move to the more anonymous city of Johannesburg. In the nineties, he was told by a doctor that he was likely to die from AIDS. Through it all, he kept drawing comics; his book “The 360 Degrees Trilogy,” one installment of which has been released so far, is the first graphic memoir published by a black South African.
When we met in Cape Town last summer, however, Motshumi hadn’t drawn for months, and the days without drawing had depressed him. “I don’t have friends in Bloemfontein,” he said. “I only have my little cat.” He used to cherish solitude, because it allowed him to work. Now he was writing notes for comics he wished he could create. At times, he has felt his hope seeping away. “I used to look at my wrists. And there’s this jar, where I keep my pencils and razors and whatever. What if I just took this thing, and ended it all?”
Source: newyorker.com