Domestic politics ... Madam and Eve
I first visited South Africa four years ago, visiting my girlfriend's grandparents living in Durban. When I arrived I was shocked to find an educated, comparatively radical, Indian family who had been deeply involved in Alan Paton's anti-apartheid Liberal Party also had an elderly black maid apparently at their beck and call.
In order to explain the situation and the culture my girlfriend presented me with a collection of Madam and Eve cartoons. To a white boy from Manchester the idea behind it seemed bizarre; a Garfield-style daily newspaper strip about a white Afrikaner woman and her Zulu maid.
Other characters include Madam's unreconstructed elderly mother from England who lives off gin and tonic, spends her days fighting with a local woman selling corn and is disgusted when her grandson returns home with a Zulu girlfriend. There was nothing delicate about the setting, but there was a lot of truth.
My girlfriend's Durban grandparents are, needless to say, a million miles from Madam. They have grown old with their friend Mavis and (this part is like the strip) spend their autumnal days arguing in Zulu with each other over feeding the dog or taking their pills.
As I read and bought more collections of the series I realised that, firstly, it was very funny and secondly there has been no greater chronicle of the changes that have come to modern South Africa. The strip began in 1992, when American Stephen Francis moved to the country with his South African wife and felt much of the same cultural confusion as I did. The character of Madam was apparently based on his mother-in-law, and he is, tellingly, now divorced and not on speaking terms with the source of his creation.
Over the years the strips have reflected, in a middle-class domestic setting, South Africa's national dramas. At the moment there is a huge public services strike which, at its peak last week, had 600,000 teachers, civil servants and nurses refusing to work. Madam and Eve, meanwhile, has been reflecting the negotiations between the unions and the government by writing about Eve's annual pay increase. The archive (http://www.madamandeve.co.za/archive.php) section of the main website offers the ability to search by categories which include the environment, economics, crime, race and gender. Maybe not so Garfield, then...
The whole set-up of the cartoon works because the reader is entirely on the side of the wry, intelligent and somewhat cynical Eve without ever hating the bumbling Madam or her semi-lunatic mother. Like the elected Mandela, the strip has always preached reconciliation over conflict.
The UK has nothing to touch it. Internationally, I can only think of Doonesbury as a example of a mainstream cartoon similarly unafraid to tackle the trickiest of national issues. But perhaps there are more gems like this completely unknown in the UK: anyone have any suggestions?
