Zapiro (aka Jonathan Shapiro, 1958, South Africa) is editorial cartoonist for Mail & Guardian, Sunday Times and The Times. Born in Cape Town, he studied architecture and became active in the UDF in 1983. In 1988 he was detained by the security police shortly before taking up a Fulbright Scholarship at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He has produced educational comics with Story Circle; he has published 14 cartoon collections and also a large-format hardcover, The Mandela Files (2008).

He has held solo cartoon exhibitions and exhibited in numerous group shows both locally and internationally. He has been an invited participant and speaker in International Cartoon Events. In South Africa he has been a presenter and run workshops for a wide variety of organisations and educational institutions. He attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland 2003-2006 as one of a group of invited cartoonists.

He has received numerous International and SA awards. He has been awarded two honorary doctorates, Honorary Doctor of Literature (2004) University of Transkei and Honorary Doctor of Laws (2008) Rhodes University.

Personal thoughts on innovation and creativity

I love it that there’s a little white space in the paper that they leave for the cartoon, knowing it’s a space where anything can happen – something hilarious, something outrageous, something infuriating, something sad, something irreverent, something cerebral or something so controversial that it spills over onto the letters page and even onto the airwaves.

Cartooning is about tapping into the zeitgeist. It’s also about connecting the seemingly unconnectable, a way of sparking the mind to perceive something in an entirely new way.

Humour is just one of a cartoonist’s tools. But it’s the biggest tool in the box.