The headlines out of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which tend to evoke images of bloodshed, rape, ethnic hatred and government corruption, are usually no laughing matter.<\/p>\n
But political cartoonist Kashoun Thembo is an expert at wringing humor out of his country’s tragedies, capturing the newsmakers and travails of life in DR Congo with a fierce pen that hits home and spares no one.<\/p>\n
At the end of each afternoon, Kash — the pen name he took in 1992 to protect himself under the regime of late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko — joins the editorial team of Le Potentiel, the most widely read daily in the capital Kinshasa, to thrash out the day’s news.<\/p>\n
The next morning the first thing many readers turn to is his work.<\/p>\n
“I take the news and I reproduce it according to my rules, the journalists enrich it, we discuss it. I exaggerate but I keep the essence of the information,” Kash says.<\/p>\n
“When people complain, my boss tells me I’ve hit the mark.”<\/p>\n
There are plenty of targets here for a political cartoonist.<\/p>\n
Wealthy in gold, diamonds and coltan, DR Congo nevertheless sits second from the bottom of the U.N.’s Human Development Index, a measure of development in countries around the globe.<\/p>\n
Back-to-back wars that ravaged DR Congo from 1996 to 2003 have given way to a complex web of rebel groups still terrorizing the east.<\/p>\n
And the world’s largest U.N. peacekeeping force has not managed to stop atrocities including killing of civilians, use of child soldiers and rape on a scale that has given the country the label of “rape capital of the world”.<\/p>\n
Kash’s work regularly lampoons this sad reality.<\/p>\n
In one of his cartoons, a U.N. peacekeeper leers at a young girl as she leaves school in the eastern province of North Kivu.<\/p>\n
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” he asks her salaciously.<\/p>\n
“Anything and everything… except a rape victim!” she answers, glaring at him.<\/p>\n
Another depicts the tough job journalists have in the country, which watchdog Reporters Without Borders ranks 142nd in the world for press freedom.<\/p>\n
A cigar-chomping strongman in a three-piece suit tells a young radio reporter, “You want information? You’ll have to go straight to the source” — and points her toward crocodile-infested waters.<\/p>\n
Kash likes to quote Plantu, a veteran cartoonist for the French daily Le Monde, who asserts that to do the job well, you need “a good dose of bad faith”.<\/p>\n
“A kind caricature doesn’t exist,” says the jovial Congolese cartoonist, 48, clad in a cap and with his work under his arm.<\/p>\n
“You don’t do caricatures to please people…. It’s my way of taking part in the debate.”<\/p>\n
— ‘Bad boy’ —<\/p>\n
Born in Beni, in northeast DR Congo, Kash crossed the vast nation and took up classes at the school of fine arts in Kinshasa.<\/p>\n
He says the event that launched his career was the death of Jamaican reggae legend Bob Marley.<\/p>\n
“It was in ’81 and everybody wanted Bob Marley on his T-shirt. I never stopped drawing. When my father saw me with so much money on my hands he believed I had become a thief,” Kash says.<\/p>\n
“I watched television with a pencil in my hand…. I learnt by experience,” he adds, recalling that his first caricature was of Ivory Coast’s late founding president, Felix Houphouet-Boigny.<\/p>\n
His work was singled out by a fine arts professor who had worked in the Brussels studio of famous Belgian artist Herge, the creator of Tintin.<\/p>\n
His first published cartoon targets included the United Nations, the great powers and neighbouring Rwanda — all of which says contribute to DR Congo’s misery.<\/p>\n
“We Congolese are the first to blame, but they must stop looting us,” he says.<\/p>\n
Kash, who is married with four children, puts his monthly income at $1,000 (750 euros) — a lot higher than the theoretical minimum wage of $90.<\/p>\n
But life in Kinshasa is expensive. To top up his earnings from Le Potentiel, which has a daily print run of 3,000, he works for diplomatic missions that want to give parting staff a caricature to sum up their stay.<\/p>\n
Asked whether his career is a sign of increasing freedom, Kash says he has never been threatened.<\/p>\n
“When I am presented to dignitaries, those people are very kind,” he says.<\/p>\n
“But once my back’s turned, they say ‘bad boy’.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The headlines out of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which tend to evoke images of bloodshed, rape, ethnic hatred and government corruption, are usually no laughing matter.<\/p>\n
But political cartoonist Kashoun Thembo is an expert at wringing humor out of his country’s tragedies, capturing the newsmakers and travails of life in DR Congo with a fierce pen that hits home and spares no one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":9907,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=451"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}