A few years into the 1970s, as the two magazines started using homegrown African talents rather than exported ones, there started to be important shifts in the tone and content of the comic strips published in both
Mwana Shaba Junior and
Orbit. Though Mayele survived unscathed because of its popularity with the readers,
1 Paul Baeke continued the series from Belgium until 1987, when he was replaced by Gécamines employee Mukiny Nkemba. comic strips published in
Junior from 1972 showed an increasing ‘re-appropriation’ of Belgo-French narrative and graphic codes in ways that subverted or reversed them. An early example of this are the adventures of ‘Mwana’ and ‘Shaba’, two new characters which first appeared in the
Mwana Shaba Junior in the summer of 1972.
2 In total six ‘Mwana and Shaba’ adventures were published between 1972 and 1989. Cassiau-Haurie suspects that the first two adventures were produced by the Chenge brothers, who ran an influential artistic workshop in Lubumbashi. Cassiau-Haurie, Histoire de la BD congolaise, p. 39. The first two of these,
Echec aux Espions (1972–74) and
Le Trésor de Targaz (1975–77), follow a fairly similar template in which its two young journalist heroes travel to exotic locales – New York and ‘Tibera’, a fictional North African country – and are confronted with gangs of villains, whose plans they thwart. These two stories still have many characteristics that connect them to the Franco-Belgian comic tradition. Both are high-adventure stories set in exotic locations and broadly follow the aesthetics of mid-twentieth-century Belgian comics, being reminiscent of Franquin’s
Spirou et Fantasio. Both are full of slapstick humour – Mwana falls down the stairs of his hotel twice in high comical fashion yet never seems to get physically injured – and present Mwana and Shaba as moral paragons. For example, a new character introduced in
Le trésor de Targaz, a spoiled princess, who is used to her every whim being catered for, progressively learns to emulate the behaviour of Mwana and Shaba who are selfless and help others without expectation of rewards. Yet, on the whole, the usual template is here reversed. While Mwana and Shaba’s country of origin has featured in more than one European comic as the exotic destination, in this case, it is the two heroes who are doing the travelling, visiting such exotic locales as the United States, and they are the ones who are greeted as heroes by the ‘natives’. Elements of
Authenticité-era Zaïre, as Congo was known from 1971, are also visible throughout.
3 ‘Authenticité’, or ‘Zairianisation’, was an official state ideology implemented by the Mobutu regime in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In an effort to rid the country of the lingering vestiges of Western influence, the country was renamed Zaïre, and Zaïriens had to adopt new ‘authentic’ names, and change their ways of dressing and addressing each other. See Crawford Young and Thomas E. Turner, The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). Characters refer to each other as ‘citoyen’ or ‘citoyenne’, Mwana and Shaba conspicuously use ‘Air Zaïre’ to fly everywhere, and Zaïre is constantly implicitly being presented as a modern nation, a member of the United Nations on par with any other player on the international chessboard. In this way, European codes of comic-making were here used in a way that updated them for a contemporary ‘Zairian’ audience.
From around the mid-1970s,
Orbit and its comic strips started to change too, both in outlook and in subjects. These changes were claimed by the editorial team of 1977 to have been inspired by readers’ letters,
4 Orbit, 6, 6, October 1977, p. 1. yet this was a period when Zambia too was experiencing important political changes. In 1973, Zambia had become a one-party state, and, as economic decline started to bite, its politics became increasingly centred around the person of the President and the ideologies of the nationalist struggle.
5 Larmer, Rethinking African Politics, p. 167. This new party line was openly advertised in the
Orbit of October 1974 which celebrated Zambia’s tenth anniversary of independence. For the occasion President Kenneth Kaunda penned a letter for
Orbit’s young readers in which he grandly stated that ‘we older ones fought and won a battle for political freedom’ but this, he continued ‘was just the beginning – Not the end!’
6 Orbit, 3, 7, p. 5. This was accompanied by a ‘special insert’, a comic advertised as an ‘exciting picture-story’ depicting
how the Zambian people became united by the belief that every man or woman has the right to help decide the kind of life they live … to choose their own government! Orbit tells you how the people of Zambia gave voice to that idea through the leadership of Kenneth Kaunda. And how the people, the idea and the man became one nation on October 24 1964.
7 Orbit, 3, 7.Soon thereafter, Marion and Robert were taken down from their pedestal as
Orbit’s star cartoon to be replaced by
Fwanya, a young Zambian schoolboy whose two-pages-long stories were meant to be amusing and to educate children on good behaviour. In ‘Fwanya learns that laziness does not pay’, for example, Fwanya collects copies of
Orbit which he is supposed to bring to his teacher so they can be sold. He stops to rest and to read them, allowing the wind to blow all the copies away.
8 Orbit, 4, 3, p. 10. Just as Mwana and Shaba had stuck close aesthetically to earlier Belgian and Congolese comics, Fwanya’s realistic black-and-white aesthetics are only a stone’s throw away from the Fleetway-style comic strips which had previously been the norm in
Orbit. Similarly, despite this aesthetic continuity, there is a change in content, in this case towards a new brand of moralistic didacticism.
The content of these comics also differed at times from their predecessors in being located in a more distinctly Zambian or Katangese context and making references to events and societal change experienced by Copperbelt society. For example, in January 1975, a new comic in
Junior entitled
Un espion à Lusaka featured a young girl foiling a bomb attack at a summit held in Lusaka, where delegations of all ‘African copper-producing countries’ met to discuss the impact of the fall in copper prices.
9 Mwana Shaba Junior, 180, January 1975, p. 8. In fact, from the mid-1970s onwards,
Junior’s adventure and detective stories took a darker turn and, by the 1980s, stories depicting a character struggling against crime and corruption grew increasingly common. Similarly, comic strips in
Orbit had become much less ‘European-looking’ by the late 1970s and, apart from
Fwanya, all now touched upon topics relating to the realities of contemporary Zambian life. The stories of
Constable Mulenga, for example, highlighted urban dangers, such as going home alone from the cinema after dark.
10 Orbit, 6, 6, October 1977, p. 3. In a story entitled
Choose a Husband published in 1977, it was the tricky topic of marriage and the rift between cities and villages that was explored. Tisa, a chief’s daughter, decides to marry ‘a successful young man from the city who has come back to the land’, who, unfortunately, turns out to be a goat transformed into a man. ‘You had a lot of handsome young men to choose from’, the goat–husband teases Tisa. ‘You just wanted my money and my car and a goat for a husband Ha! Ha! Ha!’
11 Ibid., pp. 22–3. This is consistent with the evolution of the depiction of the village-town relationship in twentieth-century Zambian literature identified by Giacomo Macola. Whereas there had previously been a tendency to assign moral superiority ‘either to the urban or to the rural space as a whole’, he argued, ‘the demise of social expectations of urban permanence led to both spheres of social relationships’ and was increasingly ‘perceived as fundamentally deficient and unappealing’.
12 Giacomo Macola, ‘Imagining Village Life in Zambian Fiction’, Cambridge Anthropology 25, 1 (2005), pp. 1–10, pp. 6–7. Similarly, the story here serves as a cautionary tale for young women who get dazzled by the lures of the city, while it also criticises both city dwellers for their empty promises and villagers for their naivety and longing for material wealth.
Similar changes in perception were expressed in
Junior’s
Le Masque de la Tortue (1989–90), in which a young village man named Sadiki travels to the city to help his cousin, only to be disabused by the reality of crime and squalor he finds there. However, instead of going home as the heroes of such stories often do, Sadiki stays, and the message seems to be that people from the village and the city should help each other and are stronger if they do so. City life was further de-idealised with the arrival, in 1987, of a new comic character named Mafuta. As with Mayele, Mafuta’s comic strips are one page long, and consist of jokes derived from the frustrations of daily and domestic life. Yet this comic strip differs from Mayele in fundamental ways. Whereas Mayele’s jokes are slapstick-based, Mafuta’s play on (changing) societal mores and situations that Katangese readers may actually have encountered in real life. Mafuta jokes cover a large number of topics such as gender relationships, superstition, insecurity, and religion, and a great number find humour in family and social obligations. In
L’heureux papa, for example, two drunk men come to Mafuta’s house and demand he offers them a drink since a child was born in his family. They pester him until Mafuta buys them one glass of beer, and when they complain, Mafuta protests, ‘what are you complaining about? I bought you “a” drink, didn’t I?’
13 Mwana Shaba Junior, 366, August 1989, p. 5. In
Les visiteurs, Mafuta receives the visit of his uncle, aunt and children from the village. While his uncle is busy listing all the items he requires from Mafuta (a sewing machine, a bicycle, a suit, a hoe, clothes for his wife and children), Mafuta thinks: ‘what a disaster! Now I have five additional mouths to feed … life has become too expensive … I will get rid of them, and quickly.’ In order to do so, he gives them a bad supper, leading the unwanted guests to decide to leave of their own accord.
14 Mwana Shaba Junior, 372, March 1990, p. 5. Mayele and Mafuta’s jokes have in common that they take place in urban settings, mostly in and around the home. Yet, whereas Mayele’s jokes show a life of abundance and middle-class aspirations, Mafuta’s highlight all that is lacking.
From 1989, the year that the Kamoto mine collapsed, causing Gécamines’ total production to drop by 90% between 1989 and 1993, the implicit social and political commentary of
Junior’s comic strips became distinctly more explicit.
Les tribulations de Mashaka, published between 1990 and 1991, for example, straightforwardly dealt with the effects of poverty. Mashaka is a perennially unemployed character whose wife urges to go out and find work. Yet everything goes wrong for Mashaka. He loses the little money he had earned, breaks his leg yet continues looking for work, finds a job then gets fired, gets evicted from his house, and even tries to commit suicide. He is only saved when a rich uncle comes back from America and offers him a job on no other basis than the fact that he is family. The suggestion is that the only remaining way to get out of one’s situation is through a wealthy relative or going abroad. Similarly,
Msumbuko Le syndicaliste,
les victimes de la tentation (1989–90, by Mukiny Nkemba and Nansong Yav), deals with the effects of economic collapse. In this story, the protagonist is Masumbuko, the chief trade unionist for the textile company, I.T.M., which acts as a stand-in for Gécamines. The company originally does well but the salaries are too low and as one employee comments, ‘it’s impossible to make ends meet’.
15 Mwana Shaba Junior, 364, June 1989, p. 9. As time goes by, an increasing quantity of goods goes missing from the company as employees help themselves to them to compensate for their low salaries. Masumbuko then summons all of his fellow employees and lectures them on having endangered the company’s survival and by extension the ability of all workers to feed their families. Another worker then takes the stand and expresses what must have a widely shared opinion among Gécamines’ employees: that the directors of the company shared a part of the blame since they had sold out to ‘the capitalist system of exploiting Man to extract as much profit out of him as possible’ and neglected their ‘obligation to think about improving the living conditions of workers’.
16 Mwana Shaba Junior, 376, June 1990, p. 9. In that way, I.T.M.’s story is a thinly veiled reference to Gécamines’ contemporary struggle with debilitating thefts and underpaid employees.
On the Zambian side, meanwhile,
Orbit had been largely been supplanted by
Speak Out! A Christian Magazine for Youth, created by the Franciscan Mission press in 1984. It too contained comic strips, though fewer in number and of a very different kind than those contained in
Orbit, having been conceived in a very different political context. Whereas there had hitherto been no significant challenge to the party and its government, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, the unprofitability of the mining industry, rising foreign debt and periodic harvest failures finally led to rising discontent.
17 Larmer, Rethinking African Politics, p. 82. In this context, Zambia’s Catholic Church found itself in the position of mouthpiece for the opposition to the one-party state. This it was largely able to do because of its ownership of independent media including magazines such as
Icengelo (1971-present) and
Speak Out! (1984-present).
18 Marja Hinfelaar, ‘Legitimizing Powers: The Political Role of the Roman Catholic Church, 1972–1991’ in Jan-Bart Gewald, Marja Hinfelaar and Giacomo Macola (eds), One Zambia, Many Histories: Towards a History of Post-Colonial Zambia (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 127–43, p. 141. Like
Orbit and
Mwana Shaba Junior,
Speak Out! had games, a questions-and-answers section (‘Dear Kabilo’), and competitions. The overall tone however was very different. Whereas
Orbit was resolutely turned towards a vision of Zambia as a nation at the cutting edge of technology and fully incorporated in a global (or at least Pan-African) world,
Speak Out! was very Copperbelt-focused, and resolutely turned towards questions of politics and morality. The educational articles on science, technology or history which were
Orbit’s hallmark, were gone. Instead, the bulk of the articles consisted of thinking pieces, fictional and real-life stories often contributed by readers, and scripted conversations in which two friends debated a topic of interest. While political critiques were present in the magazine, with discussions about the education system
19 Speak Out! March–April 1984, p. 10. or the extent of individual responsibility in the quest of employment,
20 E.g. Speak Out! January–February, p. 2, pp. 3–4. these were now approached through the prism of topics that concerned the youth of the Copperbelt. As Danny Chiyesu, who has been producing comics for Mission Press since 1991, explained,
Speak Out! stood for ‘speaking out on all the issues about youth: smoking, sex, marriage, romance, jobs … anything to do with the youth’.
21 Interview, Danny Chiyesu, Ndola, 15 July 2019. It is thus meant to be educational, but in a very different way to
Orbit. Much in
Speak Out! was to do with life in the city, changing social mores, and surviving in a world marked by economic hardship. These, accordingly, were the topics which the comic strips published in
Speak Out! also tackled.
Whereas
Icengelo, the ‘adult’ magazine, had a recurring comic character called Katona, whose jokes were written in Bemba and poked fun at daily life in a Zambian urban environment,
the ‘comic’ strips that appeared in
Speak Out! were not based around jokes. Most were produced by the same person, Ndola resident Michael M. Nkaka, and usually involved two characters, often a man and a woman named Friday and Frida, discussing an issue of political or societal relevance. Some of Friday and Frida’s comic strips were more on the straightforwardly moralising side. Nkaka, for example, chose to portray the dangers of drunkenness by having a drunken Friday slip on a banana peel and break his leg.
22 Speak Out! January–February 1985, p. 20. Similarly, exhortations to avoid sex outside of marriage would be accompanied by warnings that it leads to abortion and AIDS.
23 Speak Out! May–June 1987, p. 20. Yet, in most cases, the dialogue format enabled the expression of critical opinions on debates which do not have easy answers, and were sometimes used to air controversial points without appearing to do so. Some comic strips, for example, tackled the question of the legacy of colonialism. In that of March–April 1984, Friday comments to Frida that he does not like going to church as he dislikes the noise of the drums, and considers ‘Gregorian chant’ to be ‘the only suitable music for church’. In this case, it is Frida who was given the last word, arguing that ‘it seems you’re another one of those old colonials who can’t sever their ties with Europe. It’s about time you became an African!’
24 Speak Out! March–April 1984, pp. 12–13. By far the most covered topics, however, were those of love, sex and changing gender relations. The May–June 1984 issue, for example, had Friday and Frida entangled in a debate about men and women’s role in society in which Friday argued that without a man, a woman is ‘a lonely old spinster’ while Frida exclaimed that ‘you men have ruled us like servants for far too long’.
25 Speak Out! May–June 1984, pp. 12–13.The village-town relationship is yet another topic which recurs regularly (see Figure 2.1). In the very first issue, Friday complained that he is forced to do manual labour whenever he returns to the village, feeling that, as the best student in his class, he is above such work. Frida responded: ‘you should be clever enough to see that manual work will make a man out of you. There are more ways of learning than out of books!’
26 Speak Out! January–February 1984, pp. 12–13. These are but a few examples in a long list of such discussions published in comic form
Speak Out! in the 1980s. The comic strips themselves had a simple graphic style and were drawn in black and white.
Similarly, while Friday and Frida share space in
Speak Out! with a series of other characters, they are all interchangeable: all serve as vehicles through which to discuss societal questions. In this sense,
Speak Out!’s strips were an illustration of the extent to which comics, had, by this point, been fully ‘weaponised’.
In her 2016 article ‘Belgo-Congolese Transnational Comics Esthetics’, Véronique Bragard argued that post-independence Congolese
bandes dessinées displayed what she calls ‘a re-fashioning of the genre’s form and themes, leading to new engaged postcolonial aesthetics.’
27 Véronique Bragard, ‘Belgo-Congolese Transnational Comics Esthetics: Transcolonial Labor from Mongo Sisse’s Bingo en Belgique to Cassiau-Haurie and Baruti’s Madame Livingstone: Congo, la Grande Guerre (2014)’, Literature Compass 13, 5 (2016), pp. 332–40, p. 332. She cites the work of Mongo Awai Sisé, one of the first major comic artists who emerged in Congo in the second half of the twentieth century, as establishing the tradition of ‘the same but not quite’. By this she means that he borrowed a series of codes and aesthetics from the Belgo-French comic traditions but subverted these codes and aesthetics to tell his own story.
28 Bragard, ‘Belgo-Congolese Transnational Comics Esthetics’, p. 334. Sisé’s Bingo series, for example bore some resemblance to
Tintin, but in a reverse paradigm. In contrast to Tintin, Bingo does not serve as a spokesperson of any civilising mission but instead suffers the consequences of the colonial inheritance, for example when he migrates to the city to find work, only to be confronted with fraud, corruption and general
inefficiency (
Bingo en ville,
1981) or when a trip to Belgium confronts him with the North-South wealth gap (
Bingo en Belgique, 1982). In that sense, Sisé used some of the codes of the Belgo-French comic traditions to highlight some of the grim realities which Congolese citizens faced.
29 Ibid., p. 339. Similarly, the period of nationalisation and Africanisation, coinciding with a fast-changing economic and political environment, marks the beginning of a process of ‘re-appropriation’ of the medium by Copperbelt artists as they sought to distance it from its Western roots. The manner in which this reappropriation took place, along with the themes and stories tackled by the authors, evolved and varied over time, influenced by the intentions of the institutions for whom the comics were produced and also by the socio-political context in which they were produced. The faith in a future that would be urban, prosperous and technologically advanced, and the subsequent gradual deterioration of that faith, have been key features of contemporary Zambian and Katangese literature.
30 Macola, ‘Imagining Village Life’, p. 23. It is not surprising therefore that they should also be central to contemporary Zambian and Katangese comics.
Speak Out!’s comic strips represent the ultimate point at which, in a context of fast-changing societal and economic realities, comics become a means through which to have a conversation about these changes.
~
Figure 2.1 ‘Frida and Friday’, Speak Out!, May–June 1986, back cover. Reproduced by permission, Mission Press, Ndola.