One itsy bitsy doodle disappears and behold, the earth shakes... Ciao, Gado

It is hard not to be jealous of the cartoonist. There is a certain purity to the art-form: Long before we learn our ABCs we are taught to draw to express ourselves.

An unbroken chain from the days when people slapped paint-drenched hands on cave walls to say “We were here” through to hieroglyphs and pictograms to the present.

Every week several hours are dedicated to giving my editor heartburn by playing chicken with the deadline while trying to squeeze something coherent from the brain onto the screen. But a picture is worth a thousand words and a pithy cartoon is worth a thousand passionate columns.

So it was a shock to read the story of the end of Godfrey Mwampembwa’s work as The EastAfrican and the Nation’s editorial cartoonist. Ironically, I read all about it on the Facebook page of a publication titled Africa Uncensored in an article published on Wednesday, March 9.

His fans have been spoiled. We’re used to taking for granted that when Monday rolls around one of the events guaranteed to make the start of the workweek slightly less dreadful will be Gado’s skewering of some inanity, usually political.

The last time Gado didn’t show up in The EastAfrican as expected, there was a complete freakout online. He was forced to emerge from his little break to reassure us that he was alive and well and whatever horrors we were busy imagining were just that – imagined. A pretty strong indicator of the value placed on his work by its consumers, right?

Politics affects us all at such an intimate level, the more so in countries where our institutions are rarely strong enough to provide a layer of safety and functionality between those who rule and those who are ruled.

At the best of times, politics is straight up crazy but on this continent of ours, politics is all too often virulently psychotic, sometimes lethally so. In this environment, you can imagine that freedom of speech and freedom of the press are a little hard to practise.

And speaking truth to power, well. Risky business. I am perfectly aware that our societies, not just our politicians, harbour a deep suspicion of free speech, mostly because we mistake criticism for disloyalty and also because we’re stuck deep in the basement of patriarchy.

Maybe that is why Africa has three of the world’s best political cartoonists working for local publications: South Africa’s Zapiro at the Mail and Guardian, Gado formerly of Kenya’s Nation Media Group, and Kipanya of Tanzania’s Mwananchi newspaper.

They make what they do look so simple, so easy. Entertainment, therapy, activism all available at a glance. But using humour to remind the power elites to be humane is crazy hard.

The opposite of love isn’t hate, it is complete disinterest. Professional malcontents who drag their societies’ and their leaders’ evils into the limelight do it because they care deeply. They are idealists. They’re trying to fight the injustices wrought by power. These folks are providing an extremely rare and valuable service in less-than-ideal political environments, practising freedom of speech for the public good.

Speaking of political environments, I have always thought that The EastAfrican as a newspaper is the best socio-political institution of the EAC – and it’s not even an EAC initiative per se. For years this newspaper has come out every week behaving as though the EAC has already federated, its capital is Nairobi and The EastAfrican is the federation’s official newspaper.

Sure, it likes to pretend that it is a terribly serious and unimpeachably professional outfit, but we all know that at heart it is an adorably idealistic folly of the most optimistic — and of course, lucrative — kind.

To be fair, it does more than offer a natural home for the region’s integration enthusiasts. The media sectors of our...wait, how many are we now, six?... individual countries face considerable challenges. The EastAfrican managed to exploit its relative independence to publish things that would founder local media houses in most regimes – thereby garnering the deep respect and admiration of many, and the loathing of a dangerous few.

This was the paper that was hard-core enough to publish a prize-winning cartoonist punching our political elites right in the vanity, where they need it the most.

Was. The effect of the disappearance of one itty-bitty doodle is completely disproportional to its size, but as the saying goes, it is the little things that matter. Ciao, Gado, and thanks for all the ink.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com. E-mail: [email protected]