Dangers and risks - Mustapha Bulama on the Creation of Political & Socially Cautious Cartoons
The point of an editorial cartoon is to take positive effect on politics and societal issues; not to spark fights and crisis that could burn down the country. - a chat with the Daily Trust cartoonist.
Just like every other person in this dire straits of today, the 2018 DAME award winning political cartoonist, Mustapha Bulama had to find a way to keep life going during the lockdown. For him, it is creating cartoons for social awareness about the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bulama, like many of the creative stock, causes a sort of ambivalence and garners different opinion among the people.
“People come to tell me that I'm biased as a cartoonist. Some people have called me an APC cartoonist at a point in time because they felt my cartoons favored the [current] government, but later on they end up confused because they don't know where I stand… So, when it favours the government then I am biased, but when it favours the people, I am the greatest cartoonist!”
BULAMA is a patriotic Nigerian and an editorial cartoonist with one of Nigeria's most trusted sources, Daily Trust Newspaper. This Economics major cum cartoonist expresses his fight for good governance and social justice through his skillfully crafted and highly opinionated cartoons criticizing either the Nigerian government or the people under this government. Thus, unlike many cartoonists who would rather pick on the government and spare the masses and vice versa, Bulama can be described as both a political - and a ‘socially cautious’ cartoonist: playing it fair between those in authority and the people.
He is sometimes dragged on social media, even by the government's people.
Bulama, explaining this art to one of his critics, said that Kano was like a cage for the dethroned Emir and not necessarily to the people. “For that cartoon, deposing the Emir actually set him free from the cage he was in - this is what I was saying. It clearly shows that the detractor didn't even understand the cartoon.”
However, that wasn't the only time Bulama would depict Kano state as a cage. I found another recent one:
Cartoonists have been subjected to all kinds of threats, this may include legal and physical harm.
Being a professional who has been creating political cartoons for his newspaper for over a decade, controversies are as sure as moths are to the flame in a tropical African land. Yet these are risks he is willing to take for social good. Luckily, he has not had anything worse than trolls on social media.
“But if you go to other countries, especially where there are dictators or there is some form of dictatorship, or the democracy in those countries are not well entrenched, they see cartoonists as probably threatening because you are expressing opinions that they don't want to be expressed. You are expressing these opinions using satire, and like I said some people just view it as an insult, like when you draw someone in a caricature of form. The people in government may feel insulted or threatened, and their ablers and supporters as well could also feel the same thing and because of this anger, you may be at risk in some ways.”
“I think partly it's because of my methodology; how I choose to make my cartoons. There's this unwritten rule with editorial cartoonists, he began, that they just have to make negative cartoons about the government or the people in power. I feel since it's not a written rule, nobody says it has to be like that.
‘So what I try to do is just to look at the situations. Look at the facts and look at the story, what is going on? As sometimes the government gets it right and the people get it wrong, but sometimes the public is right while the government is wrong! So I don't take sides and I don't make it like it's a rule that I must always say something negative about the government, no!”
And that, Bulama says, has probably been one of the reasons why he has not been facing physical threats.
Censorships and legal limits
In all forms of expressions, automatically it is implied that there must be some certain regulations to follow to maintain a status quo. Cartoons are very effective in message delivery, although put in the most humorous way, they are however highly opinionated.
Bulama tells me that editorial cartoons have no censorship because, in newspapers, they are viewed as humor items thus it is placed in the funny category. However, in reality, editorial cartoons are serious business because they can as well be provocative and land both the newspaper and the cartoonist in legal trouble, at the least.
So to avoid that, Bulama gave a way out for a certain situation: For some cases where somebody may want to see it as a libel or insult, one way the cartoonist gets out of this trap is that in the first place, you don't mention names. I may draw a cartoon that looks like a person but I don't write the person's name. So you can't hold me in court or anything saying that this is a libel against you because the cartoon looks like you. People look like each other in many places so as long as I didn't write your name there, you just don't have anything against me.
What do you think are socially cautious cartoons?
“When you say socially cautious; it's a kind of social awareness. And you can't be a political cartoonist without being socially cautious because everything you're making cartoons about actually relates to the social life of people. Like when you talk about governance or talk about justice, education, health or whatever, you just need to be socially cautious to actually make a cartoon.”
He also added that social media is an important source to gather people's opinions about issues.
“I remember the case of Charlie Hebdo in France…
It was, essentially, an execution. Twelve people slaughtered at the office of the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo in response to the paper’s series of gleeful, pointed caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. - JSTOR Daily
You see, this is something that Muslims revered and hold very dearly, so they saw it as insults to the Prophet. They saw it as crossing the line and a lot of Muslims were upset about it and expressed their anger. Some people also went to the extreme of taking weapons and shooting people in Charlie Hebdo.”
For this Charlie Hebdo situation and some I have followed up online, I pointed to Bulama my heartfelt opinion on how it seems that many times some cartoons tend to do more damage than good. But politely disagreeing, he gave a brief history of his professional life - working with Daily Trust as a cartoonist since 2010 and having done over a thousand editorial cartoons - that there has never been a single case of violence or crisis as a result of his cartoons, rather they are educative; informing people about happenings in the Nigerian politics and put the society at alert.
“For example the cases of killings in Zamfara, I made a lot of cartoons about that - speaking for the people of Zamfara - holding on the government to take actions. I have done a lot of cartoons on the issue of Boko Haram. I have done cartoons on the issue of the economy. I'm doing a lot of cartoons on the issues that have to do with the coronavirus we are facing in the world right now; creating awareness and expressing opinions. So I believe cartoons and cartoonists are doing a great job!”
In our voice notes chat, Bulama expresses a very calm personality and negates that unwritten rule, saying that the point of an editorial cartoon is to take positive effect on politics and societal issues, and not to spark fights and crisis that could only burn down the country.
He prides himself with the success of his cartoons, once his opinions has been perceived and understood. Although they may not necessarily be agreed with by the reader, but at least the message has been successfully sent. He would feel accomplished.
He's words for aspiring political cartoonists: even if you're good in drawing, it's not all about that; you must be able to analyze issues.
We ended the chat for Iftar, and Bulama urging the public to support cartoonists and show support for the Cartoonist Association of Nigeria.
Find Bulama’s cartoons on Instagram.
Bulama's Approach: How to Play it Safe while expressing on hot issues
In the artwork you may not necessarily draw a real person, you may just draw a generic cartoon. It could be a person that's wearing a particular garment of a particular faith but it's not a real person. Say for example, there is a renowned Sheik that does something wrong, and you want to express that he has done something wrong. But he has a lot of followers and these people are actually supporting him, ignoring the fact that he has done something wrong. And maybe it becomes a very hot issue, very divided issue in the country.
One, you may decide to cool down a bit and don't make a cartoon immediately on that, while there is still tension and the issue is still hot. Secondly, you could also make the cartoon without even showing members of that faith or showing anything identifiable. But by just reading the message, a person understands that you're referring to that issue.
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Well done, bro
Nice one