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The South Atlantic Quarterly 103.4 (2004) 719-754



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Bitterkomix:

Notes from the Post-Apartheid Underground

Apartheid is supposedly gone and the avant-garde faces the question of what to make of a new sense of freedom and a new sense of limits. It seems that anything is permissible; everything is possible. It seems that any voice can find a niche audience to talk back to it. What exactly do you rebel against? What are the new taboos?
—Dror Eyal, Weekly Mail and Guardian (1997)

One of the most surprising features of the South African cultural landscape since the early 1990s has been the appearance of a series of satirical underground comics created by Conrad Botes and Anton Kannemeyer, two lecturers in graphic design at the University of Stellenbosch. First published in 1992, Bitterkomix quickly drew national interest. While its detractors protested against the publication's flirtation with pornography (Kannemeyer, or so a colleague declared, "flings the repellent results of his filthy preoccupation with sex in the face of the public"), appreciative critics declared Bitterkomix to be "undeniably part of our 'national culture'" and insisted that it "belongs in the Africana section of every library."1 Although Botes and Kannemeyer's work has been ignored by the National [End Page 719] Gallery's arbiters and has on one occasion been vandalized, it has received surprisingly broad public exposure. The South African advertising industry, for instance, never slow to register a new trend, has been fascinated by their ironic reappropriation of old commercial images and has put a high premium on their graphic skills.2 In recent years, Bitterkomix and its creators have even started to garner international attention. Botes and Kannemeyer have received many invitations to participate in international conferences and exhibitions; their work has been celebrated in a retrospective organized by the French Institute; and they have collaborated with well-known comic artists, including the American Robert Crumb and the Frenchman Pascal Rabaté.

The obvious criticisms that can be made of Bitterkomix are all probably justified: the comics are disgusting, misogynistic, deliberately provocative, studiously "postmodern," and not just pastiche-like, but at times downright imitative: even the publication's pervasive "loser" stance can seem all too reminiscent of American fanzines of the 1980s.3 But Bitterkomix is also a fascinating document for any critic interested in tracking the cultural shifts enabled by the political transition in South Africa. Few publications register as clearly the new energies unleashed by a transmogrified Afrikaans liberated from its immediate association with political oppression and reconceived as a kind of hip creole, full of subversive nuance. And few offer a comparably rich sampling of alternative histories, ranging from comics in which major nationalist myths are satirized, to embarrassingly confessional petites histoires in which the various artists (or their graphic alter egos) revisit the humiliations of Christian National Education, military service, and the Afrikaner nuclear family.4 In the course of indulging what one critic describes as a childish delight in drawing dirty pictures, Bitterkomix reexamines the legacy of the apartheid past on behalf of their target readership: disaffected young Afrikaners, who despised the old South Africa but are confused and anxious about their place in the new one.5

My concerns in this essay are threefold: I am interested in what Bitterkomix has to say, quite explicitly, about South African history and about the now defunct ideologies that subtended apartheid. But I am also interested in what Bitterkomix manages to convey more implicitly and unconsciously. Read as a collective effort, with attention to both the strips and the editorial correspondence, it is a symptomatic text, rich in clues about the structure of feeling of younger Afrikaners in the first post-apartheid decade. I am interested, finally, in the particular effects and implications [End Page 720] in the South African context of the publication's form: a sexually explicit and deliberately offensive Afrikaans comic book, created by artists who are highly self-conscious about the history of the genre they are working in and thoroughly schooled in various traditions of visual representation, from the...

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