A Semiological Analysis of Dudley's Political Cartoons in the Namibian Newspaper

Introduction

Political cartoons communicate powerful politically-inclined renditions reflective of how cartoonists view contestable contemporary issues in society. They feature as well-crafted products of artistic creation that can distract, express a joke, and provide social commentaries on key aspects of reality. All over the world, political cartoons that satirize against governance practices by powerful politicians and ruling parties are a common feature in the press. This study presents a semiological analysis of Dudley’s political cartoons, found in The Namibian newspaper from 2016 to 2019. As in economies of many African states, during this period the Namibian economy has generally been on the decline, thereby calling for new thinking in socio-economic and fiscal policies of the country. In this study, the analysis of the selected political cartoons was done from the Barthesian semiology perspective with the main objective being to interpret the meaning of the selected political cartoons at the connotative and denotative levels and also to present how the Namibian political landscape is depicted through Dudley’s cartoons. The study observes that Dudley is a pseudo name of a cartoonist that has been churning out vital cartoons on various issues of life in Namibia.

The analysis focuses on contextually embedded political cartoons that are subjected to multiple interpretations and discursive analysis. In brief, the study found that Dudley’s political cartoons depict and portray the Namibian political landscape by satirically divulging the political aspects of the country. Among the aspects portrayed through the studied political cartoons are those centring on various inefficiencies in the delivery of services to citizens with themes such as corruption, unequal distribution of resources and generally poor service delivery in the public sector as the dominant findings. Findings present political cartoons as vital metanarratives of society that need to be taken seriously particularly by policy makers, who through gleaning such information-rich sources could realise the need to revamp socio-economic and fiscal policies in order to alleviate the suffering of vulnerable groups in society. Therefore, the study concluded that political cartoons serve as mirrors used by the media, specifically to generate public attention, reorient people and initiate social and political reform in Namibia. These results yield the need to adopt a servant-leadership approach based on Ubuntu whereby governance practices are driven by consensus through which leaders view themselves as called upon to serve above everything else. This renders political cartoons studied herein as harbingers of didactive messages that are critical to socio-economic development.