Maravi

Farewell, Yuss

Farewell, Yuss
By Editor
Friday August 31, 2007 [04:00]

The death of Trevor Ford, popularly known as Yuss, is a big blow to us, our newspaper and indeed to all who read or followed his works, his cartoons. Yuss was with this newspaper from the very beginning, from edition zero - the dummy edition - of the Weekly Post, as The Post was then known. When Yuss was approached to contribute cartoons to this project, he accepted without hesitation, without weighing the consequences of doing so, especially for a foreigner who had decided to make Zambia his home and did not want to leave it under any circumstances.

Today we give thanks for the life of a man we are so proud to be able to call our friend, our cartoonist, our columnist: the unique, the complex, the extraordinary and irreplaceable Yuss, whose works will never be extinguished from our minds, from the minds of the Zambian people who he had decided to make his own people.
We thank Yuss for the way he brightened our lives with his cartoons, with his works and his genius. We feel cheated that he is taken away from us, and yet we must learn to be grateful that he came along at all. Only now that he is gone do we truly appreciate what we are now without. Yuss has left us sixteen years of cartoons, but we will never see any more new works from him.

Yuss was a cartoonist of a special kind. And indignation is what kept Yuss going as a cartoonist. Yuss humbled the pompous and the arrogant; he shamed liars and hypocrites. The glory of his cartoons was in their transience. If one didn't like Yuss' cartoons, one probably didn't like what was going on in Zambia. The significance and importance of Yuss' cartoons may be overlooked in preference to their humorous aspects, yet their power and pervasiveness cannot be ignored. Yuss, in his cartoons, shed light on the seedier and immoral face of Zambia as a commentary on societal ills. The widespread popularity and distribution of Yuss' works encouraged our leaders, political or otherwise, to act and address the social problems facing our country and our people. The power of Yuss' cartoons has been used to full advantage to help address societal ills and to just help readers laugh at themselves. There was a lot of witty and humour in Yuss' cartoons. The quality of Yuss' cartoons however varied depending on where you were and who was in power at the time, because openly criticising those in power could be very dangerous at times, but still Yuss continued, through his cartoons, to get his messages to the masses of our people.

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, as Yuss did, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, crossing each other from a million different centres of energy and daring. Those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of injustice.

Yuss used his cartoons as an appropriate tool for making accountable government leaders and others who wield or aspire to wield political and economic power over the lives of ordinary people. Yuss' cartoons were not about silly things to make people laugh, but were aimed at making our leaders account for their promises and duties to the people. The main purpose of Yuss' work was really to hold power to account. Through his cartoons, Yuss effectively questioned public officers' activities in terms of fiscal discipline and their responsibilities to the people. Clearly, Yuss' cartoons were a major component of press freedom in this country. Yuss' cartoons came out of indignation, anger and outrage. He trembled with indignation every time an injustice was committed in this country and in the world, and then tried to sublimate this into humour. He effectively used his cartoons to point out hypocrisy, pomposity, absurdity and arrogance. From Yuss' works, we learn that it is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another. From his works, we also learn that art, like life, should be free, since both are experimental. People believe that having freedom of expression is a natural phenomenon. It is not. It is the result of intense care and vigilance. We do not apologise for the effort of anybody in the news business to be entertaining, if the motive is to instruct and to teach and to elevate rather than to debase. A free press is not necessarily an angelic press. Freedom of expression does not exist so we can freely praise our public officials. It exists so we can freely criticise our public officials. Therefore, tolerance of a free press is the touchstone for a democratic society.

Standing up for what is right isn't always popular. But you cannot have a democracy and you cannot have a community if you don't have a way to share ideas. The right to express onerself is not something that is inherently part of being a journalist; it is part of being a human being.

Yuss' works over the last sixteen years pushed freedom of expression and of the press to higher levels in our country. He made a lot of people start to discuss the limits or parameters of freedom of expression and of the press. This is because his cartoons often combined anger and humour and as a result they could be profoundly disturbing - because they were essentially ironic and sarcastic, they were often misunderstood. And because cartoons are stealthy criticism, they frequently escaped civil and criminal libel laws and even censorship. This helped increase the levels of political tolerance and thereby extending the bounds of freedom of expression and of the press. It therefore cannot be denied that Yuss made a great contribution to the building of democracy in this country by helping increase the levels of tolerance among our people. And he will always occupy a special place at our newspaper and among our people. We will always remember him fondly and with pride. Farewell, Yuss.

Labels: EDITORIAL, THE POST, TREVOR FORD

posted by MrK @ 5:27 AM