Brandan Eugene Reynolds (b. 1970) is South Africa’s most prolific editorial cartoonist. He has been drawing the daily editorial cartoon for the national newspaper Business Day since October 2002, as well as the weekly cartoon created for the national weekly Sunday Times. Born in Cape Town, he matriculated from St. Columba’s High School in Athlone, Cape Town, and then graduated with a a diploma in Graphic Design from the Ruth Prowse School of Art and Design in Woodstock in 1991, specializing in illustration and design, despite not attending a high school that offered Art as a subject. Over a 30-year career he has contributed editorial cartoons to The Weekend Argus, The Sunday Independent and the Sunday Tribune and the Afrikaans-language Rapport as well as the Sunday Times Business Times. He received the Standard Bank Sikuvile Journalism Award for editorial cartoons in both 2013 and 2015. He became a member of the international organization Cartooning for Peace in 2014 and is also a member of Cartoon Movement. He lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa with his wife, Rose-Anne, son Kai and daughter Ella.

Brandan Eugene Reynolds

A CARTOONIST’S STORY

In June 2017, I was invited to be part of Derek Bauer’s Retrospective Exhibition at the Iziko South African National Gallery. It is an incredible honour to be part of such a prestigious show of a great South African cartoonist and I wish to take this wonderful occasion to look back at my 15-year career as the editorial cartoonist of this newspaper, Business Day. This is my story…

I was born in Cape Town on the 4th July 1970. I grew up in the suburbs of Lansdowne and Athlone on the Cape Flats. My parents nurtured my drawing talent from an early age, collecting stacks of used paper and letting me draw the backs of greeting cards, cigarette wrappers and matchboxes. I attended art classes on weekends and continued drawing throughout high school although art was not offered as a subject. While staying with my maternal grandparents in Bridgetown, when I was about 8 years old, I discovered a book of cartoons by the British cartoonist Giles. I assumed it had been brought home by my grandmother after no-one claimed it from the lost-and found where she worked. My grandmother was the caretaker at the lady’s toilets in the Strand Concourse below Strand Street in Cape Town. The detail intrigued me and I would look at the amazing cartoons in that book for hours on end. Another book that someone left behind was a St. John’s Ambulance First Aid Guide. I enjoyed this one for its graphic drawings of broken, bleeding limbs and bandaged heads. At that point, my career trajectory could have gone either way. I considered becoming a doctor, but at that age, I never imagined I could be a cartoonist. 

While I don’t recall the school boycotts of 1976 as I had just stated school that year, but I do remember the school boycotts of 1980. I attend St. Columba’s High School in Athlone with cast of incredible characters, including the late Robert Waterwitch, who was a year ahead of me. Robbie and I shared a love for music and we started a “Reggae Club” in 1984 where we would meet after school and watch films like “Prisoner On The Street” and “Babylon By Bus” and discuss the socio-political themes around the music and its roots. Robbie’s journey from youth activist to MK soldier and ultimately, his violent death at the hands of security police in 1989, had a profound effect on me and it continues to inspire and inform my work today. I painted the two portraits of Robbie and Coline Williams, who was also killed in the same incident, to display at their joint funeral at an Athlone church. It was after that intense period that I saw something in the local newspaper that completely made sense to me as a future career. I saw an editorial cartoon by the late Derek Bauer depicting the then-President PW Botha in a moment of extraordinary denial. It was an extremely funny cartoon, but it made such a strong statement about the politics at play at that time in our history.

After finishing high school, I attended UCT’s Michaelis School of Art where I lasted just one year. I floundered miserably in an attempt to explore cartooning while trying to catch up on the entire syllabus of high school art, which almost all most of my first-year white classmates had previously benefited from. A neighbor and mentor, Basil Juries, who had studied graphic design, encouraged me to not give up and to continue to use my talent and pursue my dream. The following year I enrolled at the Ruth Prowse School of Art for their three-year Graphic Design diploma. At Ruth Prowse, encouraged by my teachers, I was able to bring my cartoons and drawings into many of the graphic design projects, something that was curtly discouraged at UCT. I was also introduced to the airbrush and its layers and masks approach to painting, which I still follow, although now in pixels and not tiny paint droplets.

After graduating I freelanced in the newspaper and advertising industry for a few years, but as the miracle of 1994 unfolded, I felt called to try and take my place as a cartoonist in the New South Africa. I worked feverishly every day for many months trying to learn the unwritten rules of this mysterious craft and analyzing cartoons and what made them work. In September 1994, after a Time magazine-inspired-all-nighter, I produced a cartoon on the situation in Haiti, where General Raoul Cedras had been “persuaded” by the US to step down in favour of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the man he ousted in a 1991 military coup. I was so proud of my efforts that the next morning I was standing outside the offices of The Argus, in Cape Town with the cartoon under my arm. I called the managing editor, the late Tim Patten, from a payphone in the shadow of Newspaper House on Greenmarket Square. After I explained my cartoon, he invited me up to his office on the 4^th floor. He was the classic newspaperman, replete with a pipe hanging from the corner of his mouth and stacks of newspapers scattered around his wood-paneled office. He chuckled as he studied the cartoon and said he would show it to the editors at the news conference. At the time, The Argus had no staff cartoonist and often ran cartoons from other newspapers around the country. The next morning Tim Patten called me to say that the cartoon would be appearing on the editorial page that day. I was ecstatic! He then asked me what I had for tomorrow’s paper. “What…tomorrow?”, I exclaimed… “you want another cartoon for TOMORROW?”… that cartoon took me SIX MONTHS!!!!!

Over the next few months, I produced a few more cartoons for publication in The Argus. I was also invited by IDASA to draw the main, inside cover cartoon for their quarterly publication “Democracy In Action”. In 1995 I was given my first regular spot when I was approached by the editor of the Weekend Argus to draw two cartoons per week for their two weekend editions. I was also asked to contribute one cartoon per week for the daily editions of the Cape Argus. I began to appreciate the enormous amount of reading and research that informed a great cartoon so I plunged head-first into the sea of information that surrounded me and applied myself whole-heartedly to creating and drawing cartoons.

When Bruce Cameron, the Personal Finance editor, offered me a full-time job as illustrator/cartoonist/information graphics artist for his weekend supplement in 1997, I grabbed the opportunity with both hands. I continued to draw the Weekend Argus cartoon but also grew in this new role by developing my computer graphics and pixel-based computer illustration skills.

I married Rose-Anne, in March 2000 and I accompanied her to Atlanta, Georgia in the United States where she took up a two-year teaching post through the Visiting International Faculty. While living in Atlanta, I was employed as a news graphics artist by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and later during my stay, in their advertising creative department. As I was a guest of the United States, I felt it too easy to draw political cartoons as an outsider. I believe cartoons emanate from a deep sense of your place in the world where your destiny is inextricably woven into the future of the country you belong to. Upon our return to South Africa in 2002, I was offered the position of Senior Graphic Artist at Business Day in Johannesburg. The clincher was that the editor, Peter Bruce, also expected me to submit a small daily editorial cartoon for publication as well as graphics for publication. I was back in the game! My first cartoon for Business Day was published on November 1^st 2002.

I resigned from full-time staff of Business Day in 2004 to move back to Cape Town and became a freelance editorial cartoonist, which enabled me to draw for a number of other publications as well. I began drawing the Eastern Cape Herald’s cartoon a few days per week until I was re-appointed as the editorial cartoonist for the Weekend Argus in Cape Town in 2007 and remained a contributor to various Independent Newspaper title until earlier this year. In that same year, 2007, I was also invited by then editor Tim du Plessis to draw the editorial cartoon for Rapport.

I currently draw 7 editorial cartoons per week for three different South African newspapers (Business Day, Business Times and Rapport), in two official languages. 

I also regularly contribute my work to cartoon collections, books, academic books, news magazines and other publications, in South Africa and abroad. I was awarded the Standard Bank Sikuvile Journalism Award for editorial cartoons, in 2013 as well as 2017. I am also a member of the international cartoon group Cartooning For Peace.

Rose-Anne and I have two children, Kai (14) and Ella (10).

Brandan E. Reynolds

21 August 2017