Justice & Law Quote by Jonathan Shapiro

In apartheid South Africa, a single published drawing could move you from “artist” to “suspect” in a heartbeat. Jonathan Shapiro’s line is deceptively plain, but its chill comes from the imbalance it sketches: a cartoonist armed with ink and timing, and a state armed with surveillance, detention, and the bureaucratic certainty that dissent is a security threat.

The specific intent here isn’t melodrama; it’s calibration. “On one occasion” underplays what is, by any normal measure, extraordinary, and that restraint makes the threat feel routine - which is the point. Authoritarianism isn’t only tanks and trials. It’s the quiet normalization of intimidation, the idea that a satirical image counts as contraband. “Came looking for me” carries the bodily reality of it: the knock, the search, the sudden sense that your home and your body are now part of the state’s jurisdiction.

The subtext is a backhanded tribute to the power of cartoons. Regimes don’t send security police after harmless doodles. They do it when images puncture the official story faster than speeches can. A drawing condenses critique into something instantly shareable, memorable, and difficult to unsee. That compression is what scares power: humor doesn’t argue, it exposes.

Context matters: 1987 was deep into the emergency-era crackdown, when the apartheid government treated political expression as insurgency. Shapiro’s recollection doubles as a cultural timestamp - evidence that satire wasn’t a sideshow but a frontline language, risky precisely because it reached people without needing permission.