Keeping a Sharp Eye

International relations are what a government does when nobodys looking. Whilethis may well once have been true, the conduct of international relations in SouthAfrica and elsewhere has come under increasing scrutiny by the public. This ispartially the result of specialist expertise around the formal study of internationalrelations and the making of foreign policy, enhanced by the development ofInternational Relations as a separate academic field.Like the growth of institutes of international affairs (or the Council on ForeignRelations, in the case of America), the study of international relations commencedat the end of the First World War (191418) with the establishment at the Universityof Wales, Aberystwyth, of the first academic chair in International Relations. It wascalled for Woodrow Wilson, Americas twenty-eighth president, and funded byWelsh businessman and pacifist David Davis.In South Africa, the study of international relations commenced with theestablishment of the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA),which met for the first time in the Senate Chamber of the University of Cape Townon 12 May 1934. Until then International Relations had been taught in variousguises within History, Law, Economics and Politics courses, but it lacked a firminstitutional base. In South Africa, International Relations was first taught as aseparate academic discipline at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1963 although a professorship, called for Jan Smuts, was first filled in 1961.Long before this institutional setting, however, a more subversive andcertainly more spicy variety of international relations understanding and critiquewas at work: this was, of course, the sharp eye on foreign policy and internationalrelations, drawn in jest and sometimes in anger by cartoonists. Their interest ininternational relations predates the emergence of the powerful critical perspectivesthat have changed and almost redirected the field since the ending of the Cold War.This book is about how these other experts have looked at and commentedon South Africas relations with the world over the past century. It examines theirinterpretations of unfolding events and considers how these commentators andtheir work interacted with the more formal understandings of foreign policy andinternational relations that came to pass long after cartoons first appeared.A century of South Africas engagement with the world is, understandably,a long and complex story. Cartoons on the country were done years before the1910 Act of Union, as some well-known cartoons of the Anglo-Boer War suggest.However, by confining my choices to a hundred years of the South African state, Ihave chosen firm bookends for the collection.The choice of cartoons itself requires further clarification. There is a ratherworrying recent notion in South Africa that nothing that happened in the countrybefore the historic election of 1994 matters. In April 2009, at a conference, I heardan academic colleague say that what happened in the 1930s was illegitimateand of no real relevance to the present. This lack of interest in history is bothshort-sighted and intellectually lazy. South Africas international relations todayare determined as much by the cartoons drawn by Boonzaier in 1910 as they are bythe cartoons drawn by Zapiro in 2010. I choose these two names not only becausethey conveniently cover almost the full range of the alphabet, but because they runfrom the founding of the South African state in 1910 to the present.Their names signal something else, too. I have only chosen drawings bycartoonists who worked in South Africa. As will be clear, many cartoonists werenot South Africanborn but brought the cartoonists trade with them to thiscountry. As such, they brought interpretations and understandings of the worldthat helped to shape South Africas perspectives o