The Anton Kannemeyer Interview
26 août 2026
An article by Robert Aman for The Comics Journal
Anton Kannemeyer is a South African cartoonist and artist. He is best known as one half of the alternative comics magazine Bitterkomix, which he has published with Conrad Botes since 1992, often under their respective pseudonyms Joe Dog (Kannemeyer) and Konradski (Botes).
The year is symbolically significant. The first issue of Bitterkomix was published before apartheid was replaced by democratic elections in South Africa. This historical turning point also shapes the content of the comics. Kannemeyer grew up in a divided country where violence lurked in every corner. Apartheid was a wall that concealed a world of possibilities. On one side of the fence, people were subjected to oppression, persecution, and death. Hope for the future was as narrow as the slit of a mail slot. Yet the system also isolated and diminished the lives of those who benefited from it. Kannemeyer and Botes — two privileged white Afrikaners at the top of the racial hierarchy that structured society — have consistently used the sharp edge of satire to depict the claustrophobia that defined their existence: a life shaped by censorship, control, and threat.
In an autobiographical comic, Kannemeyer recounts that it was only in adulthood, during a visit to Germany, that he first heard the names of the internationally renowned anti-apartheid figures Steve Biko and Nelson Mandela. For many readers outside South Africa, this revelation may seem astonishing. Since the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 — when South African police opened fire on several thousand Black demonstrators, killing sixty-nine — political developments in the country had been widely reported in international media. By the 1980s, when the events described in Kannemeyer's account take place, most European countries had tightened sanctions against South Africa's nationalist government, as apartheid had long been seen across much of the Western world as a festering sore on humanity's conscience. Kannemeyer's ignorance of these figures was therefore not simply personal; it was symptomatic of the apartheid state's formidable machinery of censorship. Information was carefully controlled, dissenting voices suppressed, and even the images of imprisoned activists prohibited. Photographs of political prisoners could not be published. Their faces, like their names, were meant to disappear from public memory.
An article by Robert Aman for The Comics Journal
Anton Kannemeyer is a South African cartoonist and artist. He is best known as one half of the alternative comics magazine Bitterkomix, which he has published with Conrad Botes since 1992, often under their respective pseudonyms Joe Dog (Kannemeyer) and Konradski (Botes).
The year is symbolically significant. The first issue of Bitterkomix was published before apartheid was replaced by democratic elections in South Africa. This historical turning point also shapes the content of the comics. Kannemeyer grew up in a divided country where violence lurked in every corner. Apartheid was a wall that concealed a world of possibilities. On one side of the fence, people were subjected to oppression, persecution, and death. Hope for the future was as narrow as the slit of a mail slot. Yet the system also isolated and diminished the lives of those who benefited from it. Kannemeyer and Botes — two privileged white Afrikaners at the top of the racial hierarchy that structured society — have consistently used the sharp edge of satire to depict the claustrophobia that defined their existence: a life shaped by censorship, control, and threat.
In an autobiographical comic, Kannemeyer recounts that it was only in adulthood, during a visit to Germany, that he first heard the names of the internationally renowned anti-apartheid figures Steve Biko and Nelson Mandela. For many readers outside South Africa, this revelation may seem astonishing. Since the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 — when South African police opened fire on several thousand Black demonstrators, killing sixty-nine — political developments in the country had been widely reported in international media. By the 1980s, when the events described in Kannemeyer's account take place, most European countries had tightened sanctions against South Africa's nationalist government, as apartheid had long been seen across much of the Western world as a festering sore on humanity's conscience. Kannemeyer's ignorance of these figures was therefore not simply personal; it was symptomatic of the apartheid state's formidable machinery of censorship. Information was carefully controlled, dissenting voices suppressed, and even the images of imprisoned activists prohibited. Photographs of political prisoners could not be published. Their faces, like their names, were meant to disappear from public memory.