Maus and South Africa

The graphic novel Maus is an artist’s interpretation of his father remembering his experience with the Nazis and Auschwitz in World War II. In addition to the war stories Spiegelman, focuses some of the story on how his father met his mother and their relationship before, during, and after the war. To represent the different characters in the story he chose animals. The Jewish people were represented by mice and the Nazis as cats. He did this to show the relationship between the two groups. The Nazis hunted the Jewish people, like cats hunt mice. He used his ability to draw comics as a new means for telling the story of the Holocaust and other Nazi related activities.

After reading about how the Nazis treated the Jewish people as less than human, the South African Apartheid government came to my mind. South Africa was a colony of the Netherlands. The country attracted the Europeans because of its locations. It is located on the southern tip of Africa, so when sailing past the Cape of Good Hope, having control of the land allowed boats to stop. Control of the colony eventually came under control of the British Empire. The British gave the colony internal self-government. The apartheid government was created by the Nationalist Party in 1948. Once in power the party passed laws that promote very strict segregation. Homelands were created, and every black was assigned a homeland. The homelands were separate countries from South Africa and the blacks were given citizenship to their homeland, creating an all white South Africa. Blacks could live in zones of South Africa as guest workers. Unemployment among blacks was high because they could not own property to have a business or farm and they had no educational opportunities. In addition, restrictions were placed on blacks on where they could and could not travel. They had to carry identification cards that said what homeland they belonged to. The police were used to keep resistance down. The Nationalist Party outlawed their political opposition, the African National Congress (ANC). Its leader was Nelson Mandela. The ANC would use violence to oppose the apartheid government. Eventually, the Nationalist Party realized that if they did not change their ways, there would be a massacre. To avoid their deaths, they released Mandela from prison after 20 years. Mandela began negotiations for a transition. The transition was complete in 1994, when he was elected as the first president of South Africa.

This reminded me of how the Nazis treated the Jewish people. The Nazis forced them to move from their home, like how the blacks were forced to move to the homelands. The Jewish people also had to carry papers to show that they were working, like the blacks having to show their identification cards. Both the Nazis and the apartheid government decided that other races were inferior to their own race and they must be taken care of. The apartheid government did not commit mass genocide like the Nazis, but they did create an all white country. They took away the country from the majority population, who had been living there long before the imperialists came. One positive difference between the Nazis and the apartheid government was that the Nationalists did not want a bloody massacre, so they negotiated a peaceful transition. One thing that surprised me about South Africa was that there was still segregation in the early 90’s. Many people forget that not all countries have the political equality that we have here.

I think that Maus was a unique way to tell a story and I think that it is more effective than some people give it credit for. I have read other book on the Holocaust, like Night by Elie Wiesel, and he went into some graphic detail. What I liked about Maus was that there were pictures that went with the story. These pictures gave the reader more of an impression of a situation, without them the reader having to imagine the situation in their head. I also liked how Art wrote about how the Nazi experience affected his father in the rest of his life. I think that the affects, after the Nazis, on others lives are also important and can sometimes be over looked.