D.C. Boonzaier

D.C. Boonzaier (1865-1950) was a highly regarded South African political cartoonist, amateur theatre practitioner, critic and theatre diarist.

Biography
Born Daniël Cornelis Boonzaaier at Patatsrivier in the Cape Province in 1865. He came to Cape Town in 1882 as a clerk in the Master’s Office, where he started drawing portraits from photographs of world celebrities. In 1903 he became the first cartoonist appointed to the permanent staff of the South African newspaper, South Africa News. At the inception of the Afrikaans newspaper, Die Burger, in 1915 he became its cartoonist until the 1940s, particularly famous for his caricatures and political cartoons.

Boonzaaier died in Cape Town in 1950.

In 1973, his work was included in the exhibition ‘South African Cartoonists and Comic Strip Artists’ at the Pretoria Art Museum.

Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance
Boonzaier always had a keen interest in the arts, including theatre and theatre personalities, and corresponded regularly with artists and writers such as Leo Tolstoy, Sarah Bernhardt, George Bernard Shaw, Henry Irving,  W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan.

Jill Fletcher (1994) described Boonzaier as a "stage manager and capable actor among the gentlemen amateurs" and an "acute critic". A friend of many local theatre personalities, including Luscombe Searelle and particularly Stephen Black, he did numerous theatre-related cartoons and most significantly, kept an enormously useful journal of his avid theatre going. The latter material was first published as "My Playgoing Days" in SA Review, 9 March and 24 August 1932. These writings form the core of the second half of F.C.L. Bosman's second volume on theatre in South Africa (1980), dealing with the period between 1855 and 1912.

His son, the famed painter Gregoire Boonzaier (1909-2005), also did some designs for theatre.

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