D.C. Boonzaier

(1865-1950) Highly regarded South African cartoonist, amateur theatre practitioner, critic and theatre diarist. Daniël Cornelis Boonzaaier was born at Patatsrivier in the Cape Province in 1865. Boonzaaier became famous for his caricatures and political cartoons. 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. 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. He also had a keen interest in theatre and theatre personalities, and is described as a “stage manager and capable actor among the gentlemen amateurs” and an “acute critic” by Jill Fletcher (1994). A friend of many 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 (1981), dealing with the period between 1855 and 1912. His son, the famed painter Gregoire Boonzaier, also did some designs for theatre. [TH]