In an upcoming edition of The Big Issue, readers will find a cartoon jam featuring a bunch of little contributions by a bunch of South African cartoonists (some of whom are not very little).

This inaugural AfricartoonJam Big Issue patchwork features the work of: JOHN CURTIS, DR JACK, STIDY, MARK WIGGETT, MILES, STENT, NANDA SOOBBEN, ZAPIRO, F ESTERHUYSE, NIËL VAN VUUREN, JERM, GROGAN, RICO, GAVIN THOMSON, MGOBHOZI and ND MAZIN. See more of their work on africartoons.com, and get a printed version of this historical collaboration in the December 2012 edition of The Big Issue, available for sale in Cape Town and selected places in Johannesburg (Tel: 021-461-6690). [via]

Today, Vodacom informed me that the judges had voted a certain Jerm as the winner of the Western Cape leg of the Vodacom Journalist Of The Year, which means that I will be attending the final (national) leg in Johannesburg during November.

The news came as quite a surprise, especially because it’s the first time that my work has been officially acknowledged like this. (Initially, I thought that the phone call was a prank.)

Take a look at the cartoon they chose.

Submissions had to have been published between April last year and April this year. I didn’t want to include cartoons from The Times (because that would have been weird). So, my options were narrowed down from twelve months worth of cartoons to a little under four months worth of cartoons (since The New Age only launched during December, and since I got married and went on honeymoon a short while before that).

Update

Much to my surprise, “Africa 2.0″ won the national – and overall – cartoon award in the 2011 Vodacom Journalist Of The Year.

South African cartoonists are notoriously rubbish at using technology and other futuristic things that use on-off switches and this complicated interweb stuff. In fact, very few of us are able to spell “technology”. As such, hunting down local cartoons is generally about as tedious as hunting down Osama bin Laden.

Speaking of which, here are – in no specific order – four of my favourite local “Osama bin Laden is dead” cartoons.

You can view mine here.

My latest political cartoon is about the State Of The Nation address tonight.

Meanwhile, Zapiro, Brandan, and Wigget have also cashed in on the same topic, as expected.