This is a digital, hand-drawn animation that was exhibited at the KZNSA  Art Gallery, Durban, as part of the ‘Five Artists, Five Directions’ exhibition. This animation is a shadow play of a fictional deposed dictator figure being dressed by a Chacma baboon. The film shows the tyrant figure absurdly playing out delusions of grandeur - with the baboon dutifully but ironically dressing him in trappings of power, including a Napoleon-like paper hat. The film is an exploration of the Big Man syndrome. While this is a global phenomenon—describing corrupt, totalitarian rule by a single individual—it is often associated with a characteristic of political leadership in Africa. In this regard, the film depicts the fallen Big Man figure as an absurd fictional archetype and draws on Western traditions of tyranny and absurdity, as encompassed by the French Symbolist Alfred Jarry’s (1873–1907) fictional and despotic character Père Ubu for example. In the film, the character is presented as a symbol of corrupted power within a fictional South African (Apartheid) political and historical narrative. The Chacma baboon is common to Southern Africa and in South Africa is found in the Drakensberg Mountains, mountainous regions of the Western Cape, and in the Kalahari desert. It is a potent symbol in the South African social, cultural, mythological and historical consciousness and variously has been associated with the oppressed and the oppressor, as appeared in Afrikaner and San mythology as a wiley and mischevious trickster. In the film the baboon encompasses all these characteristics - in its playing out of an ironic servitude.

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