welcome to hardtalk. jonathan shapiro, better known by the pen name zapiro, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. well, it s a great pleasure to meet you, and i want to begin with something you said a few years ago. you said, moral outrage is what drives a cartoonist. you ve been at this cartooning for pretty much four decades. can you maintain outrage for four decades? you can. laughter when i was doing five or six cartoons a week, i would sometimes wonder what the hell i m going to do today, and you wake up in the morning and the news itjust keeps coming. it would happen to cartoonists everywhere in the world because that s what drives all of us, i m sure. anyone who takes this craft, or this genre of communication seriously. but in a place like south africa, the news just hits you from every every angle every day at an unbelievable rate. i wonder whether there s something personal about this outrage, which clearly developed quite young in you. you had a lot of trauma in your
for a new age a kind that has never been agreed before that s how uk prime minister rishi sunak is billing the atlantic declaration he signed with president biden at the white house on thursday. it promises cooperation on advanced tech, clean energy and critical minerals. but it falls far short of the comprehensive free trade agreement with the us that the british government has been hoping for, and had promised as a benefit of leaving the european union. our north america business correspondent michelle fleury has been looking at the details. gone was the mention of an all encompassing trade deal promised in the wake of brexit. in its place, a commitment to co operate on defence, trade, a deal on data protection and ways to regulate new ai deal on data protection and ways to regulate new al to ology. the uk prime minister failed this approach is a better response to the challenges the two countries face. . ., ., . challenges the two countries face. ., . ., ., , , face.
as a western perception that the african female is a downtrodden wretch . but when you look around the african continent today girls abducted in nigeria, polygamy re introduced in kenya, child marriages and the prevalence of gender based violence how much is there to celebrate about being female in africa? ama ata aidoo, welcome to hardtalk. thank you very much, zainab. there s a lot of political issues and social affairs in your writings. how much do you see yourself as a writer with a mission? well, now, in retrospect, i suppose i could describe myself as a writer with a mission. but i never was aware that i had a mission when i started to write, you see. it didn t work it doesn t work like that. i maen, i don t sit at my desk and say, now i ve got to depict this, and depict that. no. first of all, i was rather young when i started writing, so i didn t even have any notion of where my would be read, or how, and stuff like that. so it wasn t a conscious decision, but