Mickey Patel's Posters for the Free Mandela Campaign

How the prominent Indian cartoonist showed his support for the imprisoned activist

The cartoonist and illustrator Mickey Patel is best remembered for his work illustrating children’s books, impacting the lives of children all over India. He made drawings for books by renowned authors such as Ruskin Bond and Sigrun Srivastava, but also illustrated his own stories, such as Rupa the Elephant and 1 to 10 Procession: A Number Book. His book The Story of a Panther was published posthumously, three years after his death, and told the story of an innocent panther wandering into a village, the hysteria that followed and how the panther was killed because of people’s unthinking reliance on authority. Because they didn’t stop and question.

His work, although simplistic in style, was permeated by his understanding of life and its brutality, and his ability to be playful despite it. He recognized the comedy in ugliness and tried to use it to make people laugh. Born in Lahore in 1941, Patel studied economics in Delhi, but pursued his creative passions by studying art in evening classes, and soon secured work drawing for Shankar’s Weekly, a magazine founded by Kesava Shankara Pillai, the father of political cartooning in India. His work was varied: he worked for advertising firms, as a visualizer and animated filmmaker, designed humorous greeting cards and worked for almost every major newspaper in India such as India Today and Reader’s Digest.

In the 1980s, Patel showed his support for the campaign to release Nelson Mandela from imprisonment and created a series of 10 posters, which he donated to the Indian office of the exiled African National Congress. A series of 100 of the posters were made by silk-screening and distributed, then 23 years later some were donated to the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory. He employed imagery of other inspirational leaders from around the world, including Che Guevera, Martin Luther King and Gandhi, and some of their well known quotes.

We take a look at the series below.

This item portrays Nelson Mandela with a caption by Fidel Castro that reads "Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.", by Mickey Patel, 1988 (From the collection of Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory)

This item portrays hands, feet and 3 concentric circles, by Mickey Patel, 1988 (From the collection of Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory)

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