Owlographs

First ever publication by the famed cartoonist DC Boonzaier. An album of caricatures in black and white.

Daniël Cornelis Boonzaier (11 November 1865 – 20 March 1950), more commonly known as D.C. Boonzaier, was a South African cartoonist, famous for his caricatures of Cape politicians and celebrities at the turn of the century, and later for his anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist cartoons for Die Burger. He fathered the artist Gregoire Boonzaier.

Owlographs was dedicated to the members and visitors of the celebrated Owl Club, a society co-founded by Boonzaier in 1894 and "whose particular purpose was to entertain important visitors to the Cape".

This landmark work is of great historical interest, as it depicts virtually all the main political figures of the time: Lord Milner, Cecil Rhodes, Gordon Sprigg, John X. Merriman, J. W. Sauer and W. P. Schreiner; Sirs John Henry de Villiers, Henry Juta and James Rose Innes; and Boer leaders like Paul Kruger, Marthinus Steyn, Louis Botha, Christiaan de Wet and F. W. Reitz.

Boonzaier's cartoons were powerful propaganda for the National Party's resurgent Afrikaner nationalism, which opposed Louis Botha and Jan Smuts' relatively pro-Imperial and free-market South African Party.