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Anssi Halmesvirta
Kari Drawing the Blacks
The task at hand, in this chapter, is to disentangle the messages in Karis caricatures
of the Blacks! to reveal how far criticism of “sovereignly democratic” political cul¬
ture of Finland could go during the period under scrutiny.?
Kari made Finnish authorities look ridiculous in showing the way they ap¬
peared to deal with specific groups of Blacks. One conspicuous group towards
whom official Finland was supposed to be friendly was the Somalis who arrived
in the country at the end of the 1980s, fleeing a continuous internal warfare that
existed in Somaliland. There were at times also strong and not entirely unfounded
suspicions about the rationale of so-called financial help to developing countries
like Tanzania, where the money appeared to be used for other than civilian pur¬
poses.’ All such help was pure waste to Kari, who was ideologically a die-hard pa¬
triot. He defended such values, dear to the man-on-the-street Finn, as hard work,
responsibility, trustworthiness, and truthfulness. He insinuated in the caricatures
that asylum-seeking Blacks were insidious-and-deceiving Others, concealing their
true motives, blatantly lying, or leaving much unsaid. They were no fools or sim¬
pletons for they seemed to know how to cheat the credulous and naive Finnish of¬
ficials. Kari caricatured these asylum seekers in such a way that the readership could
interpret the messages as true—the opposite of the official truth. What follows is
a selection of the most representative caricatures.
Explanation of the Figures
Figure 1
Here one can see Finnish naiveté and credulousness described. The scene is from
the reception office for the asylum seekers. The office lady confronts a Somali
woman who is telling her story of why she left her home: “An angry wolf hunted
me and I had to flee in a chariot made of pumpkin and drawn by mice.” The office
lady starts crying and says: “Asylum granted.”
Figure 2
Two African militiamen discuss. Another one says: “Instead of cutting aid to the
developing countries, the Finns cut their defence budget—now we do not have to
cut ours.” There were some educated left-leaning and green intellectuals in Finland
who found Kari’s caricatures of Blacks insulting and offensive, and the chairman of
' Kari himself did not use the term Black/Blacks, he drew “Blacks” and did not have to name them. At the
time his readers would often call Africans either, pejoratively, Negroes (neekeri) or, more neutrally, Blacks
(mustat). The term Black is used here neutrally to resemble convention of the epoch.
? Sovereignly means here that according to the Finnish democratic form of government the president had
considerable powers, e.g. he could dismiss the Parliament and order new elections.
> There were widespread but uncorroborated suspicions that the money was used for corrupt purposes
and for buying weapons. This kind of material was very attractive to caricaturists.