Political cartoonist, Anthony Stidoph (Stidy) was born in Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe), and educated at Umtali Boy’s High School and University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, where he obtained a BA degree.

He emigrated to South Africa in 1984 and worked at SCOPE magazine as a Feature’s Editor/Illustrator until 1988. After a short stint at Laughing Stock Magazine, he was appointed Political Cartoonist at The Natal Witness in 1990 (he was the first person to be employed full-time in this post in the paper’s long history), a position he has held ever since.

Beside his work at The Witness, Stidy has contributed numerous cartoons and humorous illustrations to a wide variety of publications, and illustrated more than twenty books, a sideline that has given him a national audience beyond the regional boundaries of the paper’s circulation.

He has brought out two collections of his work (“Riding the Rainbow: The Best of Stidy’s Cartoons 1991-1995” and “Over the Rainbow: The First 10-Years of South Africa’s Democracy in Cartoons”, published in 2003) and held four exhibitions of his work: a solo exhibition at the Tatham Art Gallery in Pietermaritzburg in 1995, a joint, EU-sponsored, exhibition with fellow cartoonists Jonathan Shapiro (Zapiro) and the creators of Madam & Eve at the Tatham in Pietermaritzburg and the Museum of Africa in Johannesburg in 2004, and an exhibition with his two sisters, artists Sally Scott and Nicola Rosselli, at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in July 2016. He also staged a retrospective exhibition of his work, celebrating his over 25-years at the Witness, in the foyer of the Main Theatre at the Hilton Arts Festival in September 2014.

Stidy has been a finalist in the Mondi-Shanduka Newpaper Awards. In 2010 he won the prestigious Vodacom South African Cartoonist of the Year Award. It was the first time he had entered.

Tired of living in an enclosed box in the middle of the Pietermaritzburg CBD, surrounded by razor wire and driven half-mad by the constant blare of burglar alarms, Stidy decided, in 2015, to accept the offer of his two good friends, William Saundeson-Meyer and Karen MacGregor, to move out to their farm, Kusane, overlooking the beautiful Karkloof Valley in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands.

It proved to be a life-transforming move, one that has fulfilled his need for adventure, space, nature and escape. Inspired by the scenery around him, he has, in addition to his cartooning and writing, developed a passion for landscape painting. He has also used his new home as a base from which to set out on various journeys of exploration and to seek out wild and distant places that haven’t become too civilised or popular

Stidy is available for commissions. He can be contacted at stidy@sai.co.za