Another one of the myriad commercials made-to-order for Coca-Cola to dominate soft drink consumption during next month’s World Cup.  This time, it is an animation backed by a voice-over and yet another remix of K’Naan’s “Waving Flag” single again. It is was made with Youtube in mind. The commercial is titled “Quest.” It is the third in a series: After the original ad with K’Naan and the ridiculous “celebration” ad with Roger Milla, there’s this. The “Quest” commercial has been out since the last week of April. It is the story of an “African Boy” battling giant Transformer-like machines (“robots” in the commercial) to play football. The robots seem to play for Brazil.

I find the commercial unattractive and unoriginal. I just don’t feel it.

Africa is one giant squatter camp filled with garbage dumps and discarded robots.

The “Africa” on display here is a caricature: poor, dusty, barefoot, perpetually on the margins. Kids play on dirt pitches, surrounded by rubble and refuse, as if that exhausted visual vocabulary is the only one available. In the process, the actual host nation—South Africa —disappears almost entirely. What replaces it is the same flattened imagery we’ve seen in Pepsi’s “Africa” spot, in the branding orbit around K’naan (in which his actual politics is nowhere to be found anymore), and in countless campaigns that mistake repetition for authenticity.

How much do you bet South African ad agencies had a hand in this, perhaps as consultants? Agencies that, for all their proximity, seem curiously estranged from the country they’re meant to represent—especially from black South Africans, their aspirations, their urban realities, their complexity. Instead of drawing on that depth, they reach for a tired global template of “African-ness” designed to be legible to European and American audiences: poverty as texture, hardship as atmosphere, resilience as spectacle.

As someone recently reminded me, not to be surprised: these representations are not made with Africans in mind at all. There is little curiosity about how people actually live, what they value, or how they see themselves. The gaze is external, even when the production isn’t. That’s what makes it worse: it’s not just outsiders projecting clichés, but insiders reproducing them—faithfully, profitably, and with remarkably little self-awareness.