AfricaIs aCountry

Coco Cola and the "African Boy"

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Coco Cola and the "African Boy"

By
Sean Jacobs

I’m a bit late with this, but I’ll post it anyway. (Look out for lots of posts about World Cup commercials on this site over the next few days.) Another one of the myriad of commercials made to order for Coco Cola to dominate soft drink consumption during next month’s World Cup.   This time it is 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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFe6sVgYh3M

What do you think?

I find the commercial very unattractive and not appealing. I just don’t feel it. Here Africa is one giant squatter camp filled with garbage dumps and discarded robots. And what’s with the Peter Pan like flying creatures?

More importantly, Africa here is different. Poor. They play on dusty pitches. They play barefoot. Amid garbage. As a result, you won’t recognize host nation South Africa in these videos.  You see the same thing in Pepsi’s “Africa” commercial or any of the K’Naan commercials.

But as someone reminded me recently: In few of these representations do the creators care what Africans think or how they really live or what they are like are.

(BTW, my suspicions is that South African creatives play a key role in the Coco Cola commercials. Please tell me I’m wrong.)

Further Reading

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After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.