The South African fast-food chicken chain Nando’s, which has, of late, also become very popular in Britain, has always been known for its striking TV commercials. They usually manage to combine a quick-off-the-mark, topical sense of the news with a particularly South African brand of wit and irony. Take, for instance, their ads last year featuring a ventriloquist dummy made to resemble the leader of the ruling party’s youth wing, Julius Malema, which made the ANC Youth League so angry they called for its withdrawal; Malema, on the other hand, just wanted Nando’s to pay him for defaming him.

But I’m not sure Nando’s latest commercial hits the mark.

The ad shows a diverse cast of South African women going topless to make the visitors feel more at home with the expected African stereotypes. The ad is narrated on-screen by a white man dressed in what is supposed to be a “Zulu traditional” outfit.

Tapping into the foreign interest in South African culture around the upcoming football World Cup, it is ostensibly aimed at satirizing the stereotypes that overseas visitors to the country might bring along with them. The desire to see ‘authentic Africa’ (so clearly portrayed in the spate of ridiculous ads now emerging on TV screens around the world) is clearly lampooned by the caricature of a hapless white guy in ‘ethnic’ dress. He is making fun of the old colonial trope of bare-breasted African women who were, of course, always stared at and photographed purely for anthropological reasons.  So far, so satire.