A Selection of South African TV Ads

You can probably deduce a great deal about a country from its television advertisements: its sense of humour, its values perhaps, maybe even its sense of itself. Below are a cross-section of South African television ads, all of them leaning towards the humourous end of the marketing spectrum. I’ll let the reader come to his own conclusions.

Gentle mockery of both black and white middle-class attitudes undergirds this ad for the Ford Bantam. The white small-businessman is entertained hospitably by his white client while bossing around his black worker. A phone-call is received, and the situation is inverted. What we thought was a ruler-and-ruled situation turns out to be a relationship of mutual benefit in a free market. “Ford Bantam: the bakkie that builds the nation”. (Bakkie is the word for ‘pick-up truck’ in both Afrikaans and South African English).

Black women are the glue of South Africa, a society in which far too many mothers and children are abandoned by fathers carried away by drink, crime, jail, or death. The characters in this ad for Halls cough drops are all either Black or Coloured (or extra-terrestrial). “Ai wena! Don’t come here with your voot-voot nonsense man. VOETSAK!” (“Ai wena” is Zulu for “hey you”, while “voetsak” is an Afrikaans way of saying “piss off”).

British Petroleum did a series of ads (in preparation for this year’s World Cup) which featured different stereotypes drawn from South African society playing each other in soccer. Above is “Divas vs. Taxi Drivers”, but I prefer “Café Owners vs. Mamas”: “Stephanopoulos takes it all the way.” “There’s the ubuntu strategy.” The woman carrying the ball on her head and the dancing mamas at the end are particularly priceless.

There is also “Car Guards vs. Boytjies”. Car guards are familiar to any visitor to or native of South Africa, but a boytjie is hard to describe. Similar to a guido, but then that term usually features only in New York English.

Here, different South African cities are personified and take part in a “speed dating” session to advertise South African Airways. For the unitiated, CPT = Cape Town, JHB = Johannesburg, DBN = Durban, PE = Port Elizabeth, and EL = East London.

In this ad for the mobile phone provider Vodacom, the all-too-familiar stereotype of an African despot challenges the company’s claims about new features: “We’ve been having it!” (Further ads in the series: SatNav, Email, Mobile Internet).

Windhoek Lager is one of South Africa’s favourite beers, despite being brewed in the neighbouring republic of Namibia. This ad stars the American actor Louis Gossett Jr., who had a leading role alongside Sean Connery, John Lithgow, and Diana Rigg in the 1994 film “A Good Man in Africa”. (That film had some quality lines: “Innocence is dead.”) “A Good Man in Africa” is set in the fictional West-African state of Kinjanja, but was filmed in South Africa.

According to this Tolkein-themed ad, Frodo needed a GPS device from Garmin in his quest for the Ring. (J. R. R. Tolkein, by the way, was born in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State).

“You picked the wrong house, mannetjie.” (Mannetjie, from the Afrikans man, meaning ‘man’, plus the -tjie suffix indicating the diminutive. Thus mannetjie means ‘little man’, e.g. a hobbit).

“Izzit??” “Jaa!!” While English is usually South Africa’s lingua franca, Afrikaans is more broadly understood and spoken around the country. The Constitution enshrines no fewer than eleven official languages for South Africa (and also recognizes Hindi and German as non-official languages of immigrant communities), but television adverts in South Africa are generally either in English or Afrikaans (or a combination of the two).

Another Vodacom ad series is “Player 23”, about the biggest fan of the Springboks (South Africa’s national rugby squad), here eponymized as “Jan” and hailed in song by Robbie Wessels. Here the fans admiration for the team is reversed, as the Bokke are fans of Jan. I love the image of Schalk Burger nicking Jan’s used popsicle stick from the rubbish bin and adding it to his collection.

Jan was later joined by his Coloured rival for the Player 23 spot, Elton.

Just a few of the Afrikaans words used in these two ads: span, a team (pl. spanne); oke, a guy, mate, or bloke; elke, each; skeef, crooked or slanting (in this case, looking suspiciously at someone); boerewors, lit. ‘farmer sausage’, the most popular form of sausage to braai; tjor, jalopy, old automobile.

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