The Ubuntu Strategy”: Commodification and the Affective Politics of Ubuntu

UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Ubuntu strategies in contemporary South African culture Stuit, H.H. Publication date 2013 Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Stuit, H. H. (2013). Ubuntu strategies in contemporary South African culture. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:26 Sep 2021 Chapter 4 “The Ubuntu Strategy”: Commodification and the Affective Politics of Ubuntu HannekeStuit_Ubuntu Strategies in Contemporary South African Cultures_v4.indd 164 03-12-12 23:29 Introduction The main title of this chapter was taken from a commercial aired in South Africa in 2009, when South Africa organised the Confederations Cup in order to prepare the country for the enormous task of hosting the soccer World Cup in 2010. During this time, British Petroleum (BP) aired a series of three commercials that won the Loerie Award, the South African award for best brand communication, the year it was released (“Winning Entry”). Each commercial depicts a soccer match between two stereotypical groups from South African society that are, because of the nature of the game, automatically in opposition. All three matches end in a tie, however, which allows for the same happy ending in each separate commercial represented by a group photo full of smiling people. One match pitches the divas against the taxi drivers, in another the car guards take on the boytjies, and in the last one the mamas play the café owners (see Ogilvy, “Divas,” “Car Guards,” and “Café Owners”).1 At first sight, the commercials seem to be rather harmless, resembling a remake of Monty Python’s soccer game between German and Greek philosophers more than anything else.2 In all three commercials, however, because stereotypes are placed opposite each other, several identity categories are made to intersect in a problematic manner. In the case of the car guards versus the boytjies, for instance, the car guards are represented by a team of predominantly black, small and scruffy looking men, whereas the boytjies seem to be well groomed, muscular and mostly of a light skin colour, thus lending an unequal economic and racial dimension to the match.3 In the commercial that features the café owners playing against the mamas, intersections of race and class are extended to the issue of gender and reflected, crucially, by the mamas main plan of attack, explicitly called “the ubuntu strategy” by the commenta- tor (Ogilvy, “Café Owners”).4 This invocation of ubuntu in the context of a humorous staging of a strategy to communally achieve a certain goal crucially reflects on the 1 “Boytjie” is Afrikaans slang for “jock,” but can also mean “little boy.” It can be used as a term of endearment, but is sometimes also used derogatorily when referring to black men. 2 This sketch was first aired in the second episode of the two Monty Python episodes broadcasted in Germany in 1972: Monty Python’s Fliegender Zirkus (“Monty”). 3 It is easy to imagine what this relation would look like in “real life,” with one of the car guards offering to watch one of the boytjies’ cars for a couple of rand. 4 In this commercial, all the mamas are black, but in South Africa the word “mama” is more generally used (mostly by black people) to respectfully refer to older women, both black and white. See also the discussion of naming in Ndebele’s novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela in Chapter 3. 165 HannekeStuit_Ubuntu Strategies in Contemporary South African Cultures_v4.indd 165 03-12-12 23:29 C HAPTER 4 Figure 13. Figure 14. Figure 15. Figure 16. Figure 13-16. Screenshots from “The Café Owners vs The Mamas.” term’s continuing development, especially its increasing commodification, which is the topic at hand in this chapter. I will, therefore, first analyse the use of ubuntu in this commercial, before outlining the arguments that flow from this use at the end of the introduction. The “ubuntu strategy” consists of a circle formed by the mamas that tries to manoeuvre the ball towards the opponents’ goal (fig. 13). As such, it associates ubuntu with a common effort that, symbolically, keeps the opponents on the outside of the circle and the ball on the inside, preventing the other team from coming anywhere near it and repeating ubuntu’s potential for exclusion. Initially, the strategy fails because the circle of mamas pushes over some of the café owners. Despite, or perhaps because of substantial protest from the mamas, this results in a booking by the referee (fig. 14). The second time the strategy is deployed, however, it succeeds and we can clearly see how one of the mamas, by way of the famous cultural practice of carry- ing things on your head, breaks out of the circle that has allowed her to approach the opponent’s goal to score the game-tying goal (fig. 15). HannekeStuit_Ubuntu Strategies in Contemporary South African Cultures_v4.indd 166 03-12-12 23:29 When the commercial’s tagline “Beyond 2010, there’s a nation united” appears on screen, it turns out, however, that the stereotypes and “the ubuntu strategy” are used not just for comic effect, but also to communicate a message of national unity (fig. 16). In short, no matter who you are or what group of people you belong to, the common effort of hosting a successful World Cup crosses all boundaries. The use of the word “beyond” projects this spirit of camaraderie into the future. The World Cup is thus implicitly presented as a catalyst for national cohesion that does not yet exist, but is intended to last, long after the catalyzing spark has expired. This “feel good” senti- ment is subsequently extended to the two brands depicted in the final frame: FIFA and BP (fig. 17). The two final frames of the commercial thus reveal an overt linking of the fate of South Africa as a nation with the implicit interests of one of the biggest multinationals in the world. In other words, South African national unity is made to serve the commercial interest of sponsorship. As Alan Bairner notes in his study of the relation between sport, nationalism and globalization, “there is little point Ofcial FIFA World Cup™ sponsor in seeking to deny the extent to which global capitalism has affected the ways Figure 17. Screenshot from in which sport is played, administered, “The Café Owners vs The Mamas.” packaged, and watched throughout the world” (176). Indeed, “the flagships of the global sporting economy,” like the Olympic Games and the soccer World Cup, result in a mutually constitutive relation between nationalism and globalization, in which the localized events of different nations battling each other would not be possible without global sponsorship and vice versa (176). 5 However, no matter how heavily sponsored an event is or how dominant the 5 Silk, Andrews and Cole, in Sport and Corporate Nationalisms, even argue that “the nation and national culture have become principal (albeit perhaps unwilling) accomplices” within the process of global capitalism’s attempts to “capitalize upon the nation as a source of collective identification and differentiation” (7). On the role of sport in the creation of national unity, see Hobsbawm and Ranger’s volume The Invention of Tradition, especially Hobsbawm’s chapter dealing with the relation between sport and nationalism between 1870 and 1914 (290-1 and 297-302). A pertinent example in the context of South Africa is the representation of Nelson Mandela’s political use of the social cohesion achieved by South Africa winning the 1995 rugby World Cup in the film Invictus (2009). 167 HannekeStuit_Ubuntu Strategies in Contemporary South African Cultures_v4.indd 167 03-12-12 23:29 C HAPTER 4 “emergence and consolidation of a global sporting political economy involving the sale of merchandise, sponsorship, labor migration, and so on,” fans rarely “wave the colors of sport’s major sponsors, except when their names appear on the shirt of a club or a national team” (Bairner 176, 2). From this perspective, the most effective way to sell one’s brand would be to put it on merchandise that sports national or club colours. BP’s plan of action, however, is different. By attaching its name to a message of soccer-oriented national unity, BP manages to tap into not one, but two positive associations related to the anticipation of hosting the World Cup. These associations have to do not only with the South African national team being able to participate in the World Cup in the first place, but also with the circumstances: the World Cup was expected to create job opportunities, to bring money into the country through tourism, and, most importantly, to provide South Africa with another opportunity to achieve its long awaited national unity through the common effort of making the World Cup a success.6 During and after the World Cup, it would turn out, however, that these expecta- tions were not to be fulfilled.

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