One Nation, One Beer: the Mythology of the New South Africa in Advertising

1 ONE NATION, ONE BEER: THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE NEW SOUTH AFRICA IN ADVERTISING A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg Sarah Britten 2 I declare that this is my own unaided work. It is in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. It has not been submitted for any other degree or examination or to any other university. ________________ Sarah Britten 27 October 2005 The University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg 3 Acknowledgements Since I started on this thesis, I have worked at four jobs (one in PR, three in advertising), dated two boyfriends (one of them a professional psychic), published two novels for young adult readers, endured two car accidents (neither of them my fault), rescued two feral cats and married one husband. I ha ve lost count of the nervous breakdowns I was convinced were immanent or the Sunday evenings I spent wracked with guilt over my failure to put in enough work on the thesis over the weekend. When I started on this project in June 1998, I was a full time student wafting about without any apparent purpose in life. Now that I am finally putting this magnum opus to bed, I find that I have turned into a corporate animal saddled with car payments and timesheets and stress over PowerPoint presentations. “Get your PhD out of the way before you get married and have kids,” my elders told me. So I did, and life managed to sidetrack me anyway. There are a lot of people to whom I owe a great deal of thanks for putting up with me over the years. My supervisor, Dr Susan van Zyl, has been preternaturally patient and supportive. Without her I really could never have done it and I am eternally grateful for her considered critiques and cups of rooibos tea. Then there is my husband, Andre Steyn. When I met him, I was working on the thesis. Since it was beginning to look as though the thesis was becoming a permanent fixture in my life, I know he is thrilled to see it reach completion. My parents, Tony and Diana Britten, have been asking pointedly about the thesis for years; my mother will be sighing with delirious relief at the news that I will finally get to graduate. I am very grateful to both of them for encouraging me to further my education and supporting my choices in life. Thank you to my colleagues and clients, first at TBWA Hunt Lascaris and later at morrisjones&co, who taught me so much about the maddening frustration and the mad fun that is advertising. Many individuals assisted me with access to advertising material; Alex Holt deserves special mention for ensuring that I had access to his work on Castle Lager, which proved invaluable to my research. Without the support of my family, I might never have contemplated taking on a project of this nature in the first place; I am only sorry that my grandfather, Henry Hare, did not live to see me graduate. Finally, a very sincere thank-you to everyone who has ever nagged me to just get it done. Given the subject of this thesis, it seems appropriate to refer to perhaps the most famous advertising slogan of the past thirty years. It is from Nike, and it reads: Just do it. I couldn’t have put it better myself. 4 Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………….6 Chapter One: Always Only an Idea: Myth, Nation and Advertising………………………....18 Chapter Two: History, Context, Crit ique: Notes on Methodology……..…………....……….75 Chapter Three: A Brief History of the New South Africa…………………………................89 Chapter Four: Advertising the New South Africa……………………...………………...…135 Chapter Five: One Nation, One Soul, One Beer……………………………….....................194 Chapter Six: Yebo Gogo……...………………………………………………………...…..,254 Chapter Seven: Selling Brand South Africa………...…………………….………………..300 Chapter Eight: One way of ending the story…………………………………………….…324 References……………………………………………………………………………….…344 5 Abstract The New South Africa came into being on February 2, 1990, with State President F.W. de Klerk’s announcement of the sweeping changes that signalled the end of white minority rule. The New South Africa immediately assumed mythical status, functioning as a structuring, legitimating narrative in the face of a history that carried with it the possibility of inter-racial conflagration. Later, another myth emerged, that of the rainbow nation, together with a latter day epic hero in the form of Nelson Mandela. Together with a third, less defined myth of the freedoms promised by the new Constitution of 1996, these constitute a mythology of the New South Africa. Advertising played an important role in the propagation and interrogation of these myths. Campaigns for an assortment of consumer goods and services tracked momentous shifts in society, politics and culture, often with penetrating insight and incisive humour. Three campaigns, for Castle Lager (beer), Vodacom (cellular network) and Castrol (motor oil), and individual advertisements for Nando’s (fast food chicken), Sales House (retail clothing) and South African Airways, are analysed. The material is approached using a hybrid methodology of a structure that draws upon Fairclough’s (1989, 1995) Critical Discourse Analysis, while analysing the texts themselves using an approach most closely allied to the social semiotics of Barthes (1972). Using this approach, it can be seen, for example, how the Castle Lager ‘Friendship’ campaign is perhaps the most sustained articulation of the ideals embodied in the New South Africa and particularly the myth of the rainbow nation. In contrast, an analysis of the Vodacom ‘Yebo Gogo’ campaign reveals that even at its most dominant, the mythology of the New South Africa was being undermined by prototypical myths that would consolidate under the heading of the African renaissance. An overview of all of the campaigns analysed in this thesis point to the existence of three types of approach to advertising the nation, namely, incantatory, novelistic and identificatory. Incantatory advertising reproduces dominant national myths without questioning them; in contrast, novelistic advertising interrogates the assumptions upon which such myths are based even if it ultimately endorses them. Identificatory advertising focuses on ‘typical’ examples of what constitutes South Africanness, without any attached overt ideological agenda. Incantatory advertising tends to emerge at important national anniversaries or international sporting events, while identificatory advertising became more prominent as the mythology of the New South Africa became less immediate. It is likely that advertising will continue to play a significant role in the imagining of the South African nation. 6 Introduction On February 2 1990, South African State President F.W. de Klerk announced the first concrete steps toward the dismantling of apartheid. “I wish to ask all who identify yourselves with the broad aim of a New South Africa…Help us build a broad consensus about a new, realistic and democratic dispensation,” he told Parliament (de Klerk, 1991: 34). With these words, de Klerk named a new concept that would provide a structuring, legitimating narrative for the uncertain times that lay ahead. In het wake of de Klerk’s announcement would arise the myth of the rainbow nation and a latter day epic hero in the form of Nelson Mandela. Together with a third, less defined myth of freedom from the Calvinist strictures that characterised official apartheid morality, and which were banished with the freedoms promised by the new Constitution of 1996, these would constitute a mythology of the New South Africa. 1 As the history of post-apartheid South Africa unfolded, it became apparent to many observers that many of the most illuminating narratives about the new nation were being broadcast on television screens night after night, in the gaps between the news and the latest episode of Murder She Wrote. Campaigns for cellular networks, beer and grilled chicken amongst other advertisers tracked momentous shifts in society, politics and culture, often with penetrating insight and incisive humour. “Advertising gave us hope, it promised us a future in which black and white could laugh at each other, and at themselves, without someone pulling out an Uzi,” one journalist observed. “What these ads also suggested was that history’s power-brokers were in fact willing to give over just a little of that power, that wealthy white blokes were prepared to be the butt of black jokes” (Atkinson, 1998: 1). Reflecting on the changes that South African society was undergoing in the aftermath of apartheid, the novelist Justin Cartwright wrote that advertising was, like sport, “a huge factor in the freeing of the South African mind” (1996: 87). It was comments of this kind that led to my initial interest in the relationship between advertising and the post-apartheid nation-building project. Curiosity has evolved into an 1 Whether or not to capitalise the “n” in “New South Africa” is a stylistic choice for which source texts offer little or no guidance (in much the same way, incidentally, as the so-called African renaissance). Given the lack of general agreement over the use of “new South Africa” vs “New South Africa”, I have elected to capitalise the n throughout, in order to signify the status of the concept as the marker of a new political dispensation. 7 abiding fascination, which has ultimately taken the form of a strongly contextualised critical analytic history of advertising in South Africa, focusing primarily on the period between 1990 and 1998. Using the analysis of specific consumer advertising campaigns that appeared on television during this time frame, I will explore the mythology of the evolving South African nation as represented in advertising and examine how advertising has engaged with the nation-building project – with a view to gaining insight into what advertising texts can reveal about the nature of these myths themselves.

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