Everywhere you go in black South Africa, you are inundated with ads from Coca Cola and Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Coca-cola is advertised alongside school signs, at bus stops, on television, in mini-marts, printed on shopping bags, embroidered into football jerseys, and taped behind DJ booths.
Whereas in America, Coca-Cola competes with Unilever, General Electric, Nike, Procter and Gamble, Pepsi Cola, and other mega corporations, here it maintains a monopoly over most other companies, South African or American. There is no Pepsi Cola to compete with, no fancy-shmancy bottled water companies to fight with for shelve space. Coca-cola reigns supreme.
Coca-cola advertisements in townships usually feature pictures of black people, but with lighter skin than most black people. It's hard to tell whether coca-cola set out a casting call for lighter-skinned black people or if they went ahead and photoshopped the blackness out of dark-skinned black people.
Coca-cola also owns bottled water companies here, as well as the fruity Fanta sodas, and Sprite. So if you're drinking processed anything here, you're likely shelling out cash to Coca-Cola.
KFC is advertised on enormous billboards, at airports, and on street signs. In the townships, KFC is the only American restaurant, and the only sign of American influence (besides Coca Cola) for miles and miles. Their parking lots are often clogged with cars, and their stores filled with dozens of hungry people.
KFC restaurants are double the size of KFC restaurants in America, because they include a building for take-away and a building for sit-down. They occupy double lots in most black areas.
Right now, as I am writing these words, there is a brown paper KFC bag floating on the surface of the small swimming pool outside my window. Colonel Sander's head is submerged upside-down, and I can just barely make out the words "finger lickin' good." The bag was probably blown into the pool by the wind today, and the jets in the swimming pool are carrying the Colonel back and forth from one end of the pool to the other. I swear to god, the bag wasn't there when I started this post.
Synchronicity. It's some scary shit.
1 comment:
A co-worker of mine studied abroad in South Africa, and he commented too on the ubiquitous nature of Coke advertising. He said it's because Coke subsidizes and makes available a lot of retail-business resource-costs like signs and bags, in exchange for plastering their advertising all over everything. I dunno how obvious that is or even how true it is, but there's the explanation I've heard.
Post a Comment