Africa Is a Country

Coco Cola and the "African Boy"

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Coco Cola and the "African Boy"

By
Sean Jacobs

I’m a bit late with this, but I’ll post it anyway. (Look out for lots of posts about World Cup commercials on this site over the next few days.) Another one of the myriad of commercials made to order for Coco Cola to dominate soft drink consumption during next month’s World Cup.   This time it is animation backed by a voice-over and yet another remix of K’Naan’s “Waving Flag” single again.  It is was made with Youtube in mind.  The commercial is titled “Quest.” It is the third in a series: After the original ad with K’Naan and the ridiculous “celebration” ad with Roger Milla, there’s this. The “Quest” commercial has been out since the last week of April. It is the story of an “African Boy” battling giant Transformer-like machines (“robots” in the commercial) to play football.  The robots seem to play for Brazil.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFe6sVgYh3M

What do you think?

I find the commercial very unattractive and not appealing. I just don’t feel it. Here Africa is one giant squatter camp filled with garbage dumps and discarded robots. And what’s with the Peter Pan like flying creatures?

More importantly, Africa here is different. Poor. They play on dusty pitches. They play barefoot. Amid garbage. As a result, you won’t recognize host nation South Africa in these videos.  You see the same thing in Pepsi’s “Africa” commercial or any of the K’Naan commercials.

But as someone reminded me recently: In few of these representations do the creators care what Africans think or how they really live or what they are like are.

(BTW, my suspicions is that South African creatives play a key role in the Coco Cola commercials. Please tell me I’m wrong.)

Further Reading

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.