February is Black History Month in the United States — and, if you’re selling something, a time to put an `Afrocentric’ spin on your marketing. Tony Karon reports from New York
THE road to Africa runs through the golden arches of McDonald’s. Or so one of their ads would have us believe: under an a cappella track which sounds as if it were culled from The Lion King, McDonald’s invites its African-American customers (the ad only airs on black cable channels) to enter a competition whose winners will be “immersed in history and culture” on a trip to the mother continent. “Your journey starts here,” says the junk-food chain, flashing its logo.
The competition coincides with Black History Month in the United States — each February, Americans are invited to recall the epic struggles of hundreds of thousands of people brutally wrenched from Africa and enslaved on the plantations of the white man’s “New World”. It is a time to celebrate their triumphs and their African heritage, and, if you’re trying to sell hamburgers across 110th Street, it is a time to put an “Afrocentric” spin on your marketing.
Indeed, at a Harlem McDonald’s, my coke comes in a “Kente Kup” emblazoned with a West African design, an Africa logo and the slogan “Keep the Culture”. (Curiously enough, the cup comes with the “Extra Value Meal”, but not with the “All American Meal”).
A few years ago in America, projecting awareness of African identity was a militant defiance of slavery’s cultural legacy. Nothing became more emblematic of African-American cultural pride than kente cloth — the Ghanaian fabric containing symbolic languages in its weave.
The design most popular in the US is actually the traditional garb of Ashanti royalty. But today, printed reproductions (in which no Ghanaian royal would be seen dead) have become a mainstream bar-code for Afrocentric attitude.
The spending power generated by Afrocentric identity politics was first recognised by small entrepreneurs. Harlem’s 116th Street market brings together hawkers from all over West Africa, their tables piled high with bolts of Senegalese and Ghanaian fabric, and jewelry and accessories — cowrie shell necklaces, leather pendants bearing maps of Africa in Garveyite or Rastafarian colours, key-rings, earrings and more.
Ask a trader where a trinket is made, and he’ll smile and say “Africa” (which is usually sufficient answer here). Press him, and he’ll say “Uhh … Mali.”
Yeah right. Many of the same items are available, in wholesale quantity, at Jim’s Traders, in Little Korea. And Jim’s doesn’t bother to remove the “Made in Korea” label from behind the leather Africa pendants; the “Made in the Philippines” tag from the cowrie shell necklaces or the “Made in Pakistan” labels on the bead and wooden fist necklaces.
For the Harlem traders, there’s nothing odd about supplying “African” artefacts mass-produced in Asia. Far from the frozen-in-time “authenticity” of an idealised past invoked by American Afrocentrics, in the West African cultures from which the traders hail, symbols have a life way beyond the intentions of their creators, are never really owned, are freely appropriated from all corners of the globe and recycled with new meanings. The West African sea goddess Mami Wata, for example, is as likely to be symbolised by a wooden sculpture as by an Indian print of the goddess Shiva, or a video of Disney’s Little Mermaid.
But, as McDonald’s’ Kente Kups show, Afrocentric marketing is no longer the exclusive province of small- timers. Major retail chains like JC Penney, Woolworths and even K-Mart have opened Afrocentric sections in their outlets, stocking clothing, accessories and kente- patterned items, from wastebaskets to toothbrush holders.
In many black neighbourhoods, Kentucky Fried Chicken staff wear elaborate Kente ensembles. Coca Cola uses kente in ads directed at black consumers. So does Schlitz.
Rob Jackson, an executive of the country’s largest African-American ad agency, explains: “Kente cloth (is) … one of the things we identified that tells the black consumer that we are speaking to them.”
And the race to get a slice of that market throws up numerous ironies: African Heritage Hair Relaxant, for example (a euphemistic term for hair straighteners) — encouraging pride in natural black hair types — was, after all, an early concern of the Afrocentric agenda.
And, of course, things start to get a little surreal when Mickey Mouse wears a kente outfit to welcome Miss African-American Collegiate to Disneyworld.
When wedding bells chime, kente is incorporated into the outfits of as many as half of African-American brides. For them, Diana Chukwuka, a Nigerian designer in Cambridge, Massachussets, whips up unisex Ashokes from Nigerian fabrics. But at the store she keeps in Lagos, Nigeria, she supplies the overwhelming demand for traditional Western white wedding gowns.
One white American who has moved quickly to incorporate Afrocentricity into her circle is Barbie. In 1992, Yla Eason, a black mother who had grown up with the alienation of encountering only white dolls, founded the Olmec company and developed Imani as an Afrocentric counterpart to Mattel’s Barbi.
Imani, “the African princess”, like Barbie, soon had a bottomless wardrobe of outfits and accessories — except that hers were all kente couture.
Demand turned Imani into a mega-business, and soon her family was competing for toy-store shelf space with Barbie’s. In response, Barbie started hangin’ in the `hood, with colourful friends like Shani, Asha and Nichelle.
Barbie had a black friend — Christie — back in 1986. But Shani is different — besides having a massive promotional budget, Shani is, as a Mattel spokesperson put it, “ethnic” — in other words, a kente kugel.
But, just in case conservative white parents were about to start boycotting toy shops, Mattell executive Deborah Mitchell set the matter in perspective: “At one point it was even considered militant, if you will, to wear kente cloth, but that has changed significantly.”
Indeed. It’s hard for anything to maintain a singular meaning, like “militant”, when it’s born by McDonald’s’ cups and Mickey Mouse.