”How do you stop a black man from drowning?” asks a sneering white man. ”You take your foot off his head.”
”You’ve got two Afrikaners; one is fat and the other is thin. If they both jump off a cliff, who will die first?” asks a black man coolly. ”Who cares?”
”What’s the difference between a Jew and a snake?” asks an Indian man with a smile. ”One is a cold-blooded creature of Satan and the other is a snake.”
These three scenarios feature in television adverts for the Apartheid Museum that have caused an uproar in the media industry. The Financial Mail reported last week that M-Net and e.tv have banned them from their stations.
”They are offensive and in bad taste,” said Peter McKenzie, the managing director of Oracle Airtime Sales, the advertising sales arm of M-Net and Supersport. ”When I say offensive we have to take this interpretation as far as the reasonable man is concerned.”
Said Quraysh Patel, the chief operating officer at e.tv, ”I don’t want to debate my decisions in public.”
While the jokes are brutal, Damon Stapleton, the creative director at TBWA\Gavin\Reddy, said that they need to be taken in the context in which they were intended — racism, which still exists overtly in our daily lexicon, will only be overcome if it is confronted head on. ”The adverts let everyone behind the suburban curtain into a secret world that few people like to acknowledge.”
The adverts rip off predictable Proudly South African ads by stubbornly putting the true face of racism in front of us.
”These adverts have caused a stir because they piss on this illusionary parade,” said Louis Gavin, the CEO of TBWA\Gavin\Reddy. ”You cannot address racism in a sensitive way and in this respect I think that M-Net and e.tv have made uninformed and impulsive decisions.”
The adverts set viewers up so that they experience their own racial tendencies by laughing at the jokes. But this humour immediately turns to embarrassment when the viewers are caught out by the pay-off line: ”If you thought that was funny, we’ll show you why it was not.” The Apartheid Museum brand follows.
”We have tried to position the Apartheid Museum within the consciousness of the South African and international public by conveying that the museum does not only dwell on the history of this country, but it also stands as a monitor of racism in any form,” said Christopher Till, director of the museum.
”Although we are living in a democracy, it’s not the Cinderella story and we have to guard against washing our hands of something dirty and simply moving on.”
Beyond the war of words between the two TV channels and the agency, the adverts force an uncomfortable question: are South Africans ready to confront their own racist bigotries?
”There is a fine line,” said Jody Kollapen, chairperson of the South African Human Rights Commission. ”At many levels we are still very sensitive about race and therefore prefer to gloss over it rather than engage frankly about it. From my view I certainly think that there is a need for greater robustness in dealing with the issue. At the moment we are being too polite.”
Both M-Net and e.tv are subscribers to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) code of conduct, which states that advertising cannot offend against ”good taste or decency”. But the code also takes ”degree of social concern” into consideration.
The ASA can only make a judgement on advertisements once they have been published or broadcast. In December last year it received other complaints about a radio advert for the Apartheid Museum that was also created by TBWA\ Gavin\ Reddy.
In the advert an Afrikaans dominee is reading from a Bible and interprets certain sections as they were supposedly interpreted by dominees during apartheid. The complaints reflected the view that the ad was blasphemous.
The ASA ruled that ”when taken in the full context the advertisements are not offensive. The [ASA] felt that these adverts should be considered as advertisements which promote a matter of social concern rather than a purely commercial product”.
Since 1994 only a handful of adverts have reached the ASA desk for racism. One was an African Bank ad in which a dog barks at a white man walking past a gate. The complaint was that the ad was a form of reverse racism.
”The ASA dismissed the complaint because it ruled that the advert was a tongue-in-cheek execution of the new South Africa,” said Stefan Vos, the ASA’s legal and regulatory affairs manager. ”As far as I can remember we have never pulled an ad for racism.”
Currently the advert causing the greatest public stir, said Vos, is the Herbal Essence shampoo advert in which a woman washes her hair in an airplane bathroom while making orgasmic sounds, apparently from the pleasure of using the shampoo.