Hip in the township - one-off ads
By Lulama Zenzile, Tessa Dowling and Myolisi Gophe

The Star Online Edition
October 1, 2005

Cape Town's poorest residential areas are adorned by advertising signs that are often more interesting than conventional advertisements on expensive shopfronts and billboards produced by pricey signwriters and advertising companies.

When township businesses want to reach their markets, they offer more than just a product: they give something that goes deeper in describing what is on offer in a relevant way.

Like a herbalist's sign in Gugulethu that shows one man with an assegai chasing another riding backwards on a giant baboon, with a slogan in Xhosa.

Customers know that the advertisement means the herbalist can drive witches away or cure diseases.

A coffee shop-restaurant mural features a woman holding a cup while talking on a cellphone. A spaza shop has a hand-painted Coca-Cola sign among the details of products it sells.

Business owners say the home-grown advertising murals came naturally.

"It is not that we want to be different from other communities. It is about who you are, what you believe in and just trying to convey that message to your clients," said an employee at one coffee shop in Nyanga.

She said that, in informal settlements in particular, people had more time to stand and look at the ads because most of them walked and did not drive.

"They like to look at an ad even if it has a lot of wording. Sometimes they call the owners after such ads, not by their own names," she said.

Tessa Dowling, director of the African Voices Institute (and one of the three authors of this article), said most of these unique ads were in informal settlements and risked being lost as the areas were developed: "They are part of our heritage and need to be preserved."

She said that when advertisers wanted to reach their township markets they had to go a little deeper and use idiomatic Xhosa to attract more customers.

The adverts are painted by several artists working collectively.

One of them is student Thando Samuels who is studying at Cape Town's Arts and Media Access institution.

He said township ads were different as business people wanted to portray life and how their products were relevant to it.

He said conventional advertising signs were not attractive and went unnoticed because people were bored with them.