«Gutes aus dem Reich der Affen» - The Representation of Africa and Africans in German Coffee Ads

The country-of-origin effect is a marketing strategy which is also used to promote African coffee. But unlike other cases where origin functions as a kind of quality seal, when it comes to Africa product quality is only rarely the central selling point. Way more often the promotion is based on images which reveal the persistence of colonial thinking. According to the literary scholar Pierre Kodjio Nenguié, colonialistically biased representations of peoples and places imply a set of fundamental ideological units, i.e.: a. the Eurocentric self-image; b. the superiority of the White man; c. the opposition between culture and nature, and d. the civilizing mission (cf. Nenguié 2006: 144). These European/Western self-concepts, in turn, are enacted through the creation of a spatially and socioculturally remote Other who is not simply different but first and foremost deviant from the White man’s norm and, therefore, defective (cf. Gouaffo 2007: 102). In the case of Africa, recurrent othering strategies are exoticization, marginalization, primitivization, dehumanization, paternalization, and infantilization (cf. Freese 2012). The present study seeks to investigate if and how these building blocks of colonial discourse are still at work in internet ads which promote African coffee in present-day Germany. It aims to show that these ads are of that kind of contemporary representations where colonialism “continues to construct cultural perspectives of peoples and places, but in a way which is covert” making it “more insidious and ultimately more dangerous” (Morgan and Pritchard 1998: 176). The analysed corpus has been collected between March and May 2015 and comprises 12 umbrella brands which belong to the three market segments of major coffee brands, fair trade market, and specialized local suppliers. Amongst other things, it will be shown that both the fair trade and the major brand market continue to deny Africans the status of competent self-reliant individuals. But whereas the fair trade selling point compassion with the poor Africans results in a fundamentally patriarchal attitude which resembles all too much the colonial ideology of the civilizing mission, major brand ads use “Africa” as projection screen for White wishes and (power) fantasies based on the unwavering faith in the White man’s superiority. As will also be shown the colonialist undertone becomes apparent on all levels of the advertising copy: syntactic structures preserve agency to Whites and relegate Africans to passive, receiving roles; lexical choices such as Ureinwohner ‘primeval inhabitant’ (instead of Ethiopian, Kenyan, Tanzanian) or Hütte ‘hut’ (instead of house) insinuate the Africans alleged backwardness; the stories told such as the one about a German entrepreneur or the one about Karen Blixen emphasize White zest for action against African alleged passivity. All of this is supported by images which show either White experts and plantation owners among their African workers or “Africa” as a wild and widely deserted continent promising spectacular safari experiences.