Tapping imaginaries: Guinness, masculinity, and the promise of Africa Rising

ABSTRACT

This article interrogates masculinity and the consumer politics of late capitalism in urban Africa. Engaging scholarship on racialized masculinities, branding, and African cities with special attention to the Nigerian context, it conducts a media analysis of three Guinness Africa advertising campaigns: Made of More, Michael Power, and Greatness. Building off of its centuries-long ties between the African male consumer and European capital, in 1998 Guinness created the fictional Michael Power in a marketing coup that was to elevate the brewery to unrivaled dominance over the continent’s beer import market. Subsequent campaigns were to glorify everyday heroes: Greatness declaring a ‘drop of greatness in each man’ and Made of More extolling the sartorial elegance of Congolese dandies. This representational shift reflected the brewery’s recognition of changing models of accumulation in the African urban informal economy and the corresponding aspirations that they ignited in its men. Bypassing scripts of hegemonic masculinity, this new era of Guinness advertising showcased self-made men in a laissez-faire economy, simultaneously celebrating and depoliticizing the racialized global inequalities and gendered politics of contemporary African urbanization. Guinness’s successful appeal to twenty-first-century African male consumers provides a case study of multinational marketing in bottom billion capitalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Africa Rising
• Black masculinity
• bottom billion capitalism
• informal economy
• racial capitalism

Made of More

It begins with fire. The distant heat of a glowing orange sun bleeds into a landscape engulfed in flames and smoke. The caption ‘Congo – Brazzaville’ strikes a familiar chord, for indeed, is not Congo always burning? Almost as quickly as we, the viewers, pass judgement, we are corrected. Here are men at work, brave men bracing flames to clear peri-urban brush and gather branches, fuel for the foundry. Another toiler of hard, manual labor expertly navigates a heavy ice block around buses and past burnt-out cars. Honking horns form the symphonic ambience of the African informalized cityscape. It is evident that these protagonists are strong, determined men who, for their daily bread, surmount the extremes of fire and ice.

Over the lyrics of ‘What makes a good man?’ sung by British Band The Heavy, a smooth baritone croons the following aspirational mantra:

In life, you cannot always choose what you do.

But you can always choose who you are.

And so back home after a long day, washing off the muck of their day labor to reveal their authentic selves, these men transform from what they do to who they really are. These gentleman dandies are in full bloom, brilliant against the grayscale of dirt road merged into carbon sky. The baritone continues:

We are the Sapeurs: The Society of Elegant Persons of the Congo

You see my friends,

With every grace and every cuff link

We say,

‘I am the master of my fate.

I am the captain of my soul.’

Those last verses, appropriated from William Henley’s poem Invictus and recited by Nelson Mandela during his long years in an apartheid South African prison, render homage to a struggle victorious over indignity and unfreedom. Our baritone too professes freedom, a rejoinder to what earlier in the poem Henley calls the ‘bludgeoning of chance’ as he emerges with head ‘bloody, but unbowed.’ Boasting chests of fine linens and carefully shined shoes, fedoras and panama hats atop unbowed heads, sapeurs are brash frontiersmen of the liberalized global economy. Their transformation is total. Out of their shanties and into the bar, they find dignity and freedom. Having arrived at the true source of their value, sapeurs strut grace and cuff links, suspenders and monocles. Their fellow revelers applaud while black beer flows from the tap, and the viewer’s last shot is a full pint on which is written, ‘Guinness: Made of More’ (Bbdoworldwide, 2014).

Released in 2014 as part of Guinness’s Made of More¹ campaign, this sapeurs commercial was the latest in a succession of media coups that tightened the brewery’s hold on African beer drinkers. A real collective of men from Brazzaville and Kinshasa, sapeurs had for a generation circulated among anthropological texts and documentarians’ lenses, appearing in theses, articles, books, news stories, and short films. Their popularized esthetic swagger fit well with the new Made of More campaign that announced, ‘Guinness celebrates those with the confidence to carve their own path’ (AMVBBDO, n.d.).

By extolling sapeurs as self-made men, both consuming and commodifiable, Guinness had effectively tapped into the ideational production and circulation of masculinities at the confluence of the post-work economy and bottom billion marketing. In this article, I conduct a media analysis of Guinness campaigns as a means to interrogate the significance of this confluence for producing and circulating changing imaginaries of African masculinity. To maximize its profits, Guinness had recognized and reworked ‘“hope” and “aspirations” as gendered and socio-discursive constructs woven into the fiber of urban economy and neoliberal capitalism’ (Dery & Amoah, 2023, p. 224). Yet while I focus on the period of late capitalism – rebranded, in recent decades, as Africa Rising – I simultaneously emphasize the contiguous logics of accumulation and commodification in the longue durée of racial capitalism. As a case study, Guinness in Africa demonstrates both this longue durée and the contemporary period. I begin with the Made of More sapeurs commercial to attend to the extractive character of Guinness in Africa whose interest in African subject-making has always been underwritten by a profit motive, and I establish that longer history in this context. Next, I pivot to examine how turn-of-the-century campaigns targeted African men as consumers while reflecting and capitalizing off of their aspirational shifts amid new economic realities.

Reframing the malaise of masculinity in late capitalism

Sapeurs descended from dandies born of Central African social clubs in the 1920s that oriented around the newly integrated style, music, and dances from Europe. Often houseboys in European homes, these men used clothing to signify participation in the colonial economy (Gondola, 1999). From the 1980s, the fashioning of the sapeur emerged from the rejections that young Congolese men faced in the ‘African city which never truly offered them a place in society,’ and their attempts to enter the capitals of a fortress Europe (Gondola, 1999, p. 30). The transatlantic journey was an adventure of becoming, the means for socially and economically marginal men to ‘consummat[e] their entrance into adulthood’ (Gondola, 1999, p. 30). Once arrived, at great sacrifice and by any means necessary, sapeurs hunted the spoils of conquest: the griffe (label). The body, debased by ‘deprivation, frustration, unemployment, boredom, hunger, heat, and illness … finds its salvation and a sort of redemption in the cult of the griffe’ (Gondola, 1999, p. 31). ‘[A]bove all corporeal,’ by seizing control of the signs of his body the sapeur ‘is there to conceal his social failure and to make it into an apparent victory’ (Gondola, 1999, pp. 30, 31). His journey is completed upon return, likely by deportation, to the African city. Despite his conquest of ailleurs (abroad), he continues to inhabit a realm without opportunity. Unable to fill his empty belly or improve the political and economic conditions under which he lives, the sapeur’s defiance begins and ends at the surface of his body. He is a fitting hero of the commodity.

The production team behind the Guinness advertisement declared the sapeurs ‘everyday heroes … whose way of life is a testament to the belief of putting more in, to get more out’ (AMVBBDO, n.d.). They elaborated:

Their life is not defined by occupation or wealth, but by respect, a moral code and an inspirational display of flair and creativity. This is demonstrated through their love of stylish dressing; but it is not the fabric or cost of the suit that counts, it is the worth of the man inside it.

Winner of over seventy creative awards, including seven Lions at Cannes, Adweek.com dubbed the sapeur commercial the ‘Best-Dressed Guinness Commercial Ever’ and praised it for departing from typical portrayals of Africa, for which ‘the goal is usually humor or pity’ (Griner, 2014). One industry insider remarked that Guinness was truly exceptional, for ‘Rarely do brands treat Africans as cultural equals, much less as inspirational role models’ (Griner, 2014).

Already familiar to the ethnographic gaze, with this commercial Guinness formally propelled sapeurs into the commercial spotlight. What was initially a practice of dubious acquisition in the clandestine migrations of young African men now bore the stamp of haute couture. Now they were self-made warriors surviving stylishly against the backdrop of the dystopic African city. Rather than failed producers, they were victorious consumers, their identities firmly anchored in and deriving status from global economic flows.

Guinness arrives in Africa

European imperialism was at its core a market imperative. The expansion of an inchoate capitalist economy consisted of an oft-indistinguishable combination of trade with and forceful extraction from the African continent, the taking of labor and raw materials for the offloading of metropolitan industry’s finished products. When Europe’s dominant powers partitioned African territories into their own monopoly jurisdictions at the 1884 Berlin Conference, the dual ethos of corporate nationalism and corporate social responsibility found strategic and ideological cover in the colonial civilizing mission.

In her classic treatise on imperialism and the commodity object, Ann McClintock (1995) observes that 1884 was also the year of the first wrapped and branded soap. Soap advertisements depicted the simultaneous expansion of the British empire and commodity culture, portraying the ‘myth of first contact’ as the commodity’s arrival onto African shores (McClintock, 1995, p. 208). As a ‘Victorian poetics of racial hygiene and imperial progress’ (McClintock, 1995, p. 209), soap dually ‘symbolized th[e] “racializing” of the domestic world and “domestication” of the colonial world’ (Hall, 1997, p. 241). Within this repository of images, caricatured Black children cleaned themselves white. This register associated black skin with dirt, and civilization as the literal washing away of blackness.

By rendering ‘washing and clothing the savage’ (McClintock, 1995, p. 208) the iconography of the civilizing mission, the Victorian soapbox of moral purity obscured the most lucrative goods being sold to the African colonies, foremost among them arms and alcohol. Guinness had begun exporting to Africa in 1827 by way of Sierra Leone, following a distribution network established by colonial shipping routes of the era (Murphy, 2012). And despite its proudly proclaimed Irish origins, Guinness interests have long been multinational, with solid connections to the United Kingdom that mimicked the latter’s colonial forays: Guinness went public on the London Stock Exchange in 1886, the same year that it became the world’s largest brewery, and in 1932 relocated its headquarters to London. In 1959 Guinness established a joint venture with the British-owned United Africa Company through which it would produce and export directly on the continent. Thus at the dawn of African independence, Guinness helped to cement enduring ties between the African consumer and British capital (Bonsu & Godefroit-Winkel, 2016; Duggan, 2019).

Guinness has been sold successfully on the African continent for almost two hundred years, with Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, its primary market. Alcohol was from the start ‘the key to unlock[ing] the economic potential of the country, a major agent for the extractive economy,’ and by the first decade of the twentieth century it had amassed one-third of Nigerian imports, serving as a ‘catalyst for the promotion of the cash-crop-for-export sector’ (Heap, 2007, p. 4). Alcohol’s deep implication in colonial Nigeria’s economic development raised a conundrum for the civilizing mission as ideology and realpolitik, ‘caught between … the Darwinian-based notion that Western civilization had a duty to protect Africans from all bad external economic influences, and the civilize-through-trade concept which sought to modernize Africans by economically exploiting colonies to their fullest potential’ (Heap, 2007, p. 10). Following the Brussels Pact of 1890 that restricted alcohol sales to those colonies where they had already been introduced, the British colonial government imposed an outright ban on liquor among Africans in the Northern Nigeria Protectorate; in Southern Nigeria, however, import duties on alcohol sales were a steady windfall for the colonial government (Okonkwo, 2018). In the words of Herbert Tugwell, then-Anglican Bishop to Lagos, ‘The greater the imports of spirits the richer the treasury: and the richer the treasury, the more rapidly we can advance in matters of reform’ (Okonkwo, 2018, p. 498). While colonial officials defended profit as a moral good, for the urban working class and elites, imported alcohol consumption, particularly beer, ‘heralded the rise of modernity’ (Okonkwo, 2018, p. 499). Already in precolonial Nigeria alcohol had been associated with masculinity and brands reinforced this association, emphasizing ‘alcohol as a resource for gender/social identity construction’ that both looked back to tradition and forward to modernity (Dumbili, 2022, p. 2; Mensah, 2021). Through its formidable advertising and local presence, building its first brewery outside of the British Isles in the Lagosian suburb of Ikeja in 1962, Guinness prominently associated its beer with Nigeria and the modern African man (Obot, 2013; Roberts, 2010).

Bottom billion masculinity

Reading this longer history of Guinness in Africa shifts the gaze on twenty-first-century corporate colonizers who, under the guise of ‘Africa Rising,’ have identified the continent’s emerging markets as capitalism’s next frontier, or the ‘fortune at the bottom of the pyramid’ (Prahalad, 2005). Illustrative is a 2016 special report in The Economist titled ‘The 1.2 Billion Opportunity’ which explores the costs and benefits of investing in what remains a largely subsistence-based African market. Of a well-cited African Development Bank (ADB) Report claiming one-third of the continent as ‘middle class,’ the chapter ‘A Matter of Definition’ in this Economist issue thus observes that ‘To reach its figure of 350 m, [the ADB] defined the middle class to include a “floating class” of people earning between $2 and $4 a day’ (2016). This same chapter references how the multinational corporation Diageo, parent of the Guinness brand, announced its intention to sell more Guinness in Nigeria even as it abandoned plans to offer its more upmarket liquors to a consumer base it recognized was unable to afford them (2016). Diageo’s assessment made clear its willful appropriation of not-so-disposable earnings; the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid indicates not their wealth but rather the extractive potential of the world’s poor. Calling out such discursive slippage between consumer wealth and corporate profit, Ananya Roy (2005, p. 152) dismisses ‘the rather ludicrous point that the poor … hold trillions in assets.’ For such a consumer base, the ‘emerging markets’ of these bottom billion capitalists is variation of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (c.f. Harvey, 2005). On this final frontier of late capitalism, petty consumerism entails the further dispossession of those who have neither land nor labor left to be extracted.

Through the Guinness sapeurs advertisement’s articulation of the everyman’s possibility reveals global capital’s fundamental profit incentive. Indeed, unlike the campaigns I discuss next, the sapeurs commercial was marketed not to Africans themselves but rather appealed to a largely European audience. In this way the advertisement was selling both the Guinness beer-commodity and the African man-commodity – doubly extolling the African as consumer and as commodity object, the latter invoking a long and troubled history of racial capitalist extraction. Attending to this doubleness enables a view of the longue durée of racial capitalism via the imperial capture of Africa for consumer markets and commodity bodies alike.

While the Guinness Made of More advertising campaign represented African masculinity as a marketable predicament and aspiration to a consuming public from abroad, Guinness had also established a long tradition of employing masculine ideals to increase its sales within Africa. As it did, it recognized and capitalized on shifts in African masculinities in a changing economy, from developmentalist aspiration to neoliberal predicament. It is a shift that characterizes much of the scholarship on African masculinities since the turn of the century. The consistent premise of this scholarship is a post-structural adjustment context of extended economic crisis, often accompanied by political or military crisis, that has left a majority of urban African men unemployed, unmarriageable, suspended in a socio-generational category of youth, and looking beyond the breadwinning ideal and the wage economy to reassert agency as modern, masculine subjects (e.g. Agadjanian, 2005; Bjarnesen, 2023; Dery & Amoah, 2023; Ferguson, 1999; Gondola, 1999; Honwana, 2012; Hunter, 2010; Izugbara & Egesa, 2020; Jeffrey, 2010; Lindsay, 2003; Lindsay & Miescher, 2003; Locke & te Lintelo, 2012; Mains, 2012; Matlon, 2016, 2022; McLean, 2021; Mensah, 2021; Mnisi & Ngcongo, 2023; Newell, 2012; Ralph, 2008; Silberschmidt, 2001; Smith, 2017; Spall & Abranches, 2022; Van Staple, 2021; Weiss, 2009). It is within the context of this well-established literature that my analysis of Guinness marketing of African masculinity and for African men departs.

In the next sections I examine two Guinness Africa advertising campaigns, one that preceded and another that followed Made of More, to interrogate consumer politics in the making of late capitalism’s African urban everyman. I pay special attention to Nigeria, today the brewery’s largest consumer market in the world. In 1998 Guinness released a series of short films starring the fictional journalist Michael Power. Performing audacious physical feats while jet-setting the globe to rub shoulders with leading figures in media and politics, Michael Power presented a superhero persona that was wildly popular across Africa, yet unattainable to an emerging market of ‘bottom of the pyramid’ consumers.

In its subsequent campaigns, Guinness celebrated everyday heroes. We have seen how Made of More extolled the clandestine sartorial elegance of Congo’s sapeurs to masterfully capture the aspirations that new economic realities ignite in the lives of Africa’s informally employed. I further explore how the Greatness campaign set the tone for this bottom billion marketing as it declared there to be a ‘drop of greatness in each man.’ I argue that the shift from Michael Power to these later representations reflects Guinness’s recognition of new models of accumulation in the African urban economy. In doing so, the brewery affirms for its drinkers the masculinities that their precarious livelihood strategies deny while also making claims on their minimal disposable incomes.

The Greatness and Made of More campaigns bypassed Michael Power’s hegemonic transnational businessman masculinity (Connell, 1998). Instead, they showcased success stories of men who had made it under the most improbable of circumstances. These were celebrations of self-made men in a laissez-faire economy, celebrations that depoliticized the global inequalities and gendered politics of contemporary African urbanization. In doing so they anchored twenty-first-century African masculinities to bottom billion capitalism. While all three campaigns brought in immense profits from the African consumer market and were widely lauded within the advertising industry, the representational shift from Michael Power to subsequent campaigns reflected the brewery’s recognition of changing models of accumulation and transformed aspirations among men in the African urban informal economy – even as their alcohol consumption soared, thereby fueling a parallel narrative around failed and problem-prone Black masculinities.

As a case study, the Guinness campaigns exemplify the ways that transnational corporations capitalize on the conjoined crises of formal employment and masculinity in postcolonial African cities. They do so by representing Black masculinities via aspirational images of petty consumerism and media stardom. Guinness’s successful appeal to a new generation of African male consumers provides a case study of multinational marketing in bottom billion capitalism. Yet far from posing this moment as unique, I contend that Guinness’s long history in the African market since imperialism demonstrates the contiguous logic and practices of racial capitalism at work.

Michael Power

The slogan, ‘Guinness brings out your inner strength,’ well articulates the global tendency to link beer to conventional notions of masculinity. The corporation suggested this ‘Key Brand Benefit’ in a 2001 internal publication, writing:

The Guinness brand positioning … shows that Inner Strength is a highly relevant and motivating concept to men throughout the world who need to feel strong, assertive and independent. This need, described as ‘potency’ or ‘independence,’ is the consumer need that Guinness currently meets across the world. (Amis et al., 2009, p. 100)

Guinness Africa’s brand director explained,

The need for self-belief, the need for inner strength is particularly relevant in Africa. The reason for this is that Africans see themselves as coming from a disadvantage. In every way of life, Africa is behind in the world. Again Africans believe, because we are Africans we can overcome all of those obstacles and we can achieve things almost of world standard … So again, it is tying that need of Africans to believe that in spite of our disadvantages we can still be reckoned with at the global stage, and tying that to the brand benefit of inner strength, that it reflects your inner strength. (Amis et al., 2009, p. 102)

That Guinness imbues men with strength is a belief that has been particularly entrenched in the brewery’s Anglophone West African markets, where lore of the stout’s medicinal qualities linked it to ‘enhanced virility,’ or ‘male power’ (Murphy, 2012; Roberts, 2010, p. 37). Suggestive of an aphrodisiac, in Nigeria Guinness has been called ‘black power’ and ‘Viagra’ (Murphy, 2012, p. 66). From 1960s advertisements depicting African men performing incredible physical feats while proclaiming ‘Guinness Gives You Power,’ Guinness has positioned itself with ‘male consumer’s aspirations to “buy into” these images and associations of strength and power’ (Murphy, 2012, p. 55).

Hence the arrival of Michael Power, a fictive character whose ‘name embodies the long-term and traditional value of the product’ and whose actions characterize the ‘physical, social and cultural expressions of power’ (Murphy, 2012, p. 62). Popularized as Africa’s James Bond, Michael Power was, in short, Guinness’ ‘brand DNA’ (Amis et al., 2009, p. 105).² Over seven years, Guinness product placements appeared conspicuously alongside Michael Power in a series of film shorts and, in what was the costliest-ever advertising campaign on the African continent, in the award-winning, feature-length film Critical Assignment (Roberts, 2010). Guinness used Power’s character to demonstrate ‘an overt bodily display of popular cultural understandings about African masculinity and self-identity’ and to promote by proxy the ‘transfer of masculine qualities [from the brand] onto the purchaser’ (Amis et al., 2009, pp. 98, 102–103). In short, ‘the discursive representation of Guinness’ Michael Power … ubiquitously ingrained the character as a locally resonant symbolic inspiration of hopeful Africans, an archetype of prescribed hegemonic masculinity, and a polysemic signifier of Guinness values’ (Amis et al., 2009, p. 114). Thus espousing the self-made individualism of late capitalism, Power reflected neither the African ‘big man’ whose ‘patriarchal dividend’ was measured ‘by accumulating social and human capital’ – namely, wives and children – nor the ‘counter-hegemonic youthful forces’ that threatened the political economic status quo (Roberts, 2010, pp. 46–47). Instead, his was ‘commercialized masculine power’ (Roberts, 2010, p. 48). Michael Power asserted wealth in objects over people to leave his trace through consumption rather than procreation (Murphy, 2012).

In the film short ‘Michael Power Episode 3,’ evil cyborg Hector Dexter masterminds the hijacking of a plane in which Prince Jabu is traveling, demanding $50 million for his and his fellow passengers’ release (Saatchi & Saatchi, 2001). But to the villian’s misfortune, Michael Power is onboard. Quickly overtaking his captors and aided by his beautiful female partner, Power orchestrates the passengers’ escape from the hidden compound where the plane is grounded. But he leaves himself behind as bait. Amid a wail of sirens, a veritable army of Dexter’s men rush to intercept him at the hostage site. His foes descending, hurriedly Power spots crates of Guinness beer and pulls out a bottle before climbing back into the plane. Watching from multiple surveillance cameras, Dexter fruitlessly attempts to operate his many gadgets to halt Power’s getaway. The shot zooms in on the defined musculature of our hero’s arms as he maneuvers the plane’s controls, sending it roaring toward an exit that shuts a moment too soon. The freed hostages, now safely outside, look up to see the blast of the plane; his partner, presuming him dead, cries out in despair. But Power had fixed the plane’s yoke with his Guinness before performing a daredevil leap from the speeding jet. He recovers his Guinness and coolly throws himself from the inferno toward an undetermined fate, the short ending with, ‘To be continued.’ In this episode, Power demonstrates bravery, intelligence, and physical and technological mastery over Dexter, a powerful and wealthy white man/cyborg with command over an abundance of both people and objects.

The Michael Power shorts elevated Guinness to dominance over Africa’s beer market, doubling its sales and garnering a 95% brand recognition (Gibbons, 2004). Profits in Nigeria tripled between 2000 and 2004 and became, with Cameroon and Ghana, the largest consumer markets for Guinness globally (Roberts, 2010). By the campaign’s end, Guinness was listed among the largest companies on the Nigerian Stock Exchange (Jernigan & Obot, 2006).

The Michael Power campaign culminated in the blockbuster Critical Assignment. In this film, Guinness juxtaposes water-scarce villages with a vision of the African metropolis sated by conspicuous consumption, ‘wonderful architecture but no roadside rubbish dumps, lively streets but no beggars, plush New York-style apartments but no shanty towns’ (Foster, 2003). Filmed on the continent, the production strategically cameoed sites from Guinness’s key consumer bases of Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, and Kenya (Amis et al., 2009). To this ‘corporately inspired creative cartographic revisionism that avoid[ed] the particularities of specific African markets,’ Michael Power was a similarly generic, pan-African figure (Amis et al., 2009, p. 107). Africans nevertheless embraced him as their own. As Guinness became a household name, so did Michael Power, and at the height of this successful campaign his fictional character was found to be only slightly less known on the continent than Nelson Mandela (Sheehan, 2013). Selling freedom in commodity form, in some places beer drinkers who wanted a Guinness simply ordered a ‘Michael Power’ (Roberts, 2010, p. 41). Power’s attributes, in short, stood for a hegemonic, heteronormative masculinity that espoused corporate brand power and a ‘commercially viable patriarchal logic’ (Amis et al., 2009, p. 107). Through him, Guinness had successfully ‘reimagine[d] the continent … as a homeland for men who generate their identity via brand associations’ (Roberts, 2010, p. 48).

Greatness

Michael Power’s lucrative heroics might have endured well into another generation. Yet the informalization of African economies has produced models that mark a definitive rupture from Michael Power’s suited and jet-setting masculinity. Spotlighting the African everyman as one in a bottom billion, in 2006 Guinness unfurled the slogan, ‘Greatness in every man.’ The shift to the Guinness Greatness campaign reflected the brewery’s keen awareness of new modes of accumulation in the context of an African working population that was, at the new century, three quarters and upwards informalized (Meagher & Lindell, 2013).³ For this majority, doors to formal avenues of education and employment have long been shuttered. Their aspirations are rather entrepreneurial if not celebrity, consumerist, and branded (Matlon, 2019; Shipley, 2013). Of the urbanizing Nigerian youth yearning for membership in the global economy, Jernigan and Obot (2006, p. 68) explain their relationship to beer in its multinational commodity form:

While most do not find regular work, the industry can count on them to fill the stadium for a Shaggy concert or the plaza for an Easter party where beer is often offered free or at reduced prices and where brand loyalty is nurtured. It can count on them to be drawn to its free feature films and television programming, promoting its brands in the guise of profiles in courage.

By attending to this marginal consumer class, Guinness transformed Africa into its largest regional market (Murphy, 2012).

An example from the Greatness campaign is the 2009 commercial ‘Guinness Scout’ (Erlfie, 2010). Filmed in three Kenyan cities, the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, with football choreographer Mike Delaney, trained amateur Nigerian and Kenyan footballers in a ‘four day bootcamp’ prior to filming (Saatchi & Saatchi, 2009). Released in Nigeria in 2009 amid the football fever anticipating the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, and on the day of a qualifying match between Nigeria and Kenya, the ad features a British scout who has come to Africa ‘in search of the Greatness in one player,’ yet ‘eventually finds its presence everywhere,’ including from his driver who is given the chance to demonstrate his talents when an errant ball flies his way (Saatchi & Saatchi, 2009). The advertisement captures the sport’s potent role in contemporary African men’s imaginaries, a path to wealth and fame in the absence of other viable opportunities. Suggesting the ubiquity of African talent, Guinness portrays raw athleticism waiting only to be discovered and cultivated by a white savior in the twenty-first-century guise of the professional football scout (see e.g. Ungruhe & Esson, 2017).

Like the colonial expeditions of a prior century, Guinness conceived the Greatness campaign by enlisting on-the-ground ethnographers employed by behemoth marketing agency Saatchi & Saatchi to discover the ‘real’ Africa (Sheehan, 2013). Former Saatchi & Saatchi executive Brian Sheehan described how the agency’s ‘Xplorers’ braved ‘extreme’ conditions in their search for ‘consumers to tell their own stories’ (Sheehan, 2013, p. 30). Xplorers reported encountering a deficit of outlets for the African imagination: in Nigeria – the birthplace of Nollywood – Sheehan (2013, p. 28) noted the paucity of television ownership as evidence that ‘access to any kind of entertainment content was scant.’ He (2013, p. 29) recounted:

Against this backdrop, the Guinness team decided to do something positive to inspire consumers. They introduced two big thoughts in their advertising. The first was that there is ‘greatness’ inherent in Africa, in general, and within African men in particular. The greatness and quality of black men parallels the greatness and quality of the world’s most famous black beer. The second thought was even more inspirational. For Africa and its men to succeed, they needed to ‘believe’ in their greatness. These combined thoughts, as executed in its marketing programs, have driven the brand’s success for the last 13 years.

Drawing on the brand identity that had long connected to African masculinity, here Guinness was situating itself anew as a source of pride and indeed inspiration for the African everyman and continent. In doing so, the brewery asserted that African potential needed only unlocking by the multinational corporation. Yet by likening the black beer to black male bodies, Guinness similarly evoked a bitter past in which African bodies were incorporated into the global economy as commodified objects.⁴ Here we might observe the false opposition as to whether Guinness advertising ‘commodif[ies] or celebrat[es] blackness’ (Murphy, 2012, p. 63). The corporation sells black beer to its African consumer by celebrating Blackness in its commodity form. Bodily commodification, as a mode of consuming and as a thing to be consumed, supplants productivity as the source par excellence of economic activity and social value. Participation-via-commodification marks the bottom billion’s ‘adverse incorporation’ into capitalist markets (Hickey & du Toit, 2007; Meagher & Lindell, 2013).

Herein lies the corporatized conditions for greatness among African everymen. In the celebratory, laissez-faire language of the self-made man, ‘Xplorers found out that life in Africa was invariably tough, but that people drew inspiration from anything that signaled their ability to rise above their circumstances and make more of their lives’ (Sheehan, 2013, p. 31). Thus heartened, Guinness left behind Michael Power, ‘a fictional character as a source of idolized inspiration,’ to instead ‘be focused on real African men who achieve greatness by improving their lives and the lives of their communities every day.’ ‘Greatness,’ then, ‘would be about the “Drop of Greatness in Every [African] Man.” Guinness was a great beer for great men, and the brand exhorted every man to “Reach for Greatness”’ (Sheehan, 2013, p. 31). The Greatness campaign increased Guinness sales across the continent by almost 20% in its launch year, and for the first time, sales in Nigeria surpassed those in Ireland (Connolly, n.d.).

Africa Rising: reaching for the bottom billion

Reaching for greatness was to reach, quite literally, for a Guinness. Despite the minimal earnings of the corporation’s target populations, the consecutive campaigns of Michael Power and Greatness were enormously profitable. Among Nigerians making $2 a day, for example, an 80-cent bottle of Guinness was a formidable expense, yet one increasingly prioritized (Sheehan, 2013). Guinness presented this disproportionate demand on precarious livelihoods not only as proof positive of the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid but also to glorify a sense of brand-inflected self-determinism.

Like so many transnational corporations, Guinness’s Diageo operates within the discursive frame of Africa Rising, which takes as its premise that in the new century, Africa boasts several of the world’s fastest-growing economies. In doing so, it locates the continent’s ideal subject, and its new target market, as the citizen-consumer. In the book The Next Africa: An Emerging Continent Becomes a Global Powerhouse, for example, authors Bright and Hruby (2015, p. 72) observe that the ‘successes of the brewers and the telecom companies over the past 15 years have encouraged a broad range of global brands to take a harder look at Africa.’ And in Africa Rising: How 900 Million African Consumers Offer More Than You Think, marketing scholar Vijay Mahajan (2009) collapses emergent African wealth with its extractive potential to present Guinness as evidence of a bright corporate future in Africa. Its feel-good intangibles rendered priceless, corporate logic thus declares that the ‘Guinness brand has actually helped inspire the men of Africa to better lives’ (Sheehan, 2013, p. 29).

The fêted Africa Rising, as with its sibling emerging markets discourse, asserts that the ‘steady growth in middle-income consumption and a growing young population are providing Sub-Saharan African and foreign firms a real opportunity for growth’ (Amankwah-Amoah et al., 2018, p. 551). In the introduction to their special issue ‘Africa Rising in an Emerging World,’ Amankwah-Amoah et al. (2018, p. 552) determine, ‘The evolving socio-economic and demographic landscape in Sub-Saharan Africa has also provided an opportunity for existing businesses to explore new consumption patterns across the continent for new revenue streams and growth drivers.’ Attending to bottom billion consumers as well as (while sometimes also conflating) the astounding wealth accumulation of an Afropolitan, joint venture elite, this discourse further implies that the yawning gap between these classes will eventually close, possibly by way of a trickle-down entrepreneurial culture of innovation and success. Denouncing decades of intellectual and investor pessimism, Africa Rising declares that Africa is open for business – thus obscuring the fact that Africa was never closed, its profits simply flowed outward in dramatic relief to continental neglect. The rediscovery of African consumers’ extractive potential by Guinness and others conveys the interests of capital as those of the greater good. Linking the African Rising discourse to a political economy of gender that ties men’s worth to commodity culture demonstrates an insidious corporate brilliance.

Guinness aired these campaigns while in decline from global dominance, reflecting its strategy of expanding in Africa to counter contractions elsewhere (Jernigan & Obot, 2006). Having achieved the industry appellation ‘Lovemark,’ in the second decade of the new century marketing insiders were remarking that the ‘level of love, respect, and trust African consumers share with the Guinness brand is astounding’ (Roberts, 2014, p. 373). During this period Africa accounted for 45% of global Guinness sales (Thompson, 2014).

Observing that ‘the African continent’s dynamic economic and social realities excite select commercial beer brewers,’ at this same moment public health advocates were sounding an alarm on alcohol consumption among African men (Hesse, 2015, p. 93). Their drinking practices have been linked to the malaise of unmet masculine aspiration and a related culture of violence (Mensah, 2021). Related critiques have emphasized that Guinness and other multinational breweries are above all ‘large global organizations with heavy financial involvement of Western-based investors’ practicing ‘unethical behaviours … in Africa [that] are largely not tolerated in their home countries’ (Obot, 2013, p. 72). Nigeria, for example, is recipient to some of the most ardent advertising efforts by alcohol companies in the world, while also having one of the highest levels of global adult per capita alcohol consumption and ranking first in Africa for heavy episodic drinking (Dumbili, 2022; Hesse, 2015; Obot, 2013). At 4.6% annually, beer consumption is rising faster in Africa than in any other world region (Hesse, 2015).

The indexing of beer with cosmopolitan sensibilities, entrenched at independence, continues to predominate in major African cities (Roberts, 2010). This association makes the corporate world eager at prospects for consumer spending, particularly as more Africans enter into the ‘middle class’ (measured earnings above $1.90 per day). Diageo has sought to direct beer consumption away from local brew-making traditions, even if that entails diversifying to produce varieties like cassava beer, as it has done in Ghana (Hesse, 2015). Nick Blazquez, president of Diageo in Africa, has described this as a means to ‘encourage (African) consumers to trade up, out of the informal sector’ (Hesse, 2015, p. 97). Evidently, glorifying the African everyman’s hustle is fine so long as the profits continue to flow outward. The world’s largest corporate breweries – British-based Diageo, French-based Castel, among others – are engaged in a ‘modern Scramble for Africa’ with a ‘continentwide mutual preemptive rights deal for Africa’ to ensure their market dominance (Hesse, 2015, p. 102). One political scientist has surmised,

If such continent-sweeping deals have a neocolonial air – think of the 1884 Berlin Conference where foreign ministers established ground rules for how European powers could exploit their own corners of the ‘dark continent’ – then consider the biggest brewers’ roots and corporate centers. (Hesse, 2015, p. 103)

In late capitalism as under colonialism, the predatory extraction of Africans accompanies the creation of a malevolent dependency. The gendered colonial logic of the civilizing mission posits this as a deficiency of African manhood. In a New York Times article written from Congo-Brazzaville and entitled ‘Moonshine or the Kids?’ Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof (2010) put it thus:

There’s an ugly secret of global poverty, one rarely acknowledged by aid groups or U.N. reports. It’s a blunt truth that is politically incorrect, heartbreaking, frustrating and ubiquitous: It’s that if the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children’s prospects would be transformed. Much suffering is caused not only by low incomes, but also by shortsighted private spending decisions by heads of households.

Here, ‘heads of household’ – shorthand for men – are self-serving consumers whose temporary fixes render them incapable as agents of African development. This is a familiar charge, the myth of the lazy African man that at one time forcefully compelled the labor of black male bodies has now morphed into a narrative of the undeserving poor, deadweight dad. Yet rarely acknowledged in this account are the high stakes involved in producing Black male subjectivities at capitalism’s narrow intersection of racial exclusion and masculine worth (Matlon, 2022).

The conflation of having with being, initiated with the body-commodities and object-commodities that circulated in the imperial economy, has ensured the ‘structurally entrenched underpinning of manhood as a performance intrinsically linked to money’ (Smith, 2017, p. 4). In the sapeurs commercial that began this article, Guinness celebrated marginal men who anchor their worth in commodity value. Increasingly, these are men who identify outside of a proletarian ethos of work that has consistently failed to reflect the African job market, and in their sartorial performances, they celebrate their bodies as sites of capital accumulation. By capitalizing on the sapeur’s dignity, the footballer’s ambition, and the respect that an however fictive Michael Power commands, Guinness effectively depoliticizes the gender politics underwriting these bottom billion markets. Offering no intrinsic value to African masculinities outside of the forces of capitalism, these advertisements reveal the entanglement of men’s social and economic value. Consumer politics thus functions as an ‘antipolitics’ (c.f. Ferguson, 1990/1994). It effectively closes men off from imagining other worlds where money is not the index of dignity, success, and respect. Asserting value via consumerism, however petty, renders masculine aspiration complicit to the extractive logic of bottom billion capitalism, continuing in novel form the longue durée of racial capitalism that began with corporate imperialism (Matlon, 2016, 2022). Attending to this longue durée calls for situating Guinness and the masculinity it invokes within the analytic of coloniality, which ‘summons racist difference into the modern period (imbricating the colonial and modern), including the very ideas of life and being human, of economic orders, cultural imaginaries, and political assemblages,’ and to this, ‘the confounding problem of the coloniality of masculinity’ (Ratele, 2021, pp. 770, 771).

The civilizing mission was never about finding dignity in work. It was always about the outward flow of capital. As a project doubly of capitalist extraction and ideology, inextricable from how civilized man earned was a vision of how he was to spend. In the absence of productive economies, the continued flow of capital finds a fortune in the anticipatory consumerism of bottom billion markets. Advertising, the masterful conjurer of the commodity fetish, peddles in the desire to derive profit – even from those with no discernable means. By ‘tacitly exploiting their knowledge of African experiences, self-identity, and disadvantage in the leveraging of the brand,’ Guinness’s advertising campaigns seamlessly

conflat[e] the notion of self-belief – the driving logic behind the attainment of confidence and inner strength, the realization and expression of a particular hegemonic masculinity … with the suggested idea that the habitual consumption of Guinness provides the means to those ends. (Amis et al., 2009, p. 113)

Free to make and to spend, to win but also to fail and to disappoint, the mantra of personal responsibility is the counterpoint to the man who, absent the accountability of state or market, declares himself master of his fate.

As the regulatory discourse of late capitalism, Guinness advertising succeeds in presenting a ‘seeming “natural” embeddedness’ of masculinity and alcohol and underscores the consumption-saturated ‘disciplinary regime for the repetitious stylized acts of gendered performance that so constitute the core of the cultural production of gendered norms’ (Amis et al., 2009, p. 101). In its move from Michael Power to the Greatness and Made of More campaigns, Guinness Africa transformed ‘“the MAN in the street” into a hero’ (Murphy, 2012, p. 65). In doing so, the multinational brewery captured the consumer imaginations of men whose exclusion from the urban wage economy had consigned them to the permanent status of social junior (Jeffrey, 2010; Locke & te Lintelo, 2012; Mains, 2012; Newell, 2009). Guinness’s multigenerational success in reading and shaping African men’s imaginaries speaks to the central role of consumer society in imperial expansion, a role that endures in the corporate marketing schemes that identify the informalized African everyman as capital’s ‘new frontier’ (Roll & Dolan, 2014). By attending to the predicament of manhood denied, Guinness provided an exemplary account of multinational marketing in bottom billion capitalism.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Marco Bacio, Cirus Rinaldi, and James Messerschmidt, and the blind reviewers at the International Review of Sociology. I presented drafts of this paper at the Conference on Youth Politics and Projects of Self-Making in the Global South at the R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies ‘Metamorphoses of the Political,’ the Dwelling in Liminalities: Uncanny Conversations seminar at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, the Gender, Power, and Theory Workshop at the University of Southern California, Department of Sociology, the Comparative Research Workshop at Yale University, Department of Sociology, the University of Virginia Departments of Women, Gender, & Sexuality and Sociology, and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Africa-American and African Studies, and thank the organizers, discussants, and participants at these convenings for their thoughtful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by IAST from the French National Research Agency (ANR) under grant ANR-17-EURE-0010 (Investissements de l’Avenir Program); the School of International Service, American University under the Faculty Exceptional Research Award.

Notes on contributors

Jordanna Matlon

Jordanna Matlon is Associate Professor at the School of International Service, American University and 2023–2024 research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse. Matlon is an urban sociologist and scholar of race and colonial legacies in Africa and the African diaspora. Her scholarship interrogates the ways ‘Blackness’ operates as a signifier, intersects with gender norms, manifests in popular culture, and illuminates understandings of political economy. Her multiple award-winning book, A Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism (Cornell University Press) investigates the relationship between masculinity, work, and globalization in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Her new book, Blackness as Being: Black Survival in the Age of Climate Catastrophe (under contract, Polity Press), bridges literature on surplus populations, climate change, and racial capitalism to theorize the possibilities and precariousness of species-survival in the Anthropocene.

Notes

1 Made of More was not specific to Africa. Rather, the sapeurs commercial was one of several from around the world featured in this campaign. However, this was a largely social media-oriented campaign, enabling a more expansive marketing reach. A simultaneous campaign, Made of Black, targeted the African market, of which the sapeur commercial was not a part. See Matlon (2022) for a prior discussion of this sapeur commercial.

2 The mid-1990s campaign ‘Guinness – The Power’ directly preceded Michael Power.

3 This figure excludes the agricultural sector.

4 It was during the Guinness – The Power campaign that Guinness first linked black beer and Black masculinity as a major selling point for the African market. By inviting the consumer to ‘see it,’ ‘taste it,’ ‘feel it’ in ‘a treatment most commonly used on the female body,’ Guinness ‘dismembered’ the Black male body to render it a ‘commodity in itself’ (Murphy, 2012, p. 59). Yet ‘more active than passive … the male character is, even in dismemberment, in control’ (Murphy, 2012, p. 59). This duality captures a tension in the presentation of Black male physicality. Against its fraught history in colonial and capitalist conquest, the specter of the commodity is ever-present, even when that same body is intended to consume.