Land Rover and colonial-style adventure

Abstract

This article examines the infamous Land Rover ‘Himba’ advertisement (2000) that shocked South Africans because of its racism and sexism. The South African Advertising Standards Authority ruled that the advertisement constituted a violation of human dignity that perpetuated gender and cultural inequality. This article takes the position that the Himba advertisement builds on the colonial notions of adventure, exploration and discovery of the African continent by the western male. The mystique of travel and discovery during the nineteenth century inscribed the control of the African landscape and its people; colonial explorers and travellers consequently feminized Africa to signify conquest and control. It is proposed that these ideas are re-inscribed in the deeply embedded cultural connotations attached to the Land Rover and Africa as its so-called spiritual home. An investigation into some of the myths and ideologies in the Himba advertisement reveals that a set of binary oppositions operates that draw attention to the distinctions between culture/nature, power/powerlessness, male/female, technology/primitivism and West/Africa. An interrogation of this advertisement is important because of the contentious nature of its content, and because fantasy adventure is a significant tendency in tourism and leisure activities in South Africa.

Keywords:

• adventure
• Africa
• car culture
• colonialism
• feminization
• Himba
• Land Rover
• masculinity
• Namibia
• postcolonialism

Notes

1. This article is an extended version of a paper entitled ‘Roving the Land: The Exploitation of Otherness in a South African Land Rover Advertisement’, delivered at the Design History Society Conference ‘Sex Object: Desire and Design in a Gendered World’ in Norwich, United Kingdom, on 12 September 2003. I am grateful to the insightful comments and suggestions made by the referees of this article prior to publication.

2. Annie Coombes (2003: 12) notes that Tribute is a ‘glossy magazine aimed at a middle-class black entrepreneurial readership’.

3. The recently launched South African magazine Blink (subtitled ‘The key to being a man’) targets upmarket black male readers and carries an advertisement for the Land Rover Range Rover (Blink 2005: 88–9). However, the Freelander and Range Rover are not coded in precisely the same manner and have different connotations since the Range Rover has limited on-road performance (‘Land Rover: The Fifty Year Miracle Origin of the Species’ 1997).

4. The use of the Himba woman as a stereotype of Africa is common; another example with a similar context is an advertisement for Britz 4 × 4 rentals that features a Himba woman and three images of 4 × 4s. The text reads: ‘Self-drive … into the wilderness and see the parts of southern Africa you only dreamed of’ (Getaway 2004: 306).

5. It is strange that her skirt does not seem to move in response to the speed of the Freelander. The notion of speed has traditionally been coded as an adjunct of male success and sexual power (Bayley 1986: 31), and supports the assumption made in this article that the driver of the Freelander is a male figure.

6. The seemingly unproblematized and essentialist use of the word ‘masculinity’ in this article is used because the social context of the Land Rover in South Africa to date justifies this almost unilateral association between the car and male consumers. Two points need to be addressed here: first, the nature of masculinity and second, females as consumers of Land Rover. The notion of a unitary and normative hyper masculinity has been under question since at least the 1970s, and in South Africa today there is a range of masculinities that are each influenced by different discourses, including those of race, class and leisure (Morrell 2001: 3–8). But media images that continue to inscribe hegemonic images of white masculinity are still very prevalent (Morrell 2001: 25) and affect the reading made in this article. Second, cars are by default still mainly coded as masculine in South African advertisements and very few explicitly target women in the manner of the British Peugeot advertisements discussed by Grace Lees-Maffei (2002: 367–9). A South African print advertisement for Caltex petrol (2004) is a rare exception: it shows an upmarket black woman getting out of a mud-spattered 4 × 4 to buy petrol – but the product that is being advertised is petrol, not the sports utility vehicle. The most recent Jeep advertisement, found in the woman's magazine Fairlady (2005: 151), is possibly indicative of a new trend. It shows three shots of a woman's legs in which she is busy discarding her high heel shoes. These images are placed above a photograph of the Jeep with the following body copy: ‘Free your mind. The new Jeep Cherokee Renegade. Get in. Turn the key. Leave the world behind… freedom is never far away’. An article in the same Fairlady states that manufacturers are now offering cheaper 4 × 2 versions of sports utility vehicles that ‘will no doubt woo women drivers who feel more secure in lofty, chunky vehicles but have no Camel Man fantasies’ (‘Saddle Up’ 2005: 150).

7. I am grateful to Prof. Patricia Hayes of the University of the Western Cape for referring me to Henrichsen (2000).

8. The importance of memory and narrative in the construction of post-apartheid subjectivities and identities is examined by Nuttall and Coetzee (1999) and Coombes (2003: 8), who points out that ‘all memory is unavoidably both borne out of individual subjective experience and shaped by collective consciousness and shared social processes’.

9. For example, the colonial photographic tradition of depicting Himba people in an ‘overwhelming [or panoramic] landscape’ (Miescher and Rizzo 2000: 42) is apparent in this advertisement, and is almost certainly not coincidental. The colonialist aestheticized panoramic view generally alluded to the fact that the landscape was available for conquest.

10. The Himba advertisement is by no means the only recent South African advertisement that invokes colonial rhetoric and iconography; I believe the reason for this lies precisely in the intertextual competence that John Fiske (1989: 125) maintains allows the cultural production of popular meaning. In terms of Frederic Jameson's (1983, 1991) examination of postmodernism and late capitalism, the Himba advertisement is a typical example of pastiche.

11. It is also significant that the Himba advertisement was followed by at least two other Land Rover advertisements wherein the colonial trope was predominant, namely ‘The Northern Trail’ and ‘Royal Geographical Society’, both by Young & Rubicam. The body copy of the latter reads: ‘Before venturing into unknown territory that forms Africa's schizophrenic landscape in your Defender, remember that generations of scientists and explorers would be lost without it. That's why the Royal Geographical Society relies on Defender. The Land Rover experience.’ This article does not suggest that colonialism itself is a homogenous discourse, but rather that colonial-style rhetoric has been appropriated by the advertising industry in a stereotypical and simplistic manner, depicting Africa as a ‘backdrop for the advertising of colonial products’ (Pieterse 1992: 123).

12. Coombes (2003: 6) points out that the dual legacy of settler colonialism and British imperialism in South Africa has a profound impact on the creation of contemporary subjectivities.

13. For the purposes of this analysis, it is also essential to recognize that cars are important status symbols in South Africa (Addison 2002: 219).

14. It is significant in terms of this article that the new cultural sensibility that Jameson aligns with postmodernism coincides with ‘the arrival of automobile culture’ (Jameson 1983: 123–4).

15. General Lothar von Trotha's infamous proclamation issued on 2 October 1904 ordered that ‘every Herero, whether found armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot’ (‘Herero to File Atrocity …’ 2003: 12). The Herero filed claims against the German government and two German companies (Deutsche Bank and the shipping company Woermann Line (also known as SAFmarine)) in 2003 for $4 billion to compensate them for the enslavement and alleged atrocities committed during colonial times (‘Herero to File Atrocity…’ 2003: 12).

16. The Himba are part of the Herero who currently number about 100,000 out of the total population of Namibia of less than 2 million.

17. The Himba dress of animal skins and bodily adornment by animal fat and ochre have become iconic for the tourism industry.

18. It is ironic that this ‘innocence’ is confirmed by the fact that very few Himba saw the advertisement under discussion, as they are not the target market at which the product is aimed.

19. See note 3. Although the advertisement for the Land Rover Range Rover previously referred to occurs in a magazine (Blink) that targets the elite black male, it is interesting that even though the figure shown in the advertisement is clearly male, all indication of colour has been elided. This strategy would support Bertelsen's (1999: 230) opinion that new consumerist subjectivities are being formed in South Africa by means of aspirational advertising.

20. Sarah Baartman was taken from Cape Town to Europe in 1810 and was put on display in London and Paris. She was exhibited as a so-called oddity because of her physical appearance (particularly her breasts and sexual organs), and in the minds of many, she illustrated the cherished notion of a kind of missing link between man and ape. When Baartman died in Paris in 1815, the palaeontologist Georges Cuvier dissected her, and her skeleton, genitalia and brain were exhibited in the Museum of Man in Paris until 1985. After prolonged negotiations with the French government, Baartman's remains were returned to South Africa in 2002, and were buried on National Women's Day (9 August). She has become an important cultural icon in South Africa, symbolizing the exploitative practices of both colonialism and patriarchy. The restitution of expropriated cultural property and human remains is a highly contentious issue – two British institutions, the Manchester Museum and London's Horniman Museum, recently returned indigenous Australian skulls for burial in their homeland (‘Return to the Native’ 2003: 18), but such cultural sensitivity is relatively rare.

21. This accusation is ironic given Land Rover's ostensible commitment to conservation and environmental issues (Keeton 2001).

22. The charges of racism in the advertisement were also projected onto the advertising industry in general in South Africa, which was alleged to be ‘still white and racist’ (Donaldson 2000: 1).

23. The clash of value systems inherent in this advertisement is evident in the fact that according to the Himba, the nudity depicted is not erotic, whereas they found the distortion of the breasts unacceptable (Rademeyer 2000: 2–3). The amount of nudity in the advertisement did not contravene the ASA Code.

24. Lesley Sutton, a media co-ordinator for Land Rover South Africa, explained (in Pillinger 2001: 2) that,

• [t]he advertisement was subject to a pilot research test among a racially mixed sample and was found to be acceptable. Respondents did not find it offensive whether on the basis of gender discrimination, nudity, racism or otherwise. We acknowledge and respect the opinions expressed to us and have made the decision to discontinue the advertisement.

25. Grace Lees-Maffei (2002: 368) reasons that Stephen Bayley revised his understanding of the meaning of cars in response to feminist analysis of gendered technology.

26. It is generally understood that technology is not neutral and has been coded by society to privilege the male gender, leading to the paradigmatic alignment between technology, masculinity and power. Judy Wajcman (1991: 137) explains:

•  To emphasize … the ways in which the symbolic representation of technology is sharply gendered is not to deny that real differences do exist between women and men in relation to technology. Nor is it to imply that all men are technologically skilled or knowledgeable. Rather … it is the ideology of masculinity that has this intimate bond with technology.

The stereotypical alliance between men and technology is problematic, and indeed untenable in terms of discourses such as cyberfeminism. The inversion of this stereotype reclaims technology for women and presents convincing arguments that demythologize gendered technology (see Wajcman 1991). Cyberfeminism disrupts and unsettles this gendered alliance between masculinity and technology, and proposes that it is just another cultural construct that builds on the existing binary oppositions such as male/female, culture/nature and body/technology. But in the Himba advertisement, the traditional gendering of technology still seems to be operative; the fact that the advertising agency used computer manipulation on the image of the woman demonstrates how the power of representation is located in the privileged binary.

27. Pieterse (1992: 111) contends that once the ‘[d]angers were under control … Africa came more and more to resemble a vast recreational area, an ideal setting for boys’ adventures'.

28. Travel writing was established as a decisively gendered trope, in which the ‘[e]xplorer-man paints/possesses newly unveiled landscape-woman’ (Pratt 1992: 213).

29. Henrichsen (2000: 166) believes that the Herrensafari was a ritualized form of temporary escape from modernity that was necessary specifically during the fraught political circumstances contingent upon the practices of colonialism in Namibia.

30. Nochlin (1991: 36–7) makes a similar point when she states that the supposed absence of westerners in orientalist paintings of the nineteenth century is paradoxical since ‘[t]he white man, the Westerner, if of course always implicitly present … his is necessarily the controlling gaze, the gaze which brings the Oriental world into being, the gaze for which it is ultimately intended’. In terms of Bertelsen's (1999) contention that black consumers are being wooed with images of putative freedom in the form of an invitation to participate in consumption, it could certainly be possible to argue that the identity of the driver of the Freelander is deliberately elided in order to make interpellation of black consumers possible.

31. The binary oppositions that operate from a specific class position and lifestyle in the Himba advertisement are not discussed in detail here as the argument focuses more on gender. The binaries related to class include: upper middle class/lower class, classless; and consumerism/nomadic lifestyle. Within a capitalist society, a luxury product such as the Land Rover serves as the epitome of a lifestyle based on consumption, which is reinforced by the resultant commodification of space and Otherness. Specific notions of moneyed class adhere to the Land Rover and connote the imperialistic gentlemen explorers of the nineteenth century who explored the world at their leisure (see note 14). But Hall (1996a: 423) warns against a reductive reading of class because the ‘“unity” of classes is necessarily complex and has to be produced – constructed, created – as a result of specific economic, political and ideological practices’.

32. Brantlinger (1985: 199) affirms the presence of the constructed binary opposition between the West (self) and Africa (Other):

• ‘[t]he spirit of Tarzan … lives on in Western culture … In criticizing recent American and European failures to imagine Africa without prejudice, Chinua Achebe notes the continuing “desire … in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar.”’

33. Primitivism here designates ‘the fixed proximity of such [generally indigenous] people to Nature’ (Hall 1995: 22) and is represented in the mise en scène of the advertisement.

34. Similarly, in orientalist paintings, according to Nochlin (1991: 45) there are:

•  two ideological assumptions about power: one about men's power over women; the other about white men's superiority to, hence justifiable control over, inferior, darker races … the (male) viewer was invited sexually to identify with, yet morally to distance himself from, his Oriental counterparts depicted within the objectively inviting yet racially distancing space of the painting.

35. In the romantic (tourist) gaze, the emphasis falls on ‘solitude, privacy and a personal, semi-spiritual relationship with the object of the gaze’, which usually implies solitary communion with, and consumption of nature (Urry 1990: 45, 86). Zimmer (1998: 645) points out that the ‘deliberate human interference with nature’ is usually followed by a later stage when nature is valorized as a place of refuge or escape.

36. Root (1996: 37–8) also establishes timelessness and primitivism as important components of the trope of exoticism by which other cultures were classified.

37. Ahluwalia and Nursey-Bray (1997: 4–5) emphasize the fact that neo-colonialism's indirect influence is exercised primarily through discourses such as communications and tourism.

38. See Rosaldo (1989) and Root (1996) for more about the idea that nostalgia for colonialism is implicit in a great deal of western visual culture.

39. Hall's (1996a: 435) Gramscian reading of racism points out that it is not the same at all times or in all places ‘either in its forms, its relations to other structures and processes, or its effects’.