Advertising Industry's Role In Cultural Colonialism and Imperialism in Africa

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 07:30:55 +0200

Have you ever glanced at a commercial on local TV in Nairobi, Lagos, Durban or Kigali and found yourself questioning why the characters, scenarios, voices, and sometimes even language does not represent the African audience that the commercial is apparently aimed at?

In this groundbreaking report for The Spearhead, Mckay Chukwu outlines the historical and economic rationale behind the weird and unsettling tradition of representing Africans using foreign depictions in African commercial messaging, and why this is not simply a quirky, harmless phenomenon.

The report examines how the marketing communications industry across Africa and the diaspora plays a pivotal role in creating and maintaining socially harmful ideas in the public imagination including racial, cultural and ethnic inferiority complexes, and the desire to "fix" or "mitigate" some aspect of African identity by spending money on consumer offerings.