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martasultan wrote

I think I sort of liked it as a mockery of the European viewpoint of "discovering" Africa, but can also understand the issues with seeing it on television unexpectedly.

I guess it's something you can enjoy if you're looking for it rather than seeing it randomly.

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An_Old_Big_Tree wrote

One South African commentator:

Personally I thought the ad was brilliant in how it displayed the sheer absurd arrogance of Big John, the colonialist. This hypermasculinist, ‘Chuck Norris’, figure and his audacity at arriving in Europe and naming it so casually.

Don’t think the story of colonialists as evil conquerors is the only relevant one. From another lens they were also utterly ignorant, humorously so. Can you imagine the kind of arrogant audacity to travel the world and think yourself so great that you can ‘discover’ land where people already live? How absurdly big must your ego be, and what kind of heavy conditioning must you have been under to have seen the vastness of the world and consider yourself the centre of it. That was Big John, a ridiculous figure satirizing the sheer absurd nature of what a colonialist was. Not powerful, advanced civilizations with obscure morality preying on the weak, but rather children spoilt by their society to the point where their worldview has regressed and now they’re effectively Johnny Bravos with ships.

I think narratives must also be allowed that undermine and show the sheer mediocrity of colonial mentality. SA should really take a few hints from the postcolonial and decolonial meme pages young people have made. Doing very important political work is reimagining narratives and shifting cultural power.

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