Last Ideology Standing

Is there a more surreal cultural sphere than that of advertising? In no other discourse would it be considered either funny or tasteful to depict infamous third world dictators as belonging to a bizarre club in which they have water fights, push each other on swings and make sand angels.

But corporate restaurant chain Nando’s ‘went there’ with its latest ad campaign, entitled ‘Last Dictator Standing’. In the ad, Robert Mugabe mourns the loss of his ‘friends’, fellow tyrants Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, P. W. Botha and Idi Amin. The foregrounding of Gaddafi is a clear nod to the Libyan revolution and the dictator’s recent death. There is no doubt that the advert would like to be interpreted as a funny, satirical celebration of the Arab Spring and the fall of authoritarian regimes throughout Africa and the Middle East.

The problem with that, though, is this: no matter how much it tries to disguise the fact, this advert exists for one obvious reason: to sell spicy chicken. ‘This time of year, no one should have to eat alone,’ a voiceover intones as a morose Mugabe slumps at the head of his deserted dinner table. ‘So get a Nando’s six-pack meal, for six.’ What is not immediately obvious is how the selling of fast food here is used to subtly reinforce consumer-capitalism as the dominant ideology.

This is achieved by taking a group of disparate dictators and reducing them all to a single type, that of the ‘bad guy’. The depiction of Mugabe, Gaddafi et al as friends effaces all political and historical context surrounding these figures: the social and economic conditions in which they were able to rise to power; the specificities of crimes and human rights abuses they committed; the ideologies they constructed in order to subjugate their various peoples. The absurdity of this reductionism is encapsulated by the image of Mugabe pushing the apartheid-era South African president P. W. Botha on a swing.

The caricature is made cruder by depicting the dictators as childlike. The machine guns that turn out to be water pistols, the tank that becomes the Titanic; these images ridicule by infantilizing their targets. This is where the ad’s tastelessness is most overt: its implication that millions of people were persecuted, tortured and murdered by bad men with the mental age of a six year-old, instead of complex political systems of control, coercion and terrorization. By depicting the dictators as immature, the ad also implies the same of the societies over which they exercised power. With particular regard to Gaddafi and Libya, it is as if the ad is taking the pre-Arab Spring Western assumption that Slavoj Zizek among others has identified (at around 22m15s): look how immature Arabs were back then under dictatorship, for many years incapable of mounting a credible movement for democracy. Great that they’ve finally seen the light.

The light, ‘Last Dictator Standing’ would have us believe, is Nando’s chicken. Into the surreal fantasy of the dictators’ dining club the deal is inserted as an injection of the ‘real’, rational world: we are offering a great deal. Buy our chicken. By juxtaposing the craziness of the world the advert constructs with the apparent ‘reality’ of corporate fast food, consumer-capitalism as it exists in Western-style democracies is asserted as crumbling authoritarianism’s logical, inevitable replacement.

Let’s hope that those currently fighting to overthrow tyrants, as well as those campaigning for greater equality of wealth and resources worldwide, will win something better. The only thing more surreal than the fantasy of this crass, unfunny advert is that it was conceived of in the first place to further globalization in an age of global revolution.