Africana Periodical Literature 
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| Title: | Selling Change: Advertisements for the 1994 South African Election |
| Author: | Bertelsen, Eve |
| Year: | 1996 |
| Periodical: | African Affairs: The Journal of the Royal African Society |
| Volume: | 95 |
| Issue: | 379 |
| Period: | April |
| Pages: | 225-252 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | South Africa |
| Subjects: | propaganda elections 1994 advertising Politics and Government Literature, Mass Media and the Press |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/723702 |
| Abstract: | This article considers the advertising strategies adopted by the major parties in the run-up to South Africa's 1994 general election, and poses the question: what happens to politics when it passes under the generic rules of advertising? The author offers a semiotic reading of the ads produced by the ANC, the National Party (NP), the Democratic Party (DP), the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), and the Vryheidsfront (Freedom Front) from mid-February to 28 April 1994. These ads were run only in the print media following an agreement that television ads would be confined to voter education. First, the author invokes the current debate around advertising and characterizes the political advertisement as a specific discourse type. Next, she reads the ads as indices of the image definition and political programmes of the parties, considering the local imagery, narrative and myth deployed in these texts, and their implied target readers. She highlights some of the formal features shared by political and consumer ads, noting, for example, the high levels of redundancy and cohesion in each run of party ads. She also keeps in view the mixed impact of this peculiar mode of representing politics, which both informs and entertains. Ref. |
