I confess that for some time I enjoyed looking at this ad. Maybe it was what seemed to me an unselfconscious style, a refreshingly naive and warm-hearted quality, a feel-good element.
But then I started to wonder, and so I paused my enjoyment, that maybe I was being a little bit of a victim of my own exotic gaze, that there was something a bit patronising about the ad, or at least a reasonable suspicion of being patronising.
Although not strikingly obvious, the ad is actually an ad within an ad, seemingly a picture of a roadside advertisement painted on a wall somewhere - one imagines - in Ghana, since it is there where Cadbury claims their cocoa beans are from.
So an "unselfconscious", "naive" and "warm-hearted" Ghanaian piece of advertising - an 'authentic', an 'original' - has been basically pasted on to the billboard spaces of the grey, cynical and decadent Britain, where a bit of Fairtrade chocolate will surely bring some comfort for the soul (and for the sugar-addicted metabolisms), and the joy of life of the wise African peoples will definitely do us good.
Well, am I being too ill-thinking to see a bit of the condescending myth of the noble savage there?
How not to get in a bad mood when being awaken from a sweet dream? And sweet is the Orientalist dream, I'm afraid, even more if it's Fairtrade.
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Cadbury Fairtrade: Come on show me your cocoa beam
Finsbury Park Underground Station
London
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