The Chicken Licken advert called Big Mjohnana, which caused a stir last year following a complaint that it was offensive, was in actual fact not about colonialism at all.
That is according to Pepe Marais, the founding partner of advertising agency Joe Public, who tried to convince the Advertising Regulatory Board (ARB) on Wednesday it was wrong to have ordered the withdrawal of the advert.
Marais, whose agency has been producing Chicken Licken adverts for three years, argued it in no way alluded to colonialism, but was rather about discovering a new land.
In the advert, a young man called Big Mjohnana leaves his village in 1650 on a boat to satisfy his hunger for adventure and discovers Europe and a man looking like Jan van Riebeeck in 1651.
In December, the advertising review board ruled that the advert be pulled from the air after a viewer called Sandile Cele complained it “makes a mockery of the struggles of the African people against the colonisation by the Europeans in general, and the persecutions suffered at the hands of the Dutch in particular”. The board said colonialism was not something to be laughed at...