Tapping imaginaries: Guinness, masculinity, and the promise of Africa Rising

This article interrogates masculinity and the consumer politics of late capitalism in urban Africa. Engaging scholarship on racialized masculinities, branding, and African cities with special attention to the Nigerian context, it conducts a media analysis of three Guinness Africa advertising campaigns: Made of More, Michael Power, and Greatness. Building off of its centuries-long ties between the African male consumer and European capital, in 1998 Guinness created the fictional Michael Power in a marketing coup that was to elevate the brewery to unrivaled dominance over the continent's beer import market. Subsequent campaigns were to glorify everyday heroes: Greatness declaring a 'drop of greatness in each man' and Made of More extolling the sartorial elegance of Congolese dandies. This representational shift reflected the brewery's recognition of changing models of accumulation in the African urban informal economy and the corresponding aspirations that they ignited in its men. Bypassing scripts of hegemonic masculinity, this new era of Guinness advertising showcased self-made men in a laissez-faire economy, simultaneously celebrating and depoliticizing the racialized global inequalities and gendered politics of contemporary African urbanization. Guinness's successful appeal to twenty-first-century African male consumers provides a case study of multinational marketing in bottom billion capitalism.