CHAPTER TEN
‘It’s Fun In South Africa’
Harriet McKay
Interior Design for the Union-Castle Shipping Line 1948–1977
Sometime in the autumn of 2007 John Graves, the Curator of Ships’ History at the National Maritime Museum, Royal Museums Greenwich, took design historian Professor Anne Massey and I on a research visit into one of the museum’s conservation studios. He wanted us to look at an object that was being treated for preservation. On a table in the studio lay a large, beautifully coloured poster: an advertisement for the Union-Castle shipping line. In my memory, the poster exists as being a considerable size (at least two metres in height by oneand-a-half metres wide). I was therefore surprised when revisiting the Maritime Museum’s online records to discover that it is in fact only 1020mm long and 635mm wide.1 That the poster should have assumed such large proportions in my mind, and that it should have made such a striking impression upon me, was not simply due to the object’s quality. Rather, it was the imagery and message that I encountered that day which became engraved on my mind and which, 13 years later, provide the leitmotiv for this chapter. The poster presents a chubby, smiling black toddler, wearing what might, at the time, have well been labelled “native dress,” jubilantly dancing barefoot in the sand. The object, dated circa 1960, broadcasts the message, “It’s fun in South Africa” (Figure 41). Of course, somewhere in South Africa, circa 1960, black children might have danced and felt joy on occasion. However, that an entire nation should be marketed according to a knowing obliviousness was what burnt the poster’s imagery onto my mind. More specifically – that at the height of the apartheid era, the viciousness of that regime, along with the enormously complicated political, socio-economic and infrastructural systems of a police state, should be deliberately hidden behind such a caricature is staggering. This chapter provides ‘It’s Fun In South Africa’
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