South Africa: What Makes Bantus Buy

For 300 years, the subjugated Bantu blacks of South Africa have served Afrikaners as house servants, field hands, laborers and mineworkers. Nobody knew how they spent their wages, and nobody seemed to care—until South African companies searching for new consumer markets discovered an impressive fact: Bantus make up a market of 11,000,000 people with an annual purchasing power of $1.26 billion. Staggered by the potential of this “new” market, South African businessmen are now scrambling to beam their goods and advertising at the Bantu. One of the most important men on the beam is himself a Bantu, a Natal University psychology graduate named Nimrod Mkele, 42, who has become South Africa’s leading expert on the Bantu market.

Mkele was South Africa’s first African account executive in an advertising firm (J. Walter Thompson), but left to devote his full time to gathering the valuable data for an assault on the Bantu market. He and his teams roam the country, interviewing Bantu shoppers on city streets, in stores and in homes. By speaking Bantu (few whites do) and penetrating into areas long a mystery to white merchants, they have uncovered many of the fascinating needs, prejudices and preferences of the Bantus. “No longer must the African be regarded as an appendage of the white market,” says Mkele; “the African market represents great wealth, which must be wooed with all the arts of mass persuasion.”

More Sophisticated. The Bantus, merchants were glad to hear, spend freely and earmark less than one dollar in 57 for savings and life insurance. Yet even the educated hang on to a few old tribal customs. Selling washing machines to Bantus is practically impossible because washing by hand is still considered as essential a wifely duty as childbearing. Bantus are rabid users of patent medicines, considering them a stimulant to sexual vigor; in one 1,000-home survey, Mkele found 300 different kinds of patent medicine.

But with urbanized Bantus now 65% literate and developing a middle class of civil servants and teachers, preferences are becoming more sophisticated. Bantus refuse to read or speak Afrikaans, react quickest to English-language advertising. British habits are widely copied: 80% of all hats sold in South Africa are bought by Bantus, who consider a hat the hallmark of English gentility, and three out of four Bantu homes prefer tea to coffee.

American Accent. Lately, however, “New from America” has become the advertising catch phrase. Commercials for Lexington cigarettes, the biggest Bantu seller, are delivered in a broad American accent, and Bantus who move up from bicycles (English, of course) to cars insist on American models. Bantus are fanatically loyal to brands; one Bantu wife in five sews on a Singer sewing machine (price: $72.80), and the Japanese failed miserably when they tried to introduce a competitor priced at $53.20.

Mkele, whose earnings have reached $600 a month, a stratospheric sum for a Bantu, finds his fellow Bantus becoming so sophisticated about advertising that they are beginning to lean toward the same prestige symbols as Americans. Bantu men looking for British respectability in their attire have long bought the most expensive clothes they could afford. Mkele suggested that stores also stock “a dignity bag in the form of a reasonably priced attaché case.” When they hit the Bantu market, the attaché cases sold like—well, like attaché cases sell along the New Haven Railroad.