Paper long abstract:

In 2000, Guinness initiated a new era in beer marketing in Africa, launching a promotional campaign that drew on Pan-African themes of racial identity, primordial attachments to the land, and beliefs in male potency and virility. This paper will focus on how the campaign connected dark beer to a racialised form of masculinity, epitomized by a character called Michael Power, the action hero of a series of television ads and a feature film produced by Guinness. The presentation will include a montage of video segments from the Guinness campaign.