The Cost of a Smile: On Colgate Nigeria's “Do Yanga With Your Smile”
The one-minute video opens with a close up of a little boy on a bike. A packet of Colgate toothpaste pokes out of the front basket. The word “Colgate” is visible on the packet. There’s a bottled water next to the toothpaste. Of course the label has been peeled off. There’s a third thing. It’s white but unrecognizable. It could’ve been a book or a piece of fabric. The boy, who has missing teeth, pulls his ear and says, “Alright, everyone. Open your ears. Make we talk.”
If you’re like me you’re surprised already, surprised and hooked. This child and others from the video ad do not look like children who speak Pidgin. But they speak Pidgin most of the video. When I showed a friend some part of this essay she asked if the kids in the Colgate ad were speaking Pidgin. Actually they spoke pidgin for half of the ad before switching to English and back to Pidgin. I told her this. She said she could somehow only remember them speaking English. And I said that’s kind of the point. We’re so used to these kids speaking English. Consequently, we notice they speak Pidgin as their kind will – with an obvious sophistication. And when they switch back to English we see they’re at home in that language. But no matter. They've sold themselves to us already. We freeze. We listen. We watch.
Surely that these kids speak Pidgin is spellbinding. But there’s more: the child model-cum-actors’ teeth. All their teeth are white, as white as truth. (It’s a matter of handpicking the kids with the whitest teeth as much as editing the teeth to a most perfect white.) But they also have missing teeth. They don’t have perfect teeth, perfect dentition, that is, and are thus not perfect. This makes them vulnerable and in turn plays on our vulnerability. We don’t have to aspire to an all-imperfect status of oral health, which could have made us feel shame for the defections – if any – in our oral rep. This makes us feel better about ourselves, especially those of us with defected dentitions. Toothpaste ads frequently feature children but not as much as children with missing teeth. That simple anti-trope is fresh, striking, memorable. Since the first time I clapped my eyes on the ad I'd always thought about it. I didn’t know why. Now I do. It’s the missing teeth.
The little boy who opens the video and his colleagues ride bikes through the ghetto. They speak close up to the camera, the ghetto blurred behind them. They ride public buses. But they look “richer” than the area they are shown in. These are simply kids who do not look like kids who speak Pidgin in an environment of kids who actually speak Pidgin. This is in fact confirmed a few seconds after. A little girl in green sportswear stands on a field and speaks to the camera, her head and hands dancing swaggishly, behind her a flurry of sport-ready (school) kids and their coach warming up. The field has full, fresh grass. Or so it has been edited to look. It is evening and the field is lit, dots of light punctuating the scene behind the girl. If this is a school field – it seems so – this is a kind of school built in a posh or bougie area and for fancy kids. If this isn’t a fancy school then it is one of those rare fine ghetto schools you hardly find in Nigerian ghettos. Either way, we notice the Colgate kids belong more to this type of school, this type of environment. But, of course, when in the second 30 seconds of the ad we see a kid brush at a sparkling white sink in a tiled white bathroom and another spews fast, fresh English in a similar bathroom, we confirm that they don’t belong to the ghettos.
The filmmakers are aware. They sell their ideas with fresh approaches to toothpaste advertisement. They come off as saints, offending no one. First they avoid being accusatory by making the kids miss a few teeth. Then they find co-sign for what could have been condescending. A little boy says, “See as my teeth fresh so. But una own? Abeg, no be so o.” Then after, a little girl: “Time don reach to rearrange things so as to give una small wisdom.” Another little girl says afterwards, a finger tapping the side of her head: “Una think say una sabi.” This is bold and almost disrespectful of the kids. But the scene that follows shows three elderly men at a game of draught on the street nod their heads. That’s co-sign. One of them wears a red baseball cap or face cap, his white hair spilling from under the cap, his white beard flourishing like duckweed. The other two sport panamas like peaky blinders on a lunch break. The white hair and the white beard, which look dyed, is a proof of age-given wisdom. And the panamas, a common street cap here, suggest street wisdom. These little kids get the best of approval. And a little girl from a bus seat latterly says, “We no dey here to point una with our small fingers. We show una solutions instead.”
To be sure the ad is a good piece of showmanship as well as salesmanship. It must have in fact contributed to the overall success of the campaign of Colgate zero-cavity paste. Many city-dwelling, YouTubbing Nigerians would have seen this video by now, either on billboards or on YouTube. But are the filmmakers, the advertisers, truly saints?
Now there are Colgate kids who speak Pidgin in an ad and there are kids who speak Pidgin always and every day. Pidgin for some of the latter is a first language and perhaps an only language. For these kids Pidgin is in fact not a language. It is an identity. And since Pidgin is an identity it is also survival. Identity is who you are and who you enact. You are you but you also perform a series of yous to carry on living. These kids, even if they can speak impeccable English, still need to speak Pidgin to survive many situations the Colgate kids rarely find themselves in. They’re the ones who live in the streets, in the ghetto, where Pidgin must be spoken if they must live.
Of course the Colgate children speak Pidgin to identify with children from that kind of background. Or, more aptly, for the children from that background to identify with them. But they, the Colgate babies, also represent the children whom the Pidgin-speaking kids aspire to become. It’s a game of measure. Identity must be rightly balanced against aspiration. The Pidgin-speaking children must identify just enough to start aspiring to the status of the Colgate children. They see children who speak “their” language. But they also see children who they want to be like. They now want to speak Pidgin with sophistication. They want to attend schools where they get to ride bikes on the finely-cut grass of a playground. They want to brush in sparkling white bathrooms and shout words like “zero cavities” while handing over a tube of Colgate to their mummies. They want to make sure we can see why they’re the coolest around. This is realistic fantasy for the Pidgin-speaking kids. The Colgate kids mimic their everyday reality to lure them into the fantasy of a fine and sometimes “fake” future. All the same their desires will flow into their psyche and thicken into the shape of a love for Colgate toothpaste. Ultimately Colgate sells.
This video will also appeal to the trust fund babies of the world. They can easily identify with the Colgate babies whose realities – as seen in the video – are also their realities. But the video will have a different effect on them. Unlike the UNICEF kids, they'll likely believe the video was made for them. After all their realities have been acted out on the screen. They ride similar bikes. They brush their teeth in similar bathrooms. They have similar well-nourished skins. Naturally they will want to brush with Colgate paste to act out this belief and claim their realities. Again Colgate sells.
Colgate has made the poor kids aspire to something and the rich kids claim something. The something for the two groups is symbolized by a tube of Colgate toothpaste. This is the fallacy of association milked for profit. Colgate is everywhere in the video – the logo, the paste, the red shirts, etc., etc. The poor will associate the toothpaste with their fantasies and the rich kids, their realities. Again Colgate sells.
An ad is an act of manipulation. Art, truth telling. The company tries to manipulate the viewers to buy what is being advertised. The company is after profit. But the artist tries to capture, even if only in a glimmer of light, that transcendental thing which language cannot express. The artist is after truth. But there’s little difference, if any at all, between ad and art in the ways their goals, albeit different, are achieved. The company will do whatever to sell, to profit. It could and often lie, making use of fiction. The artist, too, will do whatever to tell and speak a truth. The truth is quoted, of course. The artist, too, could and often lie, making use of fiction. But this is also a difference. Art is personal fiction. The truth told is always told in a way the artist has perceived it. An ad is capitalist fiction. It’s fiction that’s always after profit even at the expense of great things of life.
“Do Yanga With Your Smile” is a fine work of art, of fiction. But it, too, is capitalist fiction. It's fiction that has sought for profit while blind to the truth of others’ lives. It manipulates, appropriates, co-opts. How? Now the Colgate kids have appropriated something and it’s not Pidgin, the “language” of the Pidgin-speaking kids. The language is there for every kid, rich or poor, schooled or not, to speak, to use. There’s appropriation for the Colgate kids have co-opted the Pidgin-speaking kids’ identity, their survival, their existence, for profit’s sake. This is disrespect for the truth of their existence. But then co-opting such serious things of life for mere profits is not new or unique. It's a norm within the culture of advertisement. It is almost always a must for an ad. But it’s a shame. Behind every Colgate smile, it’s now hard for me to not glimpse a shame. These aware filmmakers and advertisers will thus be remembered both for their fine art and their disrespectful profiteering and their effort, shadier than honest, to mop off their excesses. They are not saints but they make an effort to be.
All this while soft hip-hop/R&B beat has played in the background. I listen to the music and I check the white of the Colgate children’s eyes. These kids run and skip. They smile big smiles with their white, fine teeth, which are missing in places. They jog and warm up for sports. They sport ironed school uniforms. They make impressive hairdos. I see them. I see them infect the video with their innocence. These small terrestrial miracles are not aware they have been used to process a shady business. No, they aren’t. And so they fill my screen with their purity, their poetry, their presence. If we have to forgive the ad at all it would be for their sake.
