The first time I saw what I thought to be Peter Marangi in Kigali, yes, that Peter Marangi, I felt like walking up to him and hugging him like a long lost brother, nay, a long lost, rather successful and famous rib-cracking cousin that you want to brag to friends about. I couldn’t though and not just because it was from a 5th floor window looking down, but mainly because, on second glance, “he” was a rough cardboard cut-out on a sign that said “Ask the experts” at the entrance to the premises of a paints dealership across the road.
Several months later, the Peter Marangi of Kigali still remains a cardboard cut-out to me with a message that – putting myself in the Rwandan consumer’s rather large shoes - doesn’t even begin to connect with me, let alone give me that fuzzy warm feeling that gleeful Kenyan audiences whenever experience whenever Peter Marangi appears on television, on radio, or on the scaffolding of a new construction coming up, saying something like “Great! More work for Marangi”. I found myself concluding that although he is a celebrity in Nairobi, the character or any look-alike is totally lost on Kigali’s multinational audience, where the actual “painting experts” are mostly female.
Oh I have seen the image several more times ever since, but all it does is look out of place. At the entrance to a certain Kenyan supermarket, it stands on a pull-up banner, its trade-mark lop-sided smile in place, but no matter how hard the agency seems to have tried to choose a line that should, on it’s own, relate to anyone who sees it, only a Kenyan who has been exposed to the original campaign can understand (let alone connect to the product), whatever joke “Mr Marangi” is cracking or trying to.
Quite reasonably therefore, I have walked around for months believing that with all the Kenyan building contractors, architects and interior decorators being some of the paint buying decision makers in the grand project to change our little hilly city’s skyline, maybe, just maybe, the hilarious painting expert has an audience after all; that having him here is no goof at all. But that was until one bright mid morning last week.
“Ona Marangi!,” exclaimed Victor from the back seat as we drove past the huge cardboard cut-out outside the paint company offices on the hill. His sister Mary looked up from the front seat. Mary is an events manager and interior decorator from Nairobi, the sister-in-law of an author friend who had thrust it upon me to baby sit the siblings on their exploratory virgin tour of Kigali.
“Mnk,” she snorted, a disgusted look momentarily marring her good looks as she scowled at the apparition that now, on close scrutiny, doesn’t even remotely resemble Peter Marangi. The clothes and the devil-may-care smile, yes; but the facial features have been altered with white paint to look less like a man from the slopes, more like a man of the hills.
“Peter Marangi wa huku hata si msupuu. ” (This one of here is not even handsome!). She snorted again.
She turned to examine the picture more closely as we stopped at the zebra crossing to let pedestrians slowly pass in front of the vehicles as if daring them to run them over. “He is not original; not the genuine article!” she added derisively, wagging an accusing finger at the cut-out.
Why, you wonder do I suddenly concern myself with the illiterate but humorous painting expert from Nairobi? There are a whole lot of reasons, really, not least of them, this fledging East African Cooperation. I see a cautionary tale here – not for Marangi’s creators, AY& R (the company Vernon Ayton created, no less!), – but to all corporate cross border operators; a plea for critical analysis and reason in the way advertising concepts translate across borders. The long running Kiwi shoe polish television ad has, for instance, been running for a while on local tv with dubbed-in Kinyarwanda voices and one cannot really tell that it was created in Kiswahili for a Kenyan audience!
To the manufacturers of Duracoat, the paint with over 400 different colours, whose representatives in Rwanda, Akagera Paints, have been using Peter Marangi’s likeness at more and more depots, what can I possibly say? In a town where their main rival has taken over every available wall and used it to invite the public - in large colourful letters in French and English – to “Colour your world,” a relatively unknown Kenyan-comedian-look-alike builds few or no bridges at all – and may most decidedly harm a carefully crafted brand building exercise.
Unless he is properly repackaged and introduced formerly to the public, a Peter Marangi look-alike in Kigali represents what Roger Steadman would call a “wasted advertising shilling, ” An utter waste of space.
©Lloyd Igane, Kigali 11,11.10
