“Tokoloshe Poked Me Blind!”, “Satan Goes To School!”, “Man Waves Frozen Arm”, “Stripper Dies On Job”.
All examples of newspaper posters, the first two from the Daily Sun, the latter two from The Citizen. Do newspapers still put posters up on poles? Not in the Western Cape, certainly, except occasionally when Independent Media is running a disinformation campaign on behalf of its owner, as it did a few years ago when banks were closing down Sekunjalo accounts because of the reputational risk.
I remember thinking at the time how quaint the posters were, showing a touching faith in the waning powers of print. But given that the posters appeared to only be displayed in the vicinity of Newspaper House, the home of the Cape Times and Argus, they could also have been a sad preaching to the choir at a sombre funeral.
“Frozen Chicken Train Wreck” is a 2012 poster from The Citizen, and also the title of a book that has just crossed my desk. Compiled by Laurence Hamburger, the book is a collection of newspaper posters scavenged from the lampposts of Joburg.
I initially thought the book had just been published, as this was a reviewer’s copy from Littlegig Library, a project that aims to “build a collection of African fiction, coffee-table books and monographs, and in so doing support creators, publishers and booksellers. Each month we’ll be reviewing a selection of books on our channels (newsletter, website and Instagram).”
The library is run by friends of mine, and I contribute reviews, so the ethics of journalism prevent me raving about it, but I will say that anyone interested in how Africans write about, produce and artistically express their culture should join its mailing list.
At its core, the library exists to curate and preserve printed books by Africans, to ensure that people interested in understanding the fractured evolution of culture and cultures across our continent will have a source to consult. Interestingly, Frozen Chicken Train Wreck foreshadows this impulse. The posters that the author includes in the collection all also exist in their physical form in his collection.
My first clue that the book wasn’t current (it was published in 2013) was in the very short essay at the end of the book, which includes a list of people being thanked. One of those is “Ferial Haffajee, editor of City Press”, which was a long time ago. Haffajee occupied that post between 2009 and 2016, and not only is she no longer a newspaper editor, there is in fact no more print City Press.
Though reams could be written about tabloid posters by historians, media theorists, sociologists and the like, Hamburger presents them without any accompanying text, except for his short postscript. As he writes there: “These posters exist for a day. They are conceived in the newsrooms of our tabloid dailies — The Star, The Sun, The Times and others — in the late afternoon, as the paper is being put to bed. Just hours later they are visible along every major arterial road in the city.”
He describes an accompanying photo of two posters on a lamppost (“Freed Slave Speaks” and “No More Mrs Nice Guy”), from The Star.
“This photograph was taken on Louis Botha Avenue, the street where I live … Tabloid posters like this one — candid and often outrageous epigrams of news — have been displayed along this road since the first Anglo-Boer War. They live momentarily in the minds of passing drivers and pedestrians, and by midnight they are already defunct.”
This collection is physical, the actual posters taken from lampposts, with Hamburger writing: “I am extremely grateful to every friend, colleague, girlfriend, taxi driver and stranger who was ever asked to pull over suddenly in the middle of traffic so I could retrieve one of the posters now included in this book.”
The physicality is important. One of the early lies of the internet was that stories would last forever. Unlike print, digital news would be encoded in bytes in the cloud, that mysterious place where everything lives happily and forever, and where everything is accessible to everyone. Alas, it turns out that web content is subject to digital decay, or link rot, where pages disappear, move or become inaccessible.
According to Asia International, a 2024 Pew Research Center study found that 25% of all web pages that existed between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible. And for older content, the loss is even higher. The study said 38% of the web pages that existed in 2013 have now been lost, and even newer pages are disappearing too, with 8% of pages that existed in 2023 now no longer available. “Vast amounts of news and reference content is disappearing with about 23% of news pages including at least one broken link, and 21% of government websites and 54% of Wikipedia pages including a link that no longer exists.”
One of the early lies of the internet was that stories would last forever
I tried, unsuccessfully, to find some of the stories related to the posters. The Daily Sun’s goat fixation is well represented with the posters “Goat In Sex Scandal”, “Goat In Man’s Underpants!” and “Underpants Goat Is Shrinking!” but you can’t find those stories online any more.
I was confronted with Google’s usual “It looks like there aren’t many great matches for your search” for “Underpants Goat Is Shrinking!” with the top result a link to a research paper titled “Making better policies for food systems”, which makes a weird sort of sense. Google did offer me links to some of the Daily Sun’s other goat-related stories: “Someone Is Raping My Goat!”, “Goats And Magoshas In Sex War!”, “Accused ‘Enjoyed’ Poking Goat!”, and “‘Goat Poker’ Found Dead!”
Just a note to any student who is looking for an idea for a PhD. I asked Perplexity, and “there is no evidence of a dedicated academic article that specifically analyses the use of headlines about goats in the Daily Sun newspaper”. We need that research paper.
Hamburger describes the posters included in his collection as “an alternative history of the city, a tabloid summary of our age. Constructed from political sound bites, public innuendos, colloquial bons mots and hard, bitter truths, they read like an everyman’s state of the nation address, full of comedy and antagonism.” Reading them now, you can trace the paths and culs-de-sac that have led to our current moment in history.
A Sowetan poster from 2010 proclaims “Whites Still Earn More”, and its timelessness will amuse those of us following the alleged economic travails of our brave white migrants who have fled to the US. Read some of the posters as a sentence, and you’ve got a pretty clear indication that we haven’t really progressed much.
Here’s a representative sample from 2003-2012. “Heist Season Starts” (The Times), “World Loses Hope”, “It’s Going To Get Worse”, “Time For A Change” (all The Star), “Educate Us — Or Burn” (Daily Sun) and “The End Is Nigh” (The Citizen).
For those who need contextualisation for how violent our country is, there’s “I Killed Your Mom — Dad” (Sowetan) and “Girl Kills Dad Over Food” (The Star). And if ever a poster was ahead of its time in prefiguring the current impotence of one Julius Malema, it’s The Citizen’s 2011 “Juju Loses Mojo”.
As far as I know, South African newspapers no longer use lamppost placards to advertise their stories. These have all been replaced by social media posts, and when we look at how those have devolved into an endless round of desperate clickbait, the Daily Sun’s offerings start to look fairly mundane.
While some of the posters in Frozen Chicken Train Wreck are just mildly amusing, such as “Amorous Doctor Gets Off” (The Citizen) and “TV Porn Judge Pulls Out” (Saturday Star), many of them are stark reminders of how little we’ve progressed on the big issues facing our country.
They’re also more than just a poignant requiem for print. They serve as a warning about how easily cultural artefacts can be lost or misplaced in our digital age.
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