How South African communications help shape cultural memory long after campaigns disappear

It has become part of our shared cultural vocabulary. The same can be said for “Yebo Gogo”, the Oros jingle and countless other pieces of advertising that have stayed with us long after the campaigns themselves disappeared.

Communications did something here it doesn't always get credit for: it helped shape cultural memory.

We tend to think of heritage as something inherited. Language, food, music, traditions, places and stories passed down through families.

However, some of the memories we share as South Africans were created by people trying to sell us something.

SA and humour

There is something distinctly South African about our relationship with humour, too. We have an instinct for spotting the absurd in everyday life and turning it into something we can all recognise.

Jacob Zuma's infamous “in the beginning” and numbers moments became enduring memes.

During the pandemic, Cyril Ramaphosa's Covid-19 briefings became known as “family meetings”, and when he accidentally pulled his mask over his eyes after one of them, the moment immediately became part of the national joke.

None of these moments were created as communications. People took them, shared them and gave them a life of their own.

Leaning into that instinct

The best South African advertising leans into that same instinct. Nando's built an entire brand voice around being topical and willing to say what other brands avoid.

Its work has repeatedly become part of the national conversation because it understands the mood of the country rather than trying to manufacture one.

The platforms have changed, but the underlying behaviour hasn't. A television advert once gave millions of people the same reference point at the same time. Now that can happen without a brand involved at all.

It was already theirs

The “Uyashisa” war cry started as a chant at Wynberg Boys' High in 2023 and spread nationally as other schools filmed their own versions.

When the young man who led the original chant, Luqobo “Bibo” Makwedini, died in 2026, tributes to him opened with the chant itself.

Nobody wrote that into a brief. People carried it because it was already theirs.

That is the difference between something becoming part of culture and a brand simply trying to look culturally relevant.

It makes relevance more complicated, particularly in a country as diverse as South Africa.

Representation isn't the same as relatability

There is no single South African audience. We have different languages, histories, traditions, identities and experiences, and what feels familiar to one person can be completely foreign to another.

The instinct is often to solve that by making sure everyone is represented in the picture.

However, representation and relatability aren't the same thing.

A campaign can feature people from every background and still feel like nobody in the room understands how South Africans actually live.

Relatability tends to sit in smaller places: a phrase, a family dynamic, a shared frustration, a particular behaviour.

The detail that makes someone say, “That's so South African.”

Those details can travel across a divided audience precisely because they're specific. A generic message about unity doesn't necessarily survive contact with anyone's actual life. A well-observed detail can.

For communicators, that means looking beyond representation and asking a harder question: does this actually feel familiar?

Does the language sound like something people would say? Does the situation feel observed, not invented?

The work that lasts is rarely the work that simply tells people what a brand wants them to think. It gives them something they can recognise, repeat, laugh at or make their own.

What communicators leave behind

Communications don't only reflect culture. It contributes to it.

The lines, sounds, characters and jokes we put into the world become part of people's memories of a particular time in their lives, and sometimes part of the country's collective memory.

We don't have to manufacture heritage. We're already making it, in adverts and TikToks and schoolyards and everyday conversations, whether we're doing it deliberately or not.

The job for communicators is to pay close enough attention to the culture already happening to recognise it, and to make work specific enough that people choose to carry it forward themselves.

The best communication doesn't end when the campaign does.

Sometimes it ends up in the language, sometimes in a joke, sometimes in a memory that outlives the product, the platform and the campaign that made it.

Decades later, someone still knows exactly what you mean when you say: It's not inside. It's on top.