sending...As if bidding farewell to African Film posters was not hard enough, now we have to make do with only internet images of vintage African advertising and travel posters. The ones shown below were sourced from Air Afrique, Air France and German African Airlines.
These were the airlines of choice in the hey days of “exotic” Africa holidays. These airlines served 11 newly independent Francophone nations in West Africa including Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Mauritania, Niger, the Republic of the Congo and Senegal.
The use of the colonial style imagery may be fraught, but this is best viewed through the optic of a by gone era, an era of essentialism, exploitation and the “other.” On this occasion, perhaps it is acceptable to appreciate the aesthetics of these posters without necessarily succumbing to the effects of their problematic imagery.
Some of these posters were designed by A. Roquin and Charles-Jean Hallo which probably dates these posters somewhere between the 1960s-1980s.
H/T – Dynamic African
