Chocolat banania
Wearing a red chechia cap and often depicted with a rifle, the figure specifically represented the tirailleurs sénégalais, or Senegalese soldiers who fought in the French army during World War I. Three years later, she was replaced with a smiling African man holding a spoon of the drink like a child and accompanied with the slogan, “Y’a bon” - a phrase of pidgin French that translates to, “It’s good.” The image of a smiling woman from Antilles, standing between two bushels of bananas, was the first image used in 1912 to advertise Banania, a banana-flavored chocolate drink most widely distributed in France. Uncle Ben's Rice is sold in France but has not yet become an issue.īanania, Henault says, is oddly positioned as a national product - as well-known as, say, Coca-Cola, but made by a small company with an annual turnover of only E30 million, which, as Henault points out, is hardly Coca-Cola.An iconic image of the tirailleur sénégalais used in an ad for the breakfast drink Banania (all images courtesy Schiffer Publishing) Nor is Rastus, the former Cream of Wheat chef who was considered offensive. There was no problem there." But the pancake mix, which used to feature a stereotypical black mammy in a bandanna and now has a smiling pearl-earringed young housewife, a sort of brown Betty Crocker, isn't known in France. Henault, who worked for a long time in the United States says, "Look at Aunt Jemima. The protest group withdrew its lawsuit and, as an unexpected bonus, Banania will no longer have to pay E240, or $285, every 10 years for copyright protection. "Why go to court over something we haven't used for 30 years?" Henault reasonably asked. He couldn't ban the slogan since it had already been dropped, but what he did this month as a pacifying gesture was to have "Y'a Bon" stricken from the copyright lists of the Institut National de la Propriété Industriele. In fact it had not been used by the company since 1977, but collective memory and recent debates in France about the nation's colonial past, to say nothing of controversy about what constitutes an offensive image, caused what had begun as an Internet petition to gain strength.Īs a good executive, Henault made the right decision. It is this slogan that the Collectif des Antillais, Guyanais et Réunionnais, which claims 40,000 members, objected to as racist. They also didn't speak perfect French, but a sort of "petit nègre," as it has until recently unattractively been called, and so the trooper was given a lip-smacking but ungrammatical slogan, "Y'a Bon. At the time, Senegalese troops were newly familiar in France, fighting valorously in World War I, with about 30,000 casualties, and their courage and red hats (they were not given metal helmets) had endeared them to the public. It comes in a yellow box that, from 1917, was decorated with the smiling face of a Senegalese marksman wearing a bright red fez. The problem was not with its chocolate, cereal and banana flavoring ("the most nutritious product on the market," Henault boasts) but with its packaging. The problem was a big one, a lawsuit accusing Banania, Nutrimaine's chief product (it has only two), of "offending human dignity and of contravening public order because of its racist character."īanania has since 1912 been a favorite breakfast drink for French children. "About two or three days after I started I was told there was a problem with a group from France's former overseas territories," he said in a telephone interview. PARIS - When Thierry Henault, after a long career among such food industry giants as Nestlé, took over as president of Nutrimaine, a company of 70 employees north of Paris, he looked on it as a sort of peaceful pre-retirement post.