"Stand strong against crime?"

When I walked home from teaching my debate learners on Thursday afternoon, I noticed a new political party posting its signs along the street lights on Main Road in Mowbray and Rondebosch. In South Africa, posting political signs on roads serves as the primary means of campaign advertising. Few South Africans regularly watch television, so TV commercials do not penetrate enough households to be worthwhile. The expense of the TV and the electricity to power it restricts the TV market to a minimum of privileged viewers.

Anyway, the fringe Afrikaner Vryheidsfront Plus party (or Freedom Front Plus, in English) blasted the street with the targeted message, "Stand strong against crime!" The FF+ holds only four seats in South Africa's 400-member National Assembly. A tiny voice advocating Afrikaner independence, the FF+ would not normally expect a lot of support from the voters living around the University of Cape Town in Cape Town's English-speaking Southern Suburbs.

And it seems that few residents wanted the FF+ to line their streets with their message -- less than a day after the signs were posted, I walked passed dozens of vandalized and torn FF+ posters. While removing another party's advertising violates South African election law, the vandalized signs indicate the public's sentiment to the FF+.

The FF+ signs that remained on the street posts were largely covered by the Friday morning newspaper headlines. The Cape Town newspapers publish individual headlines from their daily edition on large posters and line the streets with sensationalist, yellow journalism. I find the morning headline posters a brilliant public service! Anyone walking or driving down the street absorbs the majority of the newspaper's content without evening reading an article. I am not sure if this stands as good marketing for the newspaper's circulation department, but it serves the public!

The newspapers do a good job of removing the day-old headlines to prevent the accumulation of litter and garbage.