In the midst of the open and heated discussion, senior accounting major Ryan Swanson said he put the banana peel in the tree when he could not find a trashcan nearby. What hateful master of evil could be responsible for such a crime, you ask? Behold, the wicked purveyor of racism steps forth. "That, to me, was a slap in the face to see that banana hanging in a tree. "It was so strange and surreal to see it there," McNeil said. She said that about six feet up the tree's trunk sat a lone, fresh-looking banana peel.
she was walking with friends across camp when one of her sorority sisters pointed at a tree 15 feet away. The breakfast options included a fruit cart with bananas. morning, all of the retreat's participants ate breakfast together, followed by a session where they shared their feelings on race relations at Ole Miss. Reminder, we're still talking about a BANANA PEEL. Because of the underlying reality many students of color endure on a daily basis, the conversation manifested into a larger conversation about race relations today at the University of Mississippi." "To be clear, many members of our community were hurt, frightened, and upset by what occurred. sent a letter to all campus chapter presidents confirming the incident. interim director of Fraternity and Sorority Life. The students shared what they found with Council leaders, sparking a day's worth of camp-wide conversation. retreat was cut short Saturday night, after three black students found a banana peel in a tree in front of one of the camp's cabins. A few frat folks were trying to have a peaceful retreat in the woods, but all that came screeching to a horrifying halt.Įnter one bigoted banana: This weekend . It's a common problem among colleges (see Oberlin College Students Protest: 'The Cafeteria food is racist!'). Apparently they had a banana peel incident. A racist food crime, if you will. The Martiniquan psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon, in his 1952 book Black Skin, White Masks, mentions the grinning Senegalese tirailleur as an example of how in a burgeoning consumer culture, the Negro appears not only as an object, but as "an object in the midst of other objects".Some heated crap went down at Ole Miss this week. Some French black people connect this stereotype with aggressive colonialist policy in Africa of the global group Unilever, the old unique owner of the brand. The advertising slogans and images have been labelled racist and colonialist by some who argue that it reinforces the old cliché of a friendly yet stupid African. In France the Banania brand is now owned by the newly founded French company Nutrial, which acquired it from Unilever in 2003. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Banania sponsored the Yellow Jersey of the Tour de France. Posters and reproduction tin-plate signs of the pre-war advertising continue to be sold. However, the original advertising has become a cultural icon in France. The form of the character has since evolved to more of a cartoon character.
Slowly but surely, the slogan and the character became inseparable as the expression was coined: l'ami y'a bon ("the y'a bon buddy"). The slogan Y'a bon ("It's good") derives from the pidgin French supposedly used by these soldiers (it is, in fact, an invention). The brand's yellow background underlines the banana ingredient, and the Senagalese infantryman's red and blue uniform make up the other two main colours. Pierre Lardet took it upon himself to distribute the product to the Army, using the line pour nos soldats la nourriture abondante qui se conserve sous le moindre volume possible ("for our soldiers: the abundant food which keeps, using the least possible space"). Īt the outset of World War I, the popularity of the colonial troops at the time led to the replacement of the West Indian by the now more familiar jolly Senegalese infantry man enjoying Banania. Her image was replaced in 1915 with the drawing of a widely smiling Senegalese man. When he returned to Paris, he started its commercial fabrication and, in 1912, began marketing Banania with the picture of an Antillaise. Historyĭuring a visit near Lake Managua, Nicaragua in 1909, the journalist Pierre Lardet discovered the recipe for a cocoa-based drink. There are two types of Banania available in French supermarkets: 'traditional' which must be cooked with milk for 10 minutes, and 'instant' which can be prepared in similar fashion to Nesquik. It is made from cocoa, banana flour, cereals, honey and sugar. The logo used by the original company in 1915īanania is a popular chocolate drink found most widely distributed in France.