In April 1988, while the second official State of Emergency was still in effect in South Africa and the international clamour for sanctions against the apartheid regime was growing louder, a startling full-page advertisement appeared in the Washington Post. It featured a picture of a zebra caught in a rifle gunsight, accompanied by the slogan ‘Shoot it in the white and the black also dies’ (20 April 1988). This maxim (which had for years been a favourite weapon in Foreign Minister Pik Botha's rhetorical arsenal) is on a certain level undeniably true. The text's deviousness lies elsewhere, in the analogy between the signifier (the zebra) and the signified (the South African state). It is an analogy which turns something that has been constructed – constructed by people and through history – into something that is natural and given. With ostentatious candour the advertisement seems to address the matter of racial difference, but it renders the meaning of that difference innocent, even decorative. It turns the deep contradiction of a society in which some are rich at the expense of others into a matter of surface contrast: the elegance of the zebra's stripes. In its address to a foreign audience, moreover, the image positions its reader as a tourist on safari. It invites him or her to think of South Africa not as a site of political strife, but as an exotic beast, best looked at through the photographer's telephoto lens: as something to be celebrated and conserved – emphatically not something to take pot shots at.