Yum yum, bubblegum

Champion toffees and apricot sweets, Fizz Pops, Cream Caramels, Nutt Puffs and sherbet in straws. But above all there was Chappies bubblegum - Charl Blignaut looks back at an iconic local brand

The other day I bought a Chappies. I'd started on the research for this story and I realised I hadn't chewed one since I was a child. I popped it in my mouth and there it was, the familiar burst of synthetic pink bliss ... the shrill tune calling me to the ice cream van, the drama of the veld fire in the empty plots across the road, freedom in the white-trash lands of Port Elizabeth.

Me and a kid called Alan riding our bikes further than we were allowed to, crossing a busy street to get to the café where we'd trade in empty cooldrink bottles for Chappies and Wilson's toffees... The bubble bursts within a minute, though, because the flavour's already gone.

For the past few weeks I've asked everyone I meet about the sweets they grew up with as a child. Aside from a cranky national treasure and a beauty queen with no sweet tooth, every conversation ends in smiles.

"I was a late chewer," says Sibusiso Vilane, the first black African to conquer Everest. "I could only start buying Chappies when I was about 10 and got a job as a garden boy. You'd rather have Chappies than biscuits because it was all about who could blow the biggest bubble."

"Ooh yes! Of course I chewed Chappies," enthuses concert pianist Jill Richards, who grew up in white suburbia. "It was the sweetness and the lurid pink colour. It seemed so exotic somehow."

"I still buy it every time I pass a mama at the side of the road with oranges and Chappies," cackles Soweto-born talk show host Kgomotso Matsunyane. "We collected the Did You Know? wrappers. We believed that if you got Number One you'd win a million rand. I don't know if it was a real competition or if it was just a playground myth, but it bloody worked for them. To tell you the truth, I still believe it."

It's amazing to think that a talk-show host, a mountain climber and a concert pianist growing up in a bipolar society can share a common cultural ritual. But they do. Chappies has led its market category for almost 50years and it still sells a staggering seven million units a day.

From president to pauper, everyone in South Africa has chewed a Chappies. Except Nataniël. "I couldn't bring myself to eat something you couldn't swallow," he says.

Talking about Chappies unlocks a time of innocent naughtiness in our lives - before the big, bad wolf knocked on the door. Still, nostalgia is always a bittersweet thing.

"We had a new nanny and she gave us Chappies. She didn't know she wasn't allowed," says Akona Ndungane, a part-time blogger who works in advertising. "I came home from school still chewing the same Chappies. I fell asleep with it in my mouth. When I woke up it was all over my hair. It was my first haircut and it was very much against my will."

"In the village there were a lot of drunks," remembers Clive Madiya, a television writer who grew up on the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal. "You know how drunks will always get kids to go and buy them stuff? They'd pull money out of their pockets and a one cent or two cents would fall. We'd keep it and buy Chappies. But if it was 10 cents you'd have to give it back. That was serious money."

Brand guru Andy Rice of Yellowwood Future Architects smiles when I tell him the story. "Bubblegum represents an early and safe opportunity to display rebellion," he says.

Chappies was not something that would put a smile on a teacher's face. Everyone had at least one teacher who'd make you swallow your gum. Many of us were party to putting Chappies in a fellow student's hair if they fell asleep in class.

"It may have been banned, but that doesn't mean it wasn't happening," recalls Matsunyane. "At Mmabatho High we had a teacher, Mr Mulcahy. If you were naughty in class you'd have to report to him with your ruler. You'd scrape Chappies off the bottom of the desks as your punishment."

Mulcahy was tame compared to the teachers at Dithomo Primary in Vosloorus. According to fashion designer David Tlale, "if they caught you chewing they would rub the Chappies in your hair and you'd be forced to have a haircut that night".

And the parents were mainly on the teachers' side. Fred Khumalo is famous for his memoir Touch My Blood. Lauren Beukes is famous for her cyber-fabulist novel Zoo City. You don't get two more diverse writers, yet both learned the rules of the house from Chappies.

"My mom encouraged us to read horror comics but thought chewing gum was the devil," says Beukes.

"It was not befitting of children of civilised, Christian parents to chew gum. Chewing gum was a hoodlum thing, a tsotsi thing, a skeberesh thing," remembers Khumalo.

"Bubblegum is part of the fabric of growing up," says musician and playwright David Kramer. "I remember we'd all meet at the swimming bath in Worcester. It had the highest diving board in the Boland and there was a sweet shop there. We'd blow bubbles to impress the girls. It was a ritual." Kramer and his friends would preen like birds but with bubbles for feathers.

Like most serious bubble blowers, Kramer chose Wicks over Chappies. You needed fewer Wicks for a good bubble. In fact, we can thank Wicks for our Chappies. In the late 1940s local confectioner Chapelat decided to take on Wicks at half the price. Chappies was the nickname for Chapelat.

"When they came on the market they were two for a penny," says Ben van Wyk, a retired regional manager for Chapelat. He sold candy in such bulk they called him Container van Wyk. "In the new money they started at four for a cent."

Chappies is the only local brand to have become a currency. Up until recently you'd get Chappies as change at the café. It's a standard gag in comedian Barry Hilton's routine. A kid asks for his change at the café. The owner answers in a heavy Portuguese accent: "Change? Change? Gwhot change? Gwhat Um look like you, gwhat change? Tsk. Fine. Take Chappies. Okay, fine take tree! Jus tree! You son of the bish!"

Yet gum is gum and Chappies and Wicks were both just plastic, synthetic flavours, fructose and colourants. What a product is made of - its intrinsics - can never create a brand, says Rice, because your competitor will just clone you. What set Chappies apart were the extrinsics - packaging and marketing. Much of that is credited to Chapelat's head of marketing and sales from the early 1950s.

To combat low literacy in rural areas, Arthur Ginsburg wanted to add a logo. A colleague, Des Kennedy, told him about the chipmunks he'd seen on a trip to Canada and Chappie Chipmunk was brought into our world. He was given his own club, his own radio slot, his own cartoon in the Sunday Times magazine and even his own junior football league.

Ginsburg's coup, though, was the Did You Know? inside the wrappers. Did you know that your nose and ears never stop growing throughout your life? That coconuts kill more people in the world than sharks do? That Roman emperor Caligula made his horse a senator?

For this, Ginsburg drew inspiration from Springbok Radio's Three Wise Men quiz show and commissioned the hosts to create the content.

In the 1970s Chappie Chipmunk delivered a knockout blow when Chapelat bought out Wicks and Wicks became a Chappies flavour. Wicks is now off the market and Chapelat has in turn been bought out by Cadbury.

Fifty-five years in, the brand boffs agree it's the wrappers that set Chappies apart. "We are living in an experiential age - look at the line of Apple products - but in truth Chappies thought about this long before," says Jon Cherry of marketing agency Cherryflava.

"Normally wrapping is garbage, but with Chappies the wrapping adds value. You're not just buying a sweet, you're also buying information. It was a little Internet."

The cheerfully striped outside of the wrapper has infused itself into our pop culture. Nelson Mandela has had his likeness crafted from Chappies wrappers. They're used to decorate Swazi reed mats and to create colourful Zulu bowls. Ndungane of "the haircut" is today the proud owner of a pair of Chappies earrings. Chappies is zef, say Die Antwoord, who cite the gum in their naughty song Dagga Puff. Chappie Chipmunk is emblazoned onthe cover of contemporary novels. The stripes form the branding of local fashion chain Sowearto.

Photographer Araminta de Clermont won the Spier Contemporary Art Award for her prison gang tattoo series, Life After.

"The slang name for prison tattoos in general is 'chappies', from the bubblegum wrappers," she says. If you hold a Chappies wrapper against the light you get a rough, colourful scrawl much like prison tattoos. "If you know how to read tattoos, they are also a Did You Know? They can tell you a whole lot about a man."

One of De Clermont's subjects had the nickname Chappies. "He was so covered in 'chappies' that he looked green almost, from a distance."

My own sister, it seems, has rediscovered her Chappies fetish in a recent body of art installations Stealing The Words. Belinda Blignaut blows Chappies bubbles and sticks them to surfaces, recently covering the entire front display window of the Youngblackman gallery in Cape Town. They look like a swarm of invading foetuses. They're the opposite of childhood happiness, all vulnerable and complex and crowded. But childhood was that, too.

"About a year ago I looked long enough at a piece of chewed gum to become interested in the object, the shape, the scent, tooth marks, a grossness," she says. "And everything else it meant for me - innocent, kinky, defiant, crude, sticky, sexy, blown, popped, spat out." It seemed a fitting continuation of her work around everyday objects as well as issues of the body.

In the beginning she'd chew the Chappies, but soon the scale became a problem. So now she has helpers who knead the gum in warm water to remove the fructose and colourants, because you can only blow bubbles once the sugars are removed.

I ask Rice what makes a great brand. "When it stops looking like a brand and starts looking like part of people's lives," he says.

"Chappies is a heritage brand. It shouldn't have been touched," says Cherry, expressing annoyance at the Chappies rebrand two years ago. Chappie Chipmunk lost the cane and straw boater and got himself a peak cap. "Chappies tells the country's story; it's part of our myth. It has even spawned conspiracy theories about evil Chipmunks and Quakers. It created an urban myth - that if you found wrapper Number One you'd win a million rand."

Even Cadbury can't tell me where this myth comes from. But Van Wyk says he saw a winning wrapper with his own eyes. There was a competition for a brief period in the 1980s. If you found a Number One printed instead of the Did You Know? you would win R1000. On the playground, the myth ballooned to a million.

"These are the things that make a brand endure," says Cherry. "Much of modern marketing lacks this connection with its story. What Chappies offers is an authentic experience - like edible cigarettes and Love Hearts (Zulu mottos). "

If you haven't tried a Chappies for a while, may I suggest you do? A collection of recent studies in Psychology Today says that not only is chewing gum good for your mental health (it combats stress, which fuels depression) but thinking about chewing it in your childhood is even better. One survey concludes that naturally nostalgic people who focus on good memories have high self-esteem.

Let me get the ball rolling for you. It's not inside, it's on top! Jet Jungle! Sgud gud gud ... Have a ding-dong day ... © Charl Blignaut

Did you know

• The seven million Chappies sold every day in South Africa means 80 pieces are consumed every second. If you had to line up the Chappies we chomp in a year, they would span the circumference of the Earth. Every two weeks they'd get from Joburg to Cape Town.
• Experts say that you can blow the biggest bubble with four or five pieces and by adding peanut butter to your gum.
• Chappies Under-12 Little League holds the Guinness Book of Records title for the biggest soccer tournament in the world for the number of participants - 140000.
• In Mexico, public gum chewers were thought to be homosexuals and harlots, according to 16th century chronicler Fray Bernardino de Sahagún.