The trailer for Australia’s second season of I’m A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here! features host Chris Brown dressed in a loincloth and co-host Julia Morris in leopard print swinging on a vine through a jungle. Morris is adorned with what, at best, could be called an African-inspired headdress and jewellery – the kind of garb you might rent from a dingy Halloween costume shop.

The show is filmed in South Africa’s Kruger national park, but the trailer caption reads more generically “deep in the African jungle”, a phrase that is constantly repeated in its marketing material.

From fashion’s long-running love affair with blackface to Band Aid’s patronising Christmas song, Africa is too often western pop culture’s biggest blind spot. One person’s troppo-safari chic is another person’s grotesque act of cultural appropriation, and a Change.org petition posted on Sunday has called for Channel Ten to retract this “offensive marketing campaign” that makes a “mockery” of Africa. The petition charges the show’s marketing team of choosing to “blatantly misrepresent and make a mockery of the complex, diverse and rich cultures of Africa by reducing it to a misinformed and offensive generalisation”.

“Is this what we have to accept in 2016? The ignorance and oversimplification of a beautiful multifaceted culture who only seems to be shown in a savage, barbaric light?” wrote a petitioner, Amy Iheakanwa.

At time of writing the petition has ticked over only 500 signatures, but it raises an important issue of where the line is drawn between inspiration and exploitation, or appreciation and appropriation.

Iheakanwa, an Australian of Nigerian descent, told Guardian Australia the trailer left her “fuming”; she believes it trades on long-held and incorrect views of Africa as “full of savages and barbarians” with “animals running wild and people dressed half-naked”. As she explained, perpetuating such stereotypes reduces Africa to “one country with a jungle running through it” rather than its reality as a “really multifaceted, amazing continent with so many different cultures, each with its own tradition, tribes and languages”.

There are tribes who still dress in traditional ware and are not always fully clothed, she conceded, but the trailer is hardly a respectful homage. Rather it relies on tired western tropes of Africa and verges on parody. “It’s like we’re still stuck in 1932, with Tarzan beating on his chest, and Jane. This doesn’t represent anything that’s got to do with Africa.”

Iheakanwa suggested promotion of the show should include genuine representations of South Africa, such as iconic landmarks like Table Mountain or Boulders Beach. “They’re filming in Kruger national park and you didn’t even see the different Zulu, Sotha and Nguni tribes.”

Supporter Jeanette Nkrumah wrote in the petition’s comments there was an “onus” on the media to better inform Australian viewers, and by “playing into trite and offensive stereotypes” Channel Ten was perpetuating “insensitive and ignorant pictures of many of the people who live, work in and call this country home”. (The network was contacted and did not provide comment.)

Television is far from the only culprit. Examples of cultural faux pas are a dime a dozen in fashion and music: from Kylie Jenner’s cornrows, Rihanna in chola fancy dress, to festival-goers who sport Native American feathered headdresses (which have now been banned at Montreal’s Osheaga and British Columbia’s Bass Coast festivals, with restricted sales at Glastonbury). In an October interview, rapper Nicki Minaj reacted to twerk-aholic pop star Miley Cyrus, explaining the importance of listening to the community from which you are borrowing:

The fact that you feel upset about me speaking on something that affects black women makes me feel like you have some big balls. You’re in videos with black men, and you’re bringing out black women on your stages, but you don’t want to know how black women feel about something that’s so important? Come on, you can’t want the good without the bad. If you want to enjoy our culture and our lifestyle, bond with us, dance with us, have fun with us, twerk with us, rap with us, then you should also want to know what affects us, what is bothering us, what we feel is unfair to us. You shouldn’t not want to know that.

The appropriation of African culture has particular consequences for Australian audiences, including the 337,823 people in Australia who, according to the 2011 census, were born in an African country. Sunny-Rue Chivaura, a PhD researcher at Charles Sturt university investigating media representations of Africa in Australia, said I’m A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here!’s campaign illustrates an ongoing “lack of knowledge” around Africa’s diversity and “how offensive images such as these will impact someone who actually comes from Africa”. Chivaura, who was born in Zimbabwe, said it is not uncommon for her to be asked by Australians if she lived in the jungle and if she used to ride elephants to school: “The show just promotes that kind of ignorance.”

The loincloth-meets-leopard-print stereotype taps into “colonial idealism of the ‘unknown Africa’ ”, Chivaura said, and “explorer fantasies” also associated with other non-European regions such as South America and India. “It’s been a few hundred years since the colonial empires were exploring these regions, so why are we still promoting this ‘idealised savage’ version of Africa?”

Chivaura said a comparative lack of African people working in Australian media has led to the perpetuation of these stereotypes. She watched part of the show’s 2015 debut season and said producers opted for more familiar cultural touch points like cricket and KFC over traditional cuisine, or bringing local personalities on set.

There is a touch of irony in the fact that the long-running UK version of the show is filmed every year in the jungles (technically, rainforests) of Springbrook national park, near Murwillumbah, New South Wales. As Chivaura points out, promotion of the UK show manages to evoke jungle fever without featuring “primitive, semi-naked people” or crass caricatures of Australia’s Indigenous people. Flying the Australian cast members all the way to South Africa is a pointless exercise if the producers fall back on tired, retrograde western impressions of the country.

“Why are they even going to Africa if they’re not going include anything that typifies being in Africa? Because that jungle looks no different to the landscapes of far-north Queensland or Fiji.”