‘Africa has no PR in the west’: Nigerian influencer uses sarcasm on the uninitiated | Global development

WWhen Charity Ekezie first joined TikTok and started posting videos from her home in Abuja, Nigeria in 2020, she had just quit her job at a radio station and thought it might be a good way to stay busy and not let her journalism skills fade. they fall.

Within a few months, she began to realize from the comments under her posts that some people knew nothing about Africa. Commentators from Great Britain, the USA and European countries would ask her where she got her phone from or whether there is water in Africa.

«Wait, are you serious?» Ekezie remembers her thoughts at the time. “This is not the Africa I live in. I mean, we have phones in Africa. There is bottled water here. I decided to start answering.”

Armed with humor and heavy sarcasm, Ekezie’s sharp and witty rebuttals to a range of questions – from «Does Africa have airplanes?» to «Do you have shoes in Africa?» – has garnered the 32-year-old more than 4.5 million followers on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook, with some posts being viewed tens of millions of times.

In one TikTok post, when asked how Africans can afford phones but not water, she stands holding a bottle of water with more stacked behind her and explains that every month people gather for a spitting festival. «All the men sing a spiritual chant under the guidance of the sorcerer of the community, and all the women and girls take turns spitting into the drum… After two days, we go and the saliva is purified. Now we can take and drink,» he jokes.

People laughed at the videos, so Ekezie made more, and more questions came in. She thinks some people trolled her, but many were honest.

One post shows her and two cousins ​​dancing in a lake, responding to comments that there is no water in Africa.

To date, it has had more than 22 million views, but it has also attracted thousands of racist comments. «The water was brown at that time of year,» says Ekezie. «I started getting comments like, ‘Oh my God, look at the dirty water you’re drinking.’ People said the water washed away my dirt. That’s why the water was brown and I’m so black.»

People left monkey emojis. Ekezie didn’t always see racism. «I didn’t understand,» she says. «I knew the concept of racism, but I had never been treated in a racist way before. It hurt me so much.”

But she also received a lot of positive feedback from many Africans, some of whom joined in on the joke in the comments section. On one post that ignored the fact that many people don’t understand that Africa is a continent and not one country, people from nations across Africa commented with emojis of their flags. «No matter what country they came from, they were united and in jest,» says Ekezie. «One person said: ‘You will unite Africa alone.’ That was so cool.”

The experience taught Ekezie, who spent part of her childhood in Cameroon, that “Africa doesn’t have any PR in the west and people really don’t know anything about us. I thought people read books; apparently they don’t. It hurts me because every day we are exposed to Western media, music and culture.»

She is grateful that social media allows her to share her point of view. Since her YouTube following has skyrocketed over the past year, she’s been able to make a living off the posts. “I make my videos because people like to see Africa through my lens. They see that Africa is not this miserable jungle,» she says.

«I’m not saying that African countries are perfect,» she adds. «I mean what country is perfect anyway? But we have to do our best. People need to know that as much as we have our own problems, we are just as amazing. We have an amazing culture, amazing food, amazing people.”