Nigerian Influencer Uses Satire to Highlight Lack of Promotion of Africa in the West

circleWhen Charity Ekezie first joined TikTok in 2020 and started posting videos from her home in Abuja, Nigeria, she had recently left her job at a radio station. She saw TikTok as a way to stay active and maintain her journalism skills.

Within a few months, she realized from the comments on her posts that some people had no knowledge about Africa. Commenters from the UK, US, and European nations asked her questions like if Africa had mobile phones or access to water.

“Wait a minute, are you serious?” Ekezie thought at the time. “This is not the Africa I live in. We have telephones and bottled water. I decided to start responding.”

Armed with humor and sarcasm, Ekezie’s witty replies to questions such as “Do they have planes in Africa?” or “Do they have shoes in Africa?” have garnered her over 4.5 million followers globally. Find her on
Tick ​​tock,
Instagram,
Youtube and
Facebook. Some of her posts have amassed tens of millions of views.

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1 TikTok post
Answering a question about why Africans can buy mobile phones but not water, she holds a bottle of water in her hands, with more bottles stacked behind her, and explains that every month people gather for a spitting festival. “All the men do a spiritual chant led by the community magician, and all the women and girls take a turn spitting into the drum. After two days, we go for a purification ritual, so we can take the saliva and drink it,” she jokes.

People laughed at the video, which prompted Ekezie to make more videos and get more questions. Some of them were just trolling, but many were serious.

1 post was featured
She and her two cousins ​​dancing by the lake
In response to a comment about there being no water in Africa.

The video has been viewed more than 22 million times so far, but it has also attracted thousands of racist comments. Ekezie said, “The water was brown during that time. I started getting comments like, ‘Oh my god, the water you’re drinking is dirty,’ and people were saying the water is washing me away, that’s why it’s brown and why I’m so black.”

People left monkey emojis. Ekezie said she didn’t always notice the racism. “I didn’t understand it,” she said. “I was aware of the concept of racism, but I’d never been treated in a racist way. It really hurt.”

But she also received a lot of positive feedback from many Africans, some of whom joined in on the joke in the comments section. People from all over Africa responded to the post, which made light of the fact that many people don’t understand that Africa is a continent, not just one country, with flag emojis. “No matter where you’re from, they were united and they got the joke,” Ekezie says. “Some people said, ‘You will singlehandedly unite Africa.’ That was so cool.”

From this experience, Ekezie, who spent part of her childhood in Cameroon, learned that “Africa is not promoted at all in the West and people don’t know anything about us. I thought people read books but apparently that’s not the case. It’s heartbreaking because we are exposed to Western media, music, and culture every day.”

She’s grateful to be able to share her perspective on social media, and her YouTube following has grown so much over the past year that she’s been able to make a living from her posts. “I make videos because people want to see Africa through my lens, so they can see that it’s not this dreary jungle,” she says.

“I’m not saying African countries are perfect,” she adds. “And what country is perfect? ​​But we need to do our best. People need to know that we have our own problems, but we’re also great countries. We have great cultures, great food, great people.”