‘Africa has zero PR in the west’: Nigerian influencer using sarcasm for the uninitiated | Global development

When Charity Ekezie first joined TikTok and started posting videos from her home in Abuja, Nigeria in 2020, she had just quit a job at a radio station and thought it might be a good way to keep busy and to not allow her journalistic skills to decline. .

Within a few months, she began to realize from the comments under her posts that some people knew nothing about Africa. Commentators from the UK, USA and European countries would ask him how he had a phone or if there was water in Africa.

“Wait, are you serious?” Ekezie remembers thinking 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 some heavy sarcasm, Ekezie’s witty and pointed rebuttals to a range of questions – from “Does Africa have airplanes?” for “Do you have shoes in Africa?” – has earned the 32-year-old a combined more than 4.5 million followers on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook, with some posts being viewed tens of millions of times.

In a TikTok post answering a question asking how Africans can afford phones but not water, she stands holding a bottle of water with more piled up behind her and explains that every month people gather for a spit festival . “All the men do a spiritual chant led by the community sorcerer and all the women and girls take turns spitting into a drum… After two days, we go and the spit is cleaned. Now we can take it and drink it,” she jokes.

People laughed at the videos, so Ekezie did more and more questions came. She thinks some of it was people shocking her, but a lot of it was real.

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

It has had more than 22 million views to date, but 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 I’m drinking.’ People said the water was washing away my dirt. That’s why the water was brown and I’m so black.”

People left monkey emojis. Ekezie did not always notice racism. “I didn’t understand,” she says. “I knew the concept of racism, but I had never been treated racist before. It hurt me a lot.”

But it has also received a lot of positive reactions from many Africans, some of whom join the joke in the comments section. In a post pointing to the fact that many people don’t realize that Africa is a continent and not a single country, people from nations across Africa commented with emojis of their flags. “No matter where they came from, they were together and joking,” says Ekezie. “One person said, ‘You will unite Africa alone.’ It was so cool.”

The experience has taught Ekezie, who spent part of her childhood in Cameroon, that “Africa has zero 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 media, music and western culture”.

She is grateful that social media allows her to share her point of view. Since her YouTube following has grown over the past year, she has been able to make a living from posting. “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 African countries are perfect,” she adds. “I mean what place is perfect anyway? But we must do our best ahead. People need to know that as much as we have our problems, we are also amazing. We have great culture, great food, great people.”