W.hen Charity Ekezie first joined TikTok and started posting videos from her home in Abuja, Nigeria, in 2020, she had just left a job at a radio station and thought it might be a good way to stay busy and not leave. that his journalistic skills disappeared. .
After a few months, he began to notice from the comments under his posts that some people didn’t know anything about Africa. Commentators from the United Kingdom, the United States and European countries asked him how he had a telephone or if there was water in Africa.
“Wait, are you serious?” Ekezie remembers thinking at that moment. “This is not the Africa I live in. I mean, we have phones in Africa. There is bottled water here. “I decided to start responding.”
Armed with humor and strong 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 earned the 32-year-old a combined following of more than 4.5 million across Tik Tok, instagram, Youtube and Facebookwith some posts viewed tens of millions of times.
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In a TikTok post Responding to a question about how Africans can afford phones but not water, he holds up a bottle of water with more stacked behind it 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 turns spitting into a drum… After two days, we go and the saliva is purified. Now we can take it and drink,” she jokes.
People laughed at the videos, so Ekezie did more and more questions arose. She believes some were people trolling her, but many were genuine.
A featured post she and two cousins dancing in a lakeresponding to comments that said there is no water in Africa.
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It has had more than 22 million views to date, but has also attracted thousands of racist comments. “At that time of year the water was brown,” says Ekezie. “I started getting comments like, ‘Oh my God, look at the dirty water you’re 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 didn’t always spot racism. “I didn’t understand it,” she says. “I knew the concept of racism but I had never been treated in a racist way before. It hurt me a lot”.
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But it has also received a lot of positive feedback from many Africans, some of whom join in on the joke in the comments section. In a post that made light of the fact that many people don’t understand that Africa is a continent and not a single country, people from nations across Africa commented with emojis of their flags. “It didn’t matter what country they came from, they were united and in on the joke,” Ekezie says. “One person said, ‘You’re going to unite Africa on your own.’ That was great”.
Experience has taught Ekezie, who spent part of his childhood in Cameroon, that “Africa has no PR in the West and people don’t really know anything about us. I thought people read books; apparently not so. It hurts me because we are exposed to Western media, music and culture every day.”
She is grateful that social media allows her to share her perspective. Since her YouTube following has skyrocketed 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 a miserable jungle,” she states.
“I’m not saying African countries are perfect,” he adds. “I mean, what country is perfect anyway? But we have to give our best. People need to know that even though we have our own problems, we are also amazing. “We have an incredible culture, incredible food and incredible people.”