Africa needs own Twitter or risk silencing its social media heavies
If Twitter becomes a hotbed of “angry white men,” as some have put it, and everyone else takes flight, social media heavies could see their large audiences vanish, and their voices reduced to a whimper. PHOTO | FILE
Journalist, writer and curator of the Wall of Great Africans
What you need to know:
A freedom of speech fundamentalist, many people fear he will unlock the gates of hell and let all the vile racists and misogynists loose on his Twitter, and drive black and brown people, and women off the platform.
If Twitter becomes a hotbed of “angry white men,” as some have put it, and everyone else takes flight, these social media heavies could see their large audiences vanish, and their voices reduced to a whimper.
The jitters, however, also raise the question of why Africa doesn’t have its equivalent.
South African-born entrepreneur and innovator Elon Musk has been making a lot more waves than usual after he clinched a deal to buy the microblogging site Twitter for an eye-watering $44 billion.
Musk, the man behind the hot electric car Tesla and aerospace company SpaceX, is a bit of a complex creature. He’s very progressive on issues like climate change, and liberal on many social issues, but has some very disturbingly right-wing political views.
A freedom of speech fundamentalist, many people fear he will unlock the gates of hell and let all the vile racists and misogynists loose on his Twitter, and drive black and brown people, and women off the platform.
Twitter has become easily the biggest megaphone for political leaders and other public figures in East Africa. Kenya’s Deputy President William Ruto tops the regional rankings with 4.6 million followers.
Former Kenya prime minister Raila Odinga has 3.5 million. Rwanda President Paul Kagame (2.7 million), Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni (2.6 million). Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta, once a meaty figure on social media, quit it a while back.
A couple of public intellectuals and media personalities, mainly Kenyans, have followers between one and two million.
If Twitter becomes a hotbed of “angry white men,” as some have put it, and everyone else takes flight, these social media heavies could see their large audiences vanish, and their voices reduced to a whimper.
The jitters, however, also raise the question of why Africa doesn’t have its equivalent.
Admittedly, building a big social media platform like Facebook, Twitter or TikTok is probably harder than going to the moon.
The USA’s dominance is related to its global cultural and technological power, and population of 330 million.
China, with varying degrees of the same advantages but a far bigger population of 1.44 billion, has Sina Weibo. India, with a population of 1.4 billion, has Koo, though it's nowhere near what Sina Weibo is. Almost everywhere else, the picture is dismal.
Africa’s population will close at 1.4 billion this year. Creating a social media refuge for them will, however, be complicated by the fact that, like Europe, it’s scattered over many countries, unlike China and India. That big foundational core is elusive.
It's further complicated by the reality that creating such pan-African cultural and knowledge platforms is something we haven’t proved good at so far. Many attempts to “create an African CNN,” for example, have flopped.
There are flickers of hope, though. ART X Lagos has grown into a major African international art fair and looks set to gain global stature if it continues on its present path.
The Pan-African Film and Television Festival held biennially in the Burkina Faso capital Ouagadougou, recovered from an anaemic period and is again the continent’s undisputed largest film festival. These days there also is quite some international excitement about it.
Perhaps the biggest surprise is Iwaria, Africa’s first successful attempt at a stock photograph service. Its co-founders didn’t come from the usual creative axis of Kenya-South Africa-Nigeria-Ghana-Egypt, but are two young creators from Benin.
Somewhere in that maze lies the seed for the creation of an African Twitter. There sure is an African out there who can find it.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3
