An African TikTok? Then shake the waist, bring the watchman, aunt, and a few goats
We are animal people, but our favourite ones, for some reason, usually have a social and cultural link to our stomachs and mouths. ILLUSTRATION | JOSEPH NYAGAH | NMG
Journalist, writer and curator of the Wall of Great Africans
Nigerian music superstar Davido just announced that he had launched a social media application called Chatter. As of writing, it was not on the Apple or Google app store so we couldn’t give it a test run.
Social media apps have been slippery ground for African innovators. Many have come and gone, and those that still exist have not caught fire and garnered users in the tens of millions. Ironically, they have failed or are struggling for the right reason.
In Africa, we are still prisoners of “seriousness”. It is very difficult for most innovators to find the courage to create an app for something “frivolous” like cartoons, neighbourhood gossip, exposing cheating husbands and wives, or outing crooked pastors.
You wouldn’t get investors for that, and you would be ostracised for playing the fiddle while hundreds of millions of Africans are languishing in poverty or being killed in war.
So the app has to be something life-changing or that tries to save people, like enabling farmers to get better prices for their produce, connecting rural women to a boda boda that will rush them or their children to the hospital at night if they suddenly fall ill, send money to relatives in the village, or track locust and other pest invasions.
There is less guilt in getting on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, or TikTok because they are the work of decadent people in the West or Asia, who have lost their way and turned their backs on their gods.
However, many great apps of the world like Facebook, not to mention the popular internet, were not started to save the world, and some were born in sin. On the street, the story is that Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook while a student at Harvard as a tool to date girls.
Like many juicy stories, that isn’t true. He has said he sought to create a tool where people can share whatever they want with the people around them, although that too is not as heavy as an app that tells you which clinic or pharmacy is open at 4am.
The internet as a mass product with websites that report news, sell products, and promote businesses, was modelled along the first ones to figure out how to use the technology in a popular way – pornography sites.
If China and, especially India because it is a more open market than China, teach us anything, it is that a more parochial (national, regional) social media can be successful. ShareChat, India’s most popular social media app, has about 250 million users. Unlike in Africa, six of its top 10 apps are Indian.
India’s population today, at 1.45 billion people, is only about 40 million shy of Africa’s combined 1.49 billion. Therefore, the number of humans to make a big African social media app successful is there after we get past finding a country with the technology base to headquarter it, and the legal regime to secure it.
You don’t want an African Facebook based in a place where the army will stage a coup, or the rebels overrun the government, and the new military strongman suspends the constitution and seizes the computer servers.
An African app that finds mass take-off would easily become the world’s most fun app and draw in the rest of the world in their tens of millions.
It would have to be built to look like a child born out of an affair between TikTok and Instagram, to enable a couple of things. First, Africans, and black folks, have to shake the booty. Shaking things gives you authenticity.
Urban Africans, especially East and West Africans, have a peculiar taste in heroes. They love the funny and gossipy stories of watchmen.
One of Kenya’s biggest-ever TV shows was “Papa Shirandula”, a watchman with four wives, who dashes into the bush to change into office wear (and vice versa) and then fakes it as a manager to keep up appearances for his relatives. In Nigeria, it seems like every second show ends up with the watchman running off with his cruel boss’ wife. You would need a pithy algorithm that lends itself to such stories told in a few blinks of the eyes.
And we love our uncles and aunts. They mostly tend to be nice people, with a rich sense of humour. And we like them to do all the terrible things that we or our stuck-up parents can’t; like speaking truths at funerals and weddings. When we go to seek a beautiful young woman’s hand in marriage, there has to be an uncle or aunt nearby. After they have said “embarrassing” things at the funerals, in the night we sneak and give them gifts and money.
Now social media, the Western version, is obsessed with pets, especially cats and dogs. They go viral big time.
We are animal people, but our favourite ones, for some reason, usually have a social and cultural link to our stomachs and mouths.
A friend from Meru, in eastern Kenya, a land of hardworking farming people, told me there is a very popular channel there which, wait for it, livestreams cows feeding. The hardy folks can’t get enough of it.
Some years ago, there was a phenomenally successful theatre production that had people queuing for metres for days to snag tickets. Its biggest attraction was a dancing and talking goat. Social media as structured today, is not friendly to African cows and goats. Fix that, and you have a winner. Hopefully, Davido did.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. X@cobbo3
