When Charity Ekezie first joined TikTok and started posting videos from her home in Minna state, Nigeria, in 2020, she had just left a job at a radio station and thought it might be a good way to keep busy and not let her journalism skills fall away.
Within months, she began to realise from the comments underneath her posts that some people knew nothing about Africa. Commenters from the US, as well as the UK and other European countries, would ask her how she had a phone or whether 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 water here. I decided to start responding.”
Armed with humour and some heavy sarcasm, Ekezie’s sharp and witty rebuttals to a series of questions – from “Does Africa have aeroplanes?” to “Do you have shoes in Africa?” – has gained the 32 year-old a combined following of more than 4.5 million across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook, with some posts viewed tens of millions of times.
In one TikTok post responding to a question asking how Africans can afford phones but not water, she stands holding a bottle of water with more stacked behind her, and explains that every month people gather for a spitting festival. “All the men do a spiritual chant led by the wizard of the community and all the women and girls take turns to spit in a drum … After two days, we go and the saliva is purified. We can now take it and drink,” she jokes.
People laughed at the videos, so Ekezie made more, and more questions came. She thinks some were people trolling her, but many were genuine.
One post featured her and two cousins dancing in a lake, responding to comments saying there’s no water in Africa.
It has had more than 22m views to date but also attracted thousands of racist comments. “The water was brown at that time of the year,” says Ekezie. “I started getting comments like, ‘Oh my god, look at the dirty water you drink.’ People said the water was washing away my dirtiness. That’s why the water was brown and I’m so black.”
People left monkey emojis. Ekezie didn’t always spot the 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 so much.”
But she has also received a lot of positive feedback from many Africans, some of whom join in on the joke in the comments section. On one post making light of the fact that many people don’t understand Africa is a continent rather than a single country, people from nations across Africa commented with emojis of their flags. “No matter the country they came from, they were united and in on the joke,” says Ekezie. “One person said, ‘You are single-handedly going to unite Africa.’ That 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 pains me because we are exposed to western media, music and culture every single day.”
She is grateful that social media allows her to share her perspective. Since her following on YouTube has rocketed over the past year, she has been able to make a living from the posts. “I do 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 which country is perfect anyway? But we need to put our best foot forward. People need to know that, in as much as we have our own problems, we are also amazing. We have amazing culture, amazing food, amazing people.”
