‘Africa has zero PR in the west’: the Nigerian influencer using sarcasm on the clueless

Charity Ekezie has made it her mission to educate naive westerners about her continent on social media, and have some fun along the way

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.