TikTok: A Platform for African Creativity and Empowerment
Every day, 750 million people around the world engage with TikTok – the short-video sharing app. Kenyans are among its top users, with 54% of Kenyans sampled using TikTok for general purposes, the highest proportion among the countries in the survey. TikTok has become an integral part of social media culture in Kenya, offering a space for creativity, entertainment, and community interaction.
However, the Kenyan government is considering various restrictions on TikTok due to internal security threats, citing concerns about the spread of propaganda, fraud, and sexual content. Despite these concerns, TikTok has proven to be a valuable platform for African content creators, especially women, who are using it to challenge patriarchal and colonial narratives about Africa.
Through TikTok, African women are reviving and sharing indigenous knowledge, promoting African life, histories, and cultures. Content creators like Vivian Taabu and Azziad Nasenya are debunking dominant ideologies and structures that have shaped the lives of women throughout history, while also promoting African music and dance for African renewal.
While artists in Kenya are already benefiting from TikTok through brand sponsorships and product sales, there is a lack of a working policy governing TikTok use in the country. The absence of a TikTok Creator Fund in Kenya means that creators cannot be directly paid for their content by the app, limiting their earning potential.
As a literature lecturer at Kenyatta University, I believe that TikTok is a valuable tool for visualizing indigenous knowledge within popular literary meditations in Africa. It provides a space for contemporary African art forms to thrive and communicate context-specific knowledge. It is crucial for the government to establish policies that safeguard users while respecting their freedom of expression and to support spaces that share the African story with the world.