Social networking website, Twitter, turned ten yesterday. Exciting isn’t it? It’s been only ten years since twitter changed the course of most lives in Africa, by becoming the platform where sociocultural and political issues have been brought up, analyzed and given solutions to. Twitter has seemingly become a platform for conversations that had never before been addressed in mainstream society, and has also given some of its users masks to hide behind to give blunt opinions without being judged. Africa has never been as open as it has in the past 10 years. With many hashtags and everyday trends, here are some of the conversations twitter has enabled in Africa:
No more single stories
For a very long time, the western media dictated the conversation on how Africa is perceived; a place of senseless wars, endless drought and famine, a despot’s Shangri-La, terrorist hotbed, not fit for anything but safaris on summer vacations. Thankfully, the conversation has shifted away from that significantly. While there are still certain areas that look out of place in modern-day civilisation, Africans have now been able to switch the conversation, to a large extent, to show that there are several systems working within the continent. And Twitter has been the avenue.