Text: Lodi Matsetela
Photographs: Supplied
Our youth speaks with a twang – an American twang.
Their AHs are EHs, their T’s sit between a T and a D, softer and lazier, and they code switch between an observed culture and an experienced one.
I’ve pondered this for a long time, why it is, and it has occurred to me that their lives are lived online, just as much – or perhaps even more so – than they are lived offline.
What else could be the result of TikTok as a companion, American music as a soundtrack with a touch of Ebonics mixed with mid-Western tinges that score phrases only ever heard from the mouths of rappers from Queens New York on large screens, smalls screens, and even smaller palm-sized screens.
The math really shouldn’t math, yet it does. It all adds up.
The cultural diet, and in fact, digital cultural diet of memes and viral clips alone can but create the obvious results of a generational identity crisis going largely unnoticed.
Festivals like ours, Fak’ugesi, that may seem alternative in curation and programming, are the antidote to the cultural poverty that our youth have no option but to feast on. And they’re feasting.
However, (as the old South African adage goes) without significant funding from the private and public sector, there’s no alternative to what influence today’s influencers have on young minds, in the absence of anything that truly reflects their everyday experiences in the various new media content mediums they engage with hourly, daily.
When speaking of technology and innovation, or even the impact of Ai on the creative process, and the archive of African IP, the general way in which youth should and could be engaged is favoured for the typical tech-bro industrial complex assembly line. Again, chasing an American borne Silicon Valley success story.
But really, the new narrative should be of celebrating the success stories coming out of Nairobi, Lagos and Joburg, success stories that have a stamp of Jozi on them, a stamp of their origin. A place not so far out of reach, a place that inspires not because of its dire straits, but because the streets are paved in opportunity and potential rather than gold, as was the Jozi of old.
Contextually innovation in tech is placed outside of Africa, and its youth. How else can people reimagine their past, present and now futures (physical and digital) if it’s not demonstrated to them, and when it is demonstrated, is unattainable.
How else will we counter the virality of influencer vacantness if the works of New Media artists such as Minne Atairu (Nigeria) who recently showcased MetaData Memoire all the way in far flung Linz Austria at the 2024 Ars Electronica Festival (now in its 45th year), aren’t also showcased across our continent, where their context needs no explanation?
The subject of the Metadata Memoire, which works as a digital 3D scanning archive-in-waiting of the return of the Benin Bronzes to Nigeria, is an exploration of repatriation and reparation, while documenting the pillaging of colonial times, chronicling the little-known majesty of past African civilizations and that arc of history that’s been bent past those facts.
It’s not the absence of Social Media platforms that will give the generations to come some respite from ‘American’ globalisation, but rather the inclusion and concerted support of the staging and funding of festivals such as the Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival, and supporting organisations such as the Jozi My Jozi movement, alongside their counterparts in Uganda, Senegal, and Mozambique, that will allow for a new dialect, accent or cadence to come about that is uniquely, distinctly their own.
*Lodi Matsetela writes in her capacity as the Programme Manager at Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival, taking place this year from the 2nd to the 5th of October 2024, at Tshimologong Precinct in Braamfontein, Johannesburg.
You can buy tickets here: https://www.quicket.co.za/events/250400-fakugesi-festival-2024-untilunlocked/ #/
And get the full programme of speakers and activities here: https://fakugesi.co.za/
