African Creatives Are Criminals
Survival At Its Finest
4.66 billion people have access to the internet. Of the 4.66 billion people with access to the internet, 4. 3 billion people use Google worldwide. Google's Android as of June 2021, accounted for over 83.6 percent of the mobile OS market, while Apple's iOS had 14.35 percent in Africa.
Beyond upfront subscriptions and charges, how good are these platforms for African creatives like say- writers? Google Play Books? Apple Books? Nope, sorry. Most African writers cannot put up their books in these stores because our countries are not supported by these platforms .
Let us turn to the biggest online retailer in the world-Amazon. Yes you can trade on Amazon as a creative person but what about payment? Amazon does not deal directly with most African banks. Type in Nigeria for instance- nope. I use Nigeria because there are over 109 million users in this country who access the internet on either a Google or Apple operating system.
To fully experience global platforms, you will need a virtual card to at least stand a chance but about that virtual card like- Wise , Surely they work but again Nigeria and other African countries are excluded.
But at least, we can access Amazon but what about the other big platform like Esty? Oh, don’t even bother yourself- that is a no go for most of Africa.
Etsy is ‘so good’ that if they find out that you even attempted to bypass their rejection of your country, by say, asking a friend in another country to help you, both accounts are permanently banned.
I will like to take us to Affiliate marketing which currently is an industry of at least $12billion. $12 billion of which most African creatives cannot access because most affiliate platforms like clickbank do not support the majority of African countries.
Read: 9 Life Lessons To Avoid Abuse
The message is clear for most African creatives- there are many ways to survive, break out, get your craft in front of the world but these opportunities are not for you.
Many people in these pre approved (I say pre approved because they are the anointed ones and have it for granted) countries usually majority of other countries that are not in Africa, take these things for granted. They take for granted that they can do remote work from anywhere in the world, they can do copywriting without cloning their place of residency, they can easily do dropshipping, make and receive payments using Apply or Google pay and all other such perks that daily blows the minds of African creatives who are just as deserving of these opportunities.
As creatives, who think outside the box, the next best option is to become criminals to circumvent the systems trying to stop them and this opens up a whole other can of worms.
I remember being excited to be an affiliate marketer for a platform as ‘simple’ as Canva- lovely platform all around. I couldn’t because in the email they sent to me on their rejection, Tarek Hossain Dinaj craved my understanding with his deepest sympathies because he had to think about “safety” of others…because of the “wide-scale spamming and abuse” of which Nigeria was one of such countries to default. Many other platforms like Helium, Bookbolt etc just hid behind, “your site does not compliment” us, yeah.
Why is it that Google, Helium, Canva, Redbubble and every platform in the world can figure out ways to safely collect money from Africa but cannot work on getting rid of the bad apples so that the whole continent does not pay for the sins of said bad apples?
The Gates foundation gives billions in aids to African countries likewise many other organizations and great for them but Africans know these aids do not get to the grassroots but, that is a story for another day. What is a story for today is that these billions will not be so needed if platforms stopped discriminating against African creatives. Our fathers and their fathers took pride in their work. They took pride in the multitude of their harvests that they worked hard for. We their children want to brag on our bountiful harvests borne of honest labour.
Let me address the big elephant- this is racism pure and simple. I claim the title of a writer the same way Chimamanda Adichie is a writer but the difference is this- every platform will bend over backwards to give Adichie the opportunity to showcase her craft because she has done the work for them and now, she is pre approved because she is too big to be neglected. I dare to say that Etsy will showcase Adichie if she reached out from Pakistan even if they might not have an office there- they will work with her. Same for all those thumbing down their noses on Africa.
If you build a platform that discriminates against a particular continent over and again, you have a bias against them.
What is the basis of your bias? Are we just “shithole” countries? Can I go further and say that the mindset that banned the innocent bystander African countries to stop Covid-19 that was raging in other places, is the same mindset from which these biases grow.
Racism- pure and simple.
Every Time I Have To Discipline My Child.
These platforms don’t want criminals on their platforms and I applaud them. I am not a criminal. The majority of Africans are not criminals. You create a platform and put up firewalls that the only way for me to feed from it is to become a criminal. In warding off the evil you do not want, you create more of them because your white knight aids don’t get to us, our governments don’t work for us, our platforms are horrible to us and being creatives, all we know to do is find solutions to problems and these solutions criminalize us.
But, we are listening. What ways can we not be criminalized? What ways are these platforms proposing for us? Or are we just criminals beyond redemption because of where our continent is?
My name is Adaobi Okwy. Please turn on Email Notification for my next post. Also, Buy me coffee?
