Parents woke up last Saturday to excited children who couldn’t settle down for a meal. They were also not interested in the weekly parental guilt-trip weekend bribes of outings. IShowSpeed was coming to town and they couldn’t wait for Sunday. I Show Who? Parents rushed to Google and Youtube to find out who this twenty-year-old who is stealing their love from their children is.
The joke fell on millennials who have Gen Z and Gen Alpha children. They couldn’t believe that their children knew about the Youtube sensation all along without their knowledge. So what else don’t they know? The joke that Kenyans on Twitter (KOT) is run by young men in bed sitters with Internet bundles came home. What does he do or own? This was the first question in their mind.
It is now clear to everyone that there is a generation that got dual citizenship at birth. They are citizens of whatever nation the Berlin Conference and other wars prior to that formed and citizens of the digital world. They are first online citizens then physical world ones. They come back to the physical world briefly and then go back to where they believe they belong.
Meanwhile, their parents visit the digital world briefly and then come back to their “boring” space of ranking people by what they do or own. What the younger generation do on the digital space most often remains there, proof of how eight year-olds knew about Speed but never shared about it with their parents. No wonder parents are surprised because we treat the online space the way we dealt with post office back in the day.
IShowSpeed or simply Speed, born Darren Jason Watkins Jr, will turn twenty next week. He is one of the most popular Youtubers and streamers. He got online around 2016 when he began uploading gaming videos online. The videos did not gain much traction until he started being dramatic on them. Then the videos were picked up as memes and popularity grew. He reached one hundred thousand subscribers in 2021.
He announced late last year that he will be doing a tour of Africa from December. He landed in Cape Town and then toured Johannesburg. He raced a cheetah, played rugby and then went for the South African sensational car spinning event in Johannesburg. He toured the historic Soweto, where, from the videos, I learnt that the South African slums have spaces where people pull stunts. Kenyan slums are so averse to space such that, if you try to pull some stunt, you end up in someone’s bedroom.
Infrastructure
In South Africa, Speed was impressed by the infrastructure, which was a surprise because they have been fed a different image of Africa. If you take away the townships, what we call here slums, South Africa is a first world country. Despite the colourful events that looked well planned and thought out, he only managed 4.6 million viewers on his livestream. South Africa has superb infrastructure but most of the population has not developed to the level of their infrastructure.
On the flipside, from Speed’s videos in Kenya, Nairobi doesn’t look as flashy as South African cities. However, what we lack in advance infrastructure we make up for it in spirit and Internet connectivity. Everywhere he went, even without official announcement, word would spread fast online and within minutes he had a crowd that would give Kenyan politicians goose bumps of envy.
He landed in the CBD on a Sunday afternoon. Normally, it is a deserted town on Sundays but Speed got a show when crowds thronged everywhere he went. People came out in South Africa, but compared to Kenya, they looked mobilized. The truth is, fewer South Africans have access to Internet.
He looked surprised in Kenya, like he did not expect such a reception. The matatu rides and lessons in Kiswahili were as hilarious as they were exciting. It brought out the fact that what is normal to us is not normal to others. His reaction upon tasting nyama choma at Kenyatta Market really put a taste onto our flat cuisine.
In one stream in Kenya, he got three hundred and sixty thousand new subscribers. Millennial parents decided to jump in and follow what their children are watching. President William Ruto had to come out after a prompt by the Cabinet Secretary for Tourism Rebecca Miano. This was true Track Four diplomacy. The kind of diplomacy that bypasses the protocols of formal government engagement.
If there is something the current generation is teaching us, then it is to tear down social silos. Americans have come out to say how Speed has made them realize just how they were lied to that Africa is.
Thank you Speed for the courage. Now the world knows the side of Africa that rarely gets the airtime in global media. Parents have also realized that a lot can go on right under their noses.