What Does IShowSpeed’s Africa Tour Say About the State of Streaming?

"I want to show the world what Africa really is," American streamer IShowSpeed announced on his Speed Does Africa tour. While well-intentioned, this sentence reeks of Western privilege. With plenty of young Africans already streaming across the continent, why does Africa need an American to show the world what it really is? And is streaming the right medium to convey the manifold complexities of African cultures? 

As an American, Speed has a kind of access, funding, and reach that Africans do not have. He can walk around Cairo, a city under tight military control that does not easily grant permits for filming, and use drones when most other filmmakers are not allowed to bring drones into the country. He is given unique privileges on account of being an influential American. In return, when people invite him into their culture, he often responds in a patronizing and distracted manner, if he responds at all.

Speed’s view of Africa is through the lens of gaining followers and entertaining audiences. It is a spectacle, at times funny but often uncomfortable and even heartbreaking, like when an Algerian tells him about the martyrs who gave their lives for independence from France, and Speed does not listen. Or a young girl tells him, “We’re happy you’re here” twice, and he does not listen. 

Media outlets have celebrated Speed for opening new conversations in and about Africa. Many were touched by how Africans have welcomed him, with the streamer himself repeating how beautiful it was to be surrounded by people who looked like him. There’s no doubt that Africa has much to offer a young African American man, or anyone at that. But once his tour is over, it remains to be seen what Speed can offer Africa beyond a momentary window of global attention. Will he become more interested in collaborating with African creators? How will this shape or change his approach to streaming?

In North Africa, he became the first to stream inside the Great Pyramid of Giza, ate delicious food and tea in the Sahara, sang to raï music in Algeria, and surprised football fans as an AFCON mascot. People were excited to share their culture and met him with kindness and generosity. 

However, in a football stadium, Algerian ultras threw food and water bottles at him, overshadowing several days of positivity with what looked like anti-Blackness to a Western audience. Algerians have explained that the hostility was not due to Speed’s race, but because football ultras are closely connected to political activism. In their context of hyper-surveillance and a hostile environment, they do not want to be filmed. Algerians have also made it clear that football ultras do not represent the country, as is the case anywhere else. 

The incident sparked online outrage and fueled the mistrust many Africans and diasporans feel towards North Africa. While there are several videos of Speed having a great time in Algeria, this is the moment that remains with his audience. Was he showing “the real Africa”? Or did the medium of streaming merely help to reinforce harmful narratives, because it is difficult to showcase a place that one is discovering in real time? 

Optional Surveillance: The Multi-Million Dollar Culture of Livestreaming

Streaming culture exploded around 2018, bolstered by existing but minimally known platforms like Twitch, which now boasts over 240 million monthly users. Fortnite’s boom, along with closer integrations with celebrities, paved the way for a widespread culture of optional surveillance. The proposition of streaming culture, much like the central ethos of reality television, is that subscribers pay to watch their favorite creators do everything from mundane tasks to risky challenges.

But unlike reality television, which is often besieged with accusations of doctored plot lines and orchestrated drama, streaming culture feeds off and has gained popularity for its grounding in reality. On a stream, anything could happen; blunders cannot be edited out, the drama is driven by instinct, and viewers get an unadulterated look at how their favorite creators think, live, love, and relate with their friends and communities.

Already seeing a global and economic boom, top streamers like Kai Cenat and Speed have been known to earn over $100,000 per month alone from streaming. Adding sponsorships, ads, and brand visibility, they stand to make even more. Ishowspeed, whose streams are conducted primarily on YouTube, is estimated to earn anything between $1 Million to $7 Million from ads alone. Sponsorships from Adidas, Puma, and other brands have netted more revenue. It’s a social enterprise that has proven incredibly successful and appealing to many young people across the world. 

The Global Streaming Divide: Passport Power and the Ceiling for African Creators

Across Africa, streamers have taken to platforms like Kick and Twitch to build followers of their own. In Nigeria, creators like Carter Efe and Peller are some of the biggest creators. They are routinely performing challenges, exploring funny experiences, or conducting live sessions with friends and fans alike. Because streaming is anchored by testing the limits of mundanity and dramatizing the everyday, it often lends itself solely to entertainment. It is explicitly why, during IShowSpeed’s Nigeria stop on his Africa tour, many creators swarmed his location with Peller taking it a step further and appearing at Speed’s every stop asking to be recognized and for a possible collaboration.

The dramatics of that encounter aside, it also reveals something most African streamers are aware of, which is that no matter how hard they try, the geographic hierarchies that limit travel and international access for Africans could also limit just how global they can become.

IShowSpeed’s explosion on the global scene got even bigger with his Europe tour, a tour made possible by a high-ranking passport. The same level of accomplishment would be nearly impossible and logistically tiresome for an African creator who has to deal with visa restrictions and immigration bias. Even on the continent, Africans still deal with a variety of travel restrictions and prejudices that would make a tour of this calibre nearly impossible.

And so at a time when the Internet is the only way most young netizens can travel, learn, and develop social skills, streaming cultures like Speed’s tour provide a look into the intricacies of contemporary African life. Many of Speed’s followers outside the continent admitted to truly seeing just how developed Africa was for the first time. The problem, though, is that this limits from whose perspective we get to see the world or learn about unfamiliar cultures. The hope ultimately is that this tour might encourage people to be interested in African creators and get a context much deeper than what Speed could ever provide.