Last year, South African travel blogger Popi Sibiya set off on a voyage through the canals of Gambier, a village built on stilts in the middle of a lake in Benin. As she sat in the back of a wooden canoe, she pulled out her smartphone and began broadcasting her experience to her 40,000 Instagram followers.
Sibiya is a former kindergarten teacher who has spent much of the past two years crisscrossing the continent by public transport. She is part of an emerging group of young African women travel bloggers who are using their social media platforms to redefine what adventure travel in Africa looks like and who can experience it. They resist the stereotype that travelling on the continent is only for khaki-clad Westerners on safari and encourage their mostly African readers to do the same.
Why I wrote this
The story is
With a few exceptions, African countries rarely feature on global “must visit” lists. Now, female travel bloggers from the continent are making themselves known on those lists.
“You don’t need to rely on traditional media. [anymore]”Instead, potential travelers can scroll through the feeds of influencers like Ebaide Joy (Instagram alias @go_ebaide), a Nigerian adventure traveler who is currently traveling by motorbike from Nigeria to Kenya.
This generation of influencers:[ing] Throw away ignorant stereotypes,[ing] “It has changed the image of Africa,” Cummings Yates says.
Last year, South African travel blogger Popi Sibiya set off on a voyage through the canals of Gambier, a village built on stilts in the middle of a lake in Benin. As she sat in the back of a wooden canoe, she pulled out her smartphone and began broadcasting her experience to her 40,000 Instagram followers.
“My boyfriend’s paddling towards me right now,” she joked, laughing as a man in a water taxi surged towards her.
Sibiya, a former kindergarten teacher who has spent the better part of the past two years crisscrossing the continent by public transport, now has a following of over 100,000. She is part of an emerging group of young African women travel bloggers who are using their social media platforms to redefine what adventure travel in Africa looks like and who can experience it. They resist the stereotype that travelling to the continent is only for khaki-clad Europeans on safari or tanned Americans sipping cocktails on the beaches of Zanzibar, and encourage their mostly African readers to do the same.
Why I wrote this
The story is
With a few exceptions, African countries rarely feature on global “must visit” lists. Now, female travel bloggers from the continent are making themselves known on those lists.
African travellers are “starting to prioritise fun and adventure on their own continent,” Sibiya said. Her followers are mostly affluent South Africans who are used to holidaying in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. “They’re realising we have beautiful beaches too – they don’t have to go to Thailand,” she said.
Documenting a Different Africa
African countries receive more than 80 million tourists each year, and the travel industry provides about 25 million jobs, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council, an industry advocacy group.
And yet African countries rarely appear on global “must visit” lists – at least outside of the usual international favourites like Morocco, Mauritius, South Africa and Egypt.
Regular travelers with large social media followings are filling that void, says Rosalind Cummings Yates, an American travel journalist who has traveled extensively in the region and often uses travel influencers to help plan trips.
“You don’t need to rely on traditional media. [anymore]Instead, would-be travelers can scroll through the feeds of influencers like Ebaide Joy, a Nigerian adventure traveler who motorbikes from Nigeria to Kenya under the Instagram alias @go_ebaide. Or Ess Opiyo (@ess_opiyo), a Kenyan travel guide with a passion for offbeat destinations. This generation of influencers is “[ing] Throw away ignorant stereotypes,[ing] “It has changed the image of Africa,” Cummings Yates says.
Margot Mendes has seen firsthand the power of social media transform the way people travel in the region. She lives in Seguenal, Dakar, and works in marketing. She uses the same skills on her Instagram account @thedakardream, where she shares her life and travels with her 33,000 followers.
Her grids feature scenes of bustling outdoor markets, peach-hued sunsets overlooking cerulean hotel pools, and local fare like baguette sandwiches and spicy rice dishes.
Mendes started the account five years ago when she returned to Dakar from Paris, where her Senegalese and Guinea-Bissau family lived, to which she had immigrated as a child. At first, the page was just a way to show concerned friends and family in Europe how much Dakar had changed in the decades since they had emigrated.
“I was just interested in my culture and traveled to different places to discover my culture,” she says.
But soon her page began to attract views beyond her own circle of friends, and she said her new followers, mostly Africans, were happy to see their continent being promoted as an attractive travel destination for the first time.
Complicating the story
Mendes’s account has the feel of a glossy travel magazine, but for many of the young African women documenting their journeys, it’s important not to shy away from the hardships of the continent, or the challenges that make it so difficult to make the journey there.
For example, Nigerian-British travel blogger Pelmi Nubi recently completed a 10-week road trip from London to Lagos in a purple, four-door Peugeot 107 that she named Oluwa Rumi, or Rumi for short, which means “God lights the way” in her native Yoruba language.
Nubi documented the journey for more than 250,000 people on her Instagram account, @pelumi.nubi, where her posts alternate between joys of the journey, like when her Peugeot Rumi set foot on African soil for the first time in Morocco, and sadness, like the video of Rumi’s bonnet crumpled after crashing into a parked car on a dark road in Côte d’Ivoire.
“There are people trying to paint a picture. [Africa] “Africa is perceived as a war-torn, dangerous place, while others try to sell it as a paradise,” says Sibiya. Her page cheerfully documents her journeys in a battered bus she calls a “hearse,” and she doesn’t shy away from her encounters with poverty, bad roads and unregulated border crossings. “I document Africa in a balanced way,” she says.
Sibiya says her viewers are mostly South African, many of whom are experiencing the continent’s beaches, safaris, luxury hotels and restaurants for the first time through her account. For many, part of the problem is cost. Counterintuitively, flights between African countries are often more expensive than flights from the continent to international travel hubs like Dubai in the United Arab Emirates or New York. And instead of high-speed rail or rental cars, people traveling overland often have to choose between using aging public transport or paying to hire a private car and driver.
Sibiya funds her travels through paid memberships to her Instagram account, which costs 140 rand (about $7) a month and gives access to more detailed and frequent travel posts than her public page. She currently has about 1,200 subscribers.
She believes that social media influencers like herself are trusted travel sources because of their commitment to showcasing the true side of Africa.
For her, authenticity is embodied in her recent experience in Zanzibar, when she got lost on the cobblestone streets of Stone Town. It was clear she knew nothing, but no one tried to fool her, she says. Instead, a group of children guided her to the central square and told her:Hakuna Matata” – Swahili for “don’t worry.”
“They really understand the beauty of community, the beauty of kindness,” she says.
