Virtualising Africa’s Arts, Securing the Future <i>Engendering Africa’s Popular Songs on TikTok’s Enchanted Space</i>

Abstract

This paper, locating itself within the locus of Southern Perspectives, examines how TikTok, rehabilitating the local memories imbued in the African  popular song genre, re-situates African popular knowledge at the centre of dialogues around the human question. The paper used a lit-crit methodology  to show how African female content creators, by creatively archiving and curating Black voices into what was the realm of Northern thought, have used  TikTok’s space to dissolve epistemological and ontological boundaries. This paper posits that TikTok is the new canvas for espousing indigenous  knowledge within popular literary meditations in Africa and provides a veritable space that has placed contemporary African art forms at the centre of  transformative possibilities. The paper concludes that African music on TikTok is an epistemological tool that communicates context and community- specific knowledges.