Streamer iShowSpeed’s Africa Tour of 20 countries in 28 days just wrapped, and it has captured the news headlines and social media, producing viral moment after moment. In the process, he garnered a lot of applause, particularly from African youth and media who felt that he engaged Africa and Africans in a respectful manner, atypical of how Westerners tend to approach travel on the continent. However, this conceptualization lacks a critical understanding of not only the content itself but what it means, what it produces, what it relies on, and what it ultimately does or doesn’t do.

But before there can be an analysis of the tour itself, it is important to unpack IShowSpeed, real name Darren Watkins Jr. His content can succinctly be described as digital minstrelsy. His exaggerated expressions, hyperactivity, and repeated use of animalistic sounds, including his trademark dog bark, distinguish him from other streamers and are part of the reason he has such a large audience. He blatantly leans into negative stereotypes of Black people, and this has been demonstrated by him repeatedly eating watermelon, bananas, and chicken in a caricatured manner. That’s not even including the time he picked cotton on stream. This is not an exhaustive list but a snapshot of the nature of his content.

In the process, he has cultivated an audience that not only picks up on the cues of anti-Blackness but then feels emboldened to express it. For example, the image of him replicating the jiggaboo lips has been used as a meme on TikTok to antagonize other Black content creators. During his European and Asian tours, his fans were more than comfortable yelling racist epithets at him, making dog barks and monkey sounds at him, or being physically aggressive towards him. And when he is the direct target of racism, he responds with a hostility that is not merely reactive but performative. These moments are not treated as violations but a chance to produce virality, where anti-Black violence functions as rage bait.

Yet, despite all of this, he is not considered a pariah and can still grace the red carpet of the Ballon d’Or awards. This is because people and corporate brands are unaware, or don’t care, or are too busy salivating at his numbers. But regardless, what is important to understand is that his content plan is playing up tropes. And Africa is the perfect domain to do so.  This logic has precedent. Kony 2012 transformed Uganda into a viral morality play, drawing hundreds of millions of views and donations while mobilizing a white-savior fantasy that produced real political and economic harm on the ground.

In his book, The Racial Contract, Charles W. Mills makes the connection between how space is racialized and how this spatial framing then produces the racialization of the people associated with it. He writes, “The norming of space is partially done in terms of the racing of space, the depiction of space as dominated by individuals ( whether persons or subpersons ) of a certain race. At the same time, the norming of the individual is partially achieved by spacing it, that is, representing it as imprinted with the characteristics of a certain kind of space. So this is a mutually supporting characterization that, for subpersons, becomes a circular indictment:  ‘You are what you are in part because you originate from a certain kind of space, and that space has those properties in part because it is inhabited by creatures like yourself.’”

This is why terms like “wild,” “savage,” and  “barbaric” can be used interchangeably to describe the land and the people occupying it.  The constant repetition of stereotypes feeds an existing and insatiable appetite. It is also functional; it works to manage the anxiety produced by the fallacy of racial hierarchies, which would not require such relentless reinforcement if they were stable in the first place.

Fast-forward to today, and there are many torchbearers of the Kony 2012 model. Mr. Beast’s Africa content is rebranding exploitation as philanthropy and it is unsurprising considering his history of racist and homophobic comments. Then there’s also the likes of More Best Ever Food Review Show, Indigo Traveller, Bald and Bankrupt, and Itchy Boots shamelessly peddling a stereotypical image of Africa for millions of viewers. There is even an entire industry of Chinese content creators who exploit African children in the name of creating demeaning content.

On the surface, it seems that IShowSpeed’s Africa tour does not deserve to be placed in this category. As he travels, he is inquisitive and amicable, moving through a variety of spaces and encounters. The presentation is plural, and Africa is not reduced to a single, homogenous entity, nor is it just safaris and suffering. However, this does not negate that the content operates within the tradition of organizing Africa in a recognizable representational regime.

Binyavanga Wainaina’s famous essay “How to Write About Africa” offers a satirical take on the many clichés used to support a colonialist imagination of the continent. In the essay, he writes: “So keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular. Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat.”And furthermore, he says, “And mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this.”

IShowSpeed follows this script faithfully. At various points, he makes references to how he feels welcomed, at home, and how the people have been warm and friendly. By comparison, his reception in parts of North Africa and during his European and Asian tours was different, and it was so palpable that various content creators had conversations about the racism in these places on his behalf. But it’s important to note that he is not participating in the discourse, because he knows where his bread is buttered.

Throughout the tour, he teases his audience that he will be doing a DNA test to further validate the connection he feels to the continent. One moment he’ll say that he is part Angolan, the next moment he is Ghanaian, and at the end, emphatically claims that he is “100 percent African.” This is not the only time he has made reference to such in his content.  In a past conversation with NBA Champion Giannis Antetokounmpo, he lays out his “bloodline,” claiming he is a mixture of Portuguese, Angolan, and Finnish heritage.

Two major things worth flagging here. First, there’s a romanticization of Africans as perpetually jubilant, sociable, and ingenuous. To quote Wainaina again, “African characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life—but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause.” The representation oscillates between casting Black African people as subhuman and superhuman, and strips them of the capacity to be understood as multidimensional individuals.

Secondly, the DNA talk ventures into the territory of race science. Ancestral DNA testing is one big scam that flattens complex histories of migration and takes socially constructed identities and then maps them onto biology. It’s as if red blood cells are encoded with GPS coordinates. By presenting identity this way, the content inadvertently legitimizes racial categories as well as the social and political implications they carry.

Another problem with IShowSpeed’s tour and the reactions it elicited is the framing of his content as showing the “real Africa.” It puts into question the idea of authenticity itself and what expressions are deemed valid, what is not and the tropes that exist in between. A common feature of the tour is his visits to villages and participation in various cultural traditions. In the context of tourism, these activities would be labeled “cultural tours,” which package and sell local practices as consumable experiences. In this logic, culture becomes a spectacle where songs, dances, and other traditions are taken out their original context and are reupholstered as a performance for IShowSpeed and his audience. Typically, during his introductions, there are people in the background, already positioned, waiting and ready for instruction. This cannot be a representation of a lived reality if it is being staged.

It is a very difficult undertaking to present African traditions without reproducing familiar racist schemas. The attempt to separate the two requires nuance and sophistication, but that is not IShowSpeed’s mandate. Now, some of it is not entirely his fault. He cannot control for a viewership coming to the content with a lifetime’s worth of anti-Blackness installed. But to reflect an image back that aligns with a preexisting framework, unmediated, inevitably reinforces those stereotypes.

And there is a tacit acknowledgement from IShowSpeed of the landmine he is stepping on. During his visit to the Himba Tribe in Namibia, he disabled the live chat comments on the YouTube stream, anticipating the types of responses that would appear. Yet this precaution did not alter the overall approach of his content. On Twitch and in the comments, viewers still interpreted Himba life as simplistic—one chat member called them “cannibals,” while a large subset focused on the women’s exposed breasts. These reactions highlight the problem with the content as it falls into the trap of reducing culture and also sexualizing Black women’s bodies.

To be clear, not all women in IShowSpeed’s content are depicted in sexualized or servile ways, but there are instances where this is undeniable. For example, he is hand fed by women in Ethiopia, he participates in a fake lobola exchange for a girl barely out of her teens in eSwatini, he approaches a South African girl who is visibly uncomfortable during the interaction, and finally Ghana offers a double whammy: first a woman being presented as a prize after a race and the viral image of women massaging him to open and close the stream. In these specific cases, the women are positioned primarily as objects for his attention. These stand in stark contrast to his interactions with European and Asian women.

Even when visiting Bangkok’s Red Light District, a space that is packaged with sexual connotations, he does not exploit the opportunity. The scantily dressed women are largely ignored, and the camera does not linger on them. When he does receive a massage in Thailand during the day, it is with older women, and there is minimal skin exposure. This removes the potential for sexualization typically associated with Thai massages. The paradox is clear, the tropes are right there and fully available in Thailand, and yet he reserves the most sexually charged depiction for Ghana.

These disparities are not trivial. The consequences for Black women carry historical and social weight. Depicting them in this manner invokes stereotypes of them as hypersexual, “bestial” or “jezebels”, which is a maneuver that has been used to justify their sexual exploitation, mutilation, and violation.

Throughout the tour and in its aftermath, commentators celebrated IShowSpeed for rehabilitating the image of Africa. The irony here is comedic. Africans, who have spent decades critiquing outsiders claiming authority over their stories, are effectively giving a Westerner the baton of representing their continent. And what does IShowSpeed actually do? He skims the surface, lightly touches on the impact of colonization, and has some curated interactions, while his African audience fills in the gaps for him and does the interpretive heavy lifting.

Recruiting someone whose career is built on being a conduit for anti-Blackness, with the monumental job of changing perceptions shaped by centuries of colonialism and slavery is laughably absurd. The idea that this is even remotely plausible borders on satire; the joke writes itself.

More importantly, the argument is a fundamental misdiagnosis of the situation. It believes that Africa suffers from bad PR, and that can be rectified. This assumes the symptom is the problem while completely ignoring the violent structural cause.

To echo Frank B. Wilderson III, “Black people are the center of the world and not in a good way.” The world is dependent on the humiliation, degradation, and destruction of Africa and its people. Not just from an economic standpoint, but socially, environmentally, sexually, politically, physically, and metaphysically. There is no rehab for that. Therefore, it becomes ridiculous to believe that a singular content creator could undo more than a millennium-old structural addiction.

To truly change the negative image and stereotypes of Africa would mean that the world would forgo its reliance on anti-Blackness. And that would require a complete collapse of modern civil society as we know it. And that revolution won’t be streamed on YouTube.