
Photo illustration by Ezinne Osueke / THE REPUBLIC.
THE MINISTRY OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS
It Is Time to Let the ‘African Mother’ Jokes Go

Photo illustration by Ezinne Osueke / THE REPUBLIC.
THE MINISTRY OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS
It Is Time to Let the ‘African Mother’ Jokes Go
In 2023, I became troubled by the persistence of short-form videos online rooted in the performance of some purported African parent foolishness for consumption by both Africans and non-Africans. One of the first videos I noticed was on Instagram by content creator Manacious Powers. The video was titled, ‘pov: you go to dinner dressed as African moms with your friends.’ The video followed Powers and her friends as they entered a restaurant. While the fashion choices were gorgeous, I was disappointed by the exaggerated tropes used to portray African mothers. The ‘mothers’ could not open a glass door, struggled over food and spilled food all over the table. But most shockingly, they stole plates, spoons, and glassware. I was taken aback. My mother and the mothers of my friends had never behaved in this way. But I told myself: ‘Chukwuka, stop assuming your life must be everyone’s life.’ So, I moved on.
However, I would soon come across another short form video. This time, in the vein of ‘what you say’ vs. ‘what African parents hear’. Before I tapped on the video, I asked myself whether African parents had a special characteristic that led them to hear spoken words differently. To the best of my knowledge, there is no such characteristic. When I watched the video, my eyebrows furrowed. Created by PatZMB, its premise seemed simple: parents may react strongly when you share a personal life decision with them. But the execution seemed to support tropes of African backwardness. In the video, he said, ‘Mom, I just got my ears pierced,’ and, according to him, what his African mother heard was ‘I’m gay’. And when he said he was going out with his friend, what his African mother heard was ‘I’m going out to sell drugs.’ I was aghast. Why was the African mother figure portrayed as a one-dimensional caricature who was prone to misunderstanding?
THE CARICATURES OF AFRICAN PARENTS ON SOCIAL MEDIA
On the surface, these videos may seem mild, even funny; part of comedy is in making fun of our everyday life. But a problem arises when those comedic strategies rely on tropes: the trope of the crass African, in the first, and the trope of the conservative, backward African, in the second. Making a comedic TikTok or Instagram reel of our people can be funny when such videos do not rely on racist and colonial representations of Africans. What such videos do is that they make the sole basis of comedy be ‘the backward African’. In doing so, they strip nuance from our experiences in a way that gestures towards a flatness of Africans, especially as performed for an external viewer. This flatness stands in opposition to the texture of African parent-child relationships that do not mimic these comedic tropes.
When I made a brief, curious decision to get irun didi, I phoned my mother. To put into perspective, my Nigerian mother—to use the oft-abused lingo—was against me getting irun didi. She did not react in the violent, rash manner often portrayed in the videos. She disagreed with me, but she asked me why I wanted to get it. I explained the historical significance of hair and reminded her that the first thing colonial captors did in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was to shave the heads of their Igbo prisoners. She shared that, while I was correct, in the present day, it was a hairstyle worn mostly by women, and she was worried that I was getting it not because I ordinarily wanted to, but to prove a point. She did not arrive at any conclusion that irun didi meant failure and backwardness. She did not assume I had joined a gang or was going to sell drugs. Her reaction was measured, complex and thoughtful, as have been the reactions of every other African person I told I was getting the hairstyle. But watching these caricatures of African parents on social media would have you believe that a measured response is impossible. Thus, we arrive at the problem with these depictions: they ignore nuance. Worse, the nuances are ignored in service of colonial tropes.
In her book Postcolonial Hauntologies: African Women’s Discourses of the Female Body, Ayo Coly, a professor of Comparative Literature and African Studies at Dartmouth College, identifies how modes of thinking about and depicting the Black female body during colonial times have endured into the postcolonial present. I interpret this enduring legacy in three ways: one, a difficulty in engaging with the sexual agency of the Black female body, even by feminist writers; two, a tendency for postcolonial realities to attempt to ‘cover up’ or redignify the Black female body, as seen in anti-nakedness laws in African nation states; and three, the use of the Black female body as object and punchline, not as subject. This third interpretation is most crucial given that the skits I am critiquing rely on tropes of African parents in order to be found funny. Coly’s analysis works hand in hand with another scholar, Kimberly Juanita Brown, a professor of English and Creative Writing. Brown’s term, ‘mortevivum’, explains how Black life is represented in photography. She notes: ‘Mortevivum is a term I have come up with to understand a particular photographic phenomenon: the hyperavailability of images in the media that traffic in tropes of impending black death.’ I would extend ‘death’ to encompass all the ways Black life is depicted negatively in photography: despair, backwardness, flatness, suffering. Brown continues: ‘These tropes…make any tragedy, any crisis, an opportunity for viewers to find pleasure in Black people’s pain.’
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A HISTORY OF OBJECTIFICATION
What do these lines of thought have to offer us when we think about representations of Black African women in our influencer- and skit- produced media? Historically, white and other non-Black photographers and videographers have represented Africans and Black people in ways that portray us as backwards, fragmented and barbaric. Such portrayals speak to histories of objectification and racial voyeurism that continue to haunt us. Perhaps one of the most famous examples is the case of Sarah Baartman. In the early 19th century, Baartman, a Black South African woman, experienced sexual trafficking in Europe at the hands of English colonial captors. Subsequently, there has been a long and deep legion of scholarship connecting the imagery and ‘thingification’ of Baartman to present-day depictions of Black women. While Baartman was exhibited based on her sexualized body, I find that the underlying factor—a reading of primitive difference into Black African women’s bodies—applies to contemporary engagements with Black women. Given the historical evidence of Black bodily objectification, I do not expect the global Black community to portray ourselves in tropes of backwardness or non-complexity. More importantly, I do not expect us to take joy in such portrayals.
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AGAINST THESE TROUBLING TROPES
I have watched, with increasing dismay, the proliferation of numerous videos in the genre of making fun of your African parents, especially African mothers. One video features a father responding in an over-the-top, caricatured manner when his son sends him money. A second video features an African aunty wearing garish makeup. Multiple videos contrast the ‘African mother’ with an ‘American mother’. In all of these, the African mother is a rage machine while the American mother is thoughtful and understanding. All of these portrayals of the African mother—as vacuous, as out of touch with modern reality—offer viewers an opportunity to take pleasure in African women’s humiliation and purported barbarism. The videos are meant to be funny solely because they rely on the recurring image of the backward African mother. To borrow a phrase from Juanita Brown, ‘these tropes cohere around an ocular logic,’ rooted in finding humour, pleasure, and comic relief in African women’s degradation and pain. More insidiously, these tropes reinscribe these characteristics as intrinsic to African mothers—African mothers are, by definition, non-complex running gags in a marketplace of skits, and nothing more.
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Given the long history of how Africans have been represented via colonial media, I am dismayed that some African artists and creators seem to be leaning into the visual tropes with which colonial masters justified colonialism. To bring back the figure of Baartman, whose dismembered body was repatriated to South Africa after years of display in Europe: can Baartman, a Black African woman, find peace (from mockery, from display, from being a visual comedic object) at home? What is the difference between British anthropologists saying that African women were primitive and today’s content creators making videos saying that African women are primitive? These videos are consumed by Africans in Africa, who chuckle but come away feeling a hidden sense of confusion; by Africans in diaspora, who laugh while knowing that this is not how their African parents behave; and by non-Africans, who absorb the content, cackle at the simple mindedness of Africans, and go about their day. When such videos keep repeating themselves (just look up ‘African mother’ on Instagram for a slew of these!), they engender a situation where the running gag is a backward African parent. The question begs asking: can our portrayals of African mothers be done with some complexity?
I am not against a nuanced and thoughtful portrayal of African parents, both the good and the bad. As a matter of fact, I do not think African parents are perfect and beyond reproach. That would be an overly simplistic reading of the tensions of family kinship. Rather, I am against a sweeping generalization where every video I see is mocking the dull-witted African mother. The jokes have lost their lustre. I am tired of these videos. Let’s call it a day⎈
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