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If you’re African and online, chances are your first taste of politics came not from a news broadcast, but from a meme.
A screenshot. A freeze-frame. A line of text in Impact font. Maybe it made you laugh, then made you think. Maybe it made you mad enough to post, to protest, to speak. Across the continent, memes have emerged as one of Gen Z’s sharpest weapons against injustice, a digital dialect of rebellion where punchlines deliver punches to power.
Say goodbye to long speeches and manifestoes. Welcome to Africa’s meme wars, where humor is resistance, virality is visibility, and Gen Z doesn’t just witness history, they remix it. Memes, once considered funny internet detritus, have become tools of socio-political commentary in African digital life.
During the 2020 Nigeria #EndSARS protests against police brutality, memes took the place of protest banners. Stringing together viral images of a cartoon SpongeBob designed as a Nigerian protester, phrases like ‘Soro Soke’ (‘speak up’ in Yoruba) became a meme, a slogan, but overall a movement. The digital rebellion moved into the streets and, in time, government crosshairs.
In Sudan, as young people protested the military’s grip on power, memes comparing the generals to outdated phone apps or expired milk flooded WhatsApp groups. The goal? To ridicule the regime and rally the masses without triggering heavy-handed crackdowns.
In Kenya, Gen Z memes recently took on a historic role during the 2024 Finance Bill protests. A widely shared meme showed a stock photo of a lion captioned: ‘When the government realizes Gen Zs read more PDFs than they thought.’ Another showed a politician trying to ‘block’ a protester, only to be digitally photoshopped out by a cartoon eraser.
Meme Activism across the continent
Let’s take a minute to take stock of just how Gen Z is mobilizing for justice through memes. When it came to the 2021 elections, social media was flooded with memes satirizing President Yoweri Museveni’s long rule. One viral image showed Museveni as the ‘admin’ of an old, dusty WhatsApp group titled ‘Presidents Since 1986.’
