Social Media in Africa

"Someone who truly loves you sees what a mess you can be, how moody you can get and how hard you are to handle at times, but still wants you."

I read this quote from #Twitter last night and it spoke to me. This quote and another one previously posted on Facebook (taken from #Tumblr), about not having a handle on your life's track, were taken from other social media sites where I've found people can be open, raw, ditzy, and vulnerable and instead of judgment, they get retweets or likes and comments. Their posts posit off-color remarks, happenstances, not straight lines coloring but coloring outside the lines into a Jackson Pollock masterpiece. That's what I loved about social media (before FB), the more vulnerable you are to your readers, the more they can relate to you, come back to your words.

Not sure if this is the African way of doing social media but it's the social media that I know and love. And it's not politics every day or salacious gossip about what this celeb is doing to whom, or man/woman relationship sensationalism - it's everyday people living everyday lives finding a way to get by and dealing with its struggles and their shortcomings.

I'm going to try to get back to that and shun all the noise to edit my content or to make it conform to my current society (Nigeria) and their ubiquitous moral platitudes that are restrictive and strangely only applicable to women. And the women in their adaptation of the moral framework learn to ostracise anyone who doesn't live their life by the rules - color inside the lines. In the end this infestation of the liberal mindset leaves you without words that can be not misinterpreted  or misconstrued by your immediate environment. In other words, indirect censorship. This is Africa, and I am indeed sad, this is now my creative space. 

Why don't we, instead of just judging, sit back to enjoy the words, and allow them to move us. We might learn a thing or two about ourselves. 

 --#AnitaWrites