Playing with Difference: Oyibo Lip-Sync Performances of Nigerian Popular Culture on TikTok

Following the surge in global consumption of Nigerian music and film, non-African content creators are now part of the emerging group of people participating in the production and circulation of African, specifically Nigerian, popular culture on social media. This article provides a scholarly interrogation of these emerging “transracial” online enactments, with a particular focus on these performers’ use of lip-syncing to audio texts originally created by Nigerian artists.

We examine the performances of three Oyibos (light-skinned foreigners) who create short videos on TikTok, arguing that through lip-syncing, each of them becomes part of networked publics built around Nigerian content and facilitated by the social media application TikTok. The article takes an audience-centred approach. Through focus group interviews with potential audiences in Nigeria, we seek to understand the meanings that Nigerian viewers (and potential members of these networked publics) derive from such clips and the transgressive play with difference that they entail.

Krings, M., & Nwankwọ, I. (2024). Playing with Difference: Oyibo Lip-Sync Performances of Nigerian Popular Culture on TikTok. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 1–18.