How Facebook took over the internet in Africa – and changed everything
Western users are logging off, but across the continent the social media company is indispensable for everything from running a business to sourcing vaccines. How did it become inescapable?
B adri Ibrahim is a Sudanese comic artist and the founder of the Abbas Comics empire. His strips are quirky and irreverent, poking fun at the Sudanese military and encouraging civic activism. One recurrent character is a hapless but wise cat called Ghadanfar, a sort of Garfield meets Snoopy protagonist, who finds himself on the wrong end of misunderstandings with neighbourhood felines and humans. It is all rendered in colloquial dialect and is dry, funny and often poignant. So popular has the comic become that Ibrahim is regularly commissioned to do private work, rendering Ghadanfar in different guises – as a bashful groom on a wedding invitation card, for example.
The majority of this work comes through Facebook, where his comics have about 19,000 followers. “I ran the page for about a year,” Ibrahim says. By then, it had become its own community, and now he does not need to spend much time maintaining it. During the launch period, Ibrahim spent a lot of time “posting regularly and engaging with comments” and also “sending the page to everyone I know”. Freelance work came through those comments. “People and businesses would send me a message through the page, looking for an artist. Sometimes they ask for one of my comic characters to use for a product.” He can’t imagine how he would have launched his artistic career without Facebook.
