Nigeria’s Instapoetry: Cultivating Inward, Ideological Activism, Revitalizing African Orality and Re-defining the Art of Poetry

The generative practice of literary activism within the realm of digitized poetry challenges the hastily generalized argument that literary activism in Nigerian literature is losing steam or becoming dysfunctional (Nomu). Given that Nigeria’s literary landscape burst out of a wave of political activism fuelled by anticolonial sentiments and demands for independence, its literary scene is often considered to be an anger cauldron spilling over to generate sublime yet salacious aesthetics. The politically enthused literary activism that started with the independence fighters intensified post-1960 due to the nation’s postcolonial struggles and the socio-political frustrations of citizens (Nwagbara; Williams). It is believed that, since the 2010s, the political disillusionment of Nigerian writers and their enthusiastic immigration to the Global North has calcified into apathy, thus stifling the voice of activism in the nation’s literature (Feldner). However, as works of digital poetry will reveal, literary activism in Nigeria is still going strong; it has only taken on new shapes that reflect the multilayered, ever-dynamic oppression that people in Nigeria and of Nigeria now face. In advocating for matters related to national, international, racial, and gender politics, Nigerians are diversifying storytelling traditions and rendering social media and the internet into literary platforms. This has ignited a trend of digital storytelling in Nigeria’s literary space.

A fruitful exercise in digital storytelling and online poetic aesthetics has been Instapoetry, a generic practice that mainly deals with rendering poetry using Instagram as a medium. The rest of the chapter will focus on conceptualizing the fast-rising embrace of Instapoetry by Nigerian storytellers as well as dissecting the manifestations, commercial dimensions, and global significance of this phenomenon. In addition, points will be made about how Instapoetry is shaping up to be a formidable player in the tenuous occupation of defending rights, seeking social justice, and channelling inward activism to ensure empowerment against oppressive ideologies and systems in rather inventive ways. The primary case studies for this chapter are Hafsat Abdullahi (@_havfy), with the viral ‘To the English Girl in Class’ poem, and Wayne Samuel (@waynesamuelle), who mixes spoken poetry and AI-generated motion pictures to create a surreal voice of advocacy.

Instapoetry owes its emergence and widespread manifestations to the globally connective operations of social media. The complete dependence of this brand of poetry on nodes of online platforms, whose multimodal affordances allow for a host of services that extend beyond the literary, has caused the significance of Instapoetry to be muddied up and undermined within the context of global literary appreciation. For one, there is an overarching narrative of youthful exuberance associated with social media, and this has spilled over into the scholarly considerations accorded to literatures situated within social media. For this reason, Instapoetry has mostly been studied within the realm of technological and pedagogical innovations. Kate Kovalik and Jen Curwood, for instance, positioned Instagram poetry within a transliteracies framework, underlining how students across the globe are gaining an appreciation for poetry by channelling their creativity into social media artistic productions.

While the discussion of Instapoetry from a transliteracies viewpoint is necessary and productive for creating new models for English composition curricula, it does little to establish the quintessentiality of Instapoetry and acknowledge the dynamic poetic heritage that started taking shape at the turn of the century. The literary valence of Instapoetry needs to be undeniably established and set in stone by academic scholarship. A remarkable effort on Curwood and Kovalik’s part is using their exegetic discourse of Instapoetry as an affirmative testament to the once-up-for-debate dictum that #poetryisnotdead (185). Through their work, they not only pointed attention to the proliferation of poetic works on social media but also foregrounded the ability of these works to truly engender activism.

Apart from the conceptual limitations that have affected the definition of Instapoetry, there is also a restrictiveness in what qualifies as Instapoetry. Often, scholars tag Instapoetry as poetry written to be posted on Instagram. As Kathi Inman Berens puts it, ‘Instapoetry is simplistic, little more taxing than reading a meme. It is almost always inspirational or emotional’ (1). However, I would like to claim that Instapoetry is a metonymic shorthand for describing any kind of poetic activity that takes place on social media in general. This is mostly because of the fluidity that comes with sharing works on social media; a similar work of art that goes on Instagram can be simultaneously uploaded to TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. However, Instapoetry has established itself as the hermeneutic concept upon which to build all other discussions of social media poetry, hence its viability as a signatory shorthand.

Furthermore, Berens approaches the discussion of Instapoetry through a techno-economic lens, discussing how the huge commercial sales of the printed version of poems already uploaded on Instagram fit into the metrics of third-generation electronic literature and offsets a new understanding of the relationship between literature and physical, playable, interactive, manipulable spaces. It is within the context of her argument that she mentions Lang Leav, Atticus, Nikita Gill, and Rupi Kaur as thriving superstars of Instapoetry and third-generation electronic literature. She regards Kaur’s work as possessing a ludo-semiotic essence that underscores the playfulness of works produced in ‘dynamic event spaces like Instagram’ yet fraught with the affliction of ‘tactical media and surveillance capitalism’ (11).

The presentation of Kaur’s work as a shining example of Instapoetry is seconded by other scholars like Lili Paquet, JuEunhae Knox, and Alyson Miller. The latter presents Kaur’s work as an example of emotional ekphrastic poetry that has transmediatic affinity with all forms of visual art, including photography and tattoo art (Paquet: 296). Paquet goes on to laud Rupi Kaur as the pioneer of Instapoetry whose ‘footsteps are being followed’ (311)! It is appreciable that these scholars recognize Kaur and others as true literary poets whose ‘curating of an online human brand has allowed them to gain the momentum to bypass the traditional publishing industry and communicate directly to their readers’ (311). However, besides claims of plagiarism levied against Kaur, the fact that she and other predecessors like Lang Leav are regarded as the epitome, the zenith of Instapoetry stems from the prioritization of Western ontology in all categories of existence and the failure of scholars to radicalize their examples through decolonial approaches (Belcher). Since its inception in 2010, Instagram has always been populated with works that echo the simplistic, digestible, emotional caption-like feeling of Kaur’s works. From anonymous accounts that present emotive words on post-it notes to sentimental advice about relationships and romance doled out in the form of soft-core poetry, Instapoetry preceded Leav, Kaur, and all others who have now become famous for it.

From a geopolitical standpoint, Instapoetry’s politics of reception are as influenced by pseudo-globalization as it is by algorithmic bias (Akinpelu). From the Nigerian side of things, Tolu Akinyemi (@poetolu) is an example of a Nigerian Instapoet whose poetry is stylistically and thematically shaped the same way as Kaur’s poetry. Just as Kaur accompanies her short poems with visual sketches, he also includes sketchy digital illustrations and AI-generated photos in his Instapoems. He has also published three book collections – his latest being ‘Her Head Was a Spider’s Nest’ – which are very much appreciated and patronized by his fans and followers (‘Tolu Akinyemi’). Thus, the ontological prominence accorded to the likes of Leav and Kaur is misplaced and calls for a re-evaluation of the historiography of Insta poetry.

Although I consider Instapoetry to just be a nominal signature for social media poetry in general, the transmediatic extension of digitized Instapoetry to the realm of printing and materiality calls for a dialectic discourse. Commonsensically, it is a misnomer to call printed book collections Instapoetry once they have left the playable, dynamic space of Instagram. Even Berens admits this when she says, ‘Stripped of liveness, printed Instapoetry ends up looking banal. Its treacly insights, absent the warm glow emanating from fans inside the app, hardens into branding’ (9). To define Instapoetry as written poems simply uploaded to Instagram, poems that can be directly lifted from the digital and transposed onto a book without the need for any form of remixing and repurposing whatsoever is very limiting and misleading at the same time. On this note, as much as the quality of textuality is associated with Instapoetry, there needs to be other transcending qualities that distinguish a work of art as generically belonging to Instapoetry. Digitality and orality are key constituents that I conceive of as distinctive markers of Instapoetry. Digitality in this context can range from textuality and visuality to any other semiotic features that the techno-literate space of social media allows for. Orality, which denotes any form of self-constitutive aural ‘language combined with the performativity of the body’, is, of course, not exclusive to Instapoetry (Gunner). And yes, Instapoetry need not be oral but the quality of orality in an Instapoem foregrounds its inalterability as Instapoetry.

It is in light of my distinct inclination about the meaning of Insta­poetry that I present @_havfy and @waynesamuelle as case studies in this paper. @_havfy is the Instagram name of Hafsat Abdullahi, a well-acclaimed spoken word artist who has won awards for her performances in different poetry festivals and came into the limelight when the video ‘To the Girl in English Class’, in which she performed a poem of hers, went viral. The video’s virality has caused her poetic brand to be well sought after and has established her voice as a symbol of resilient Nigerian identity in diplomatic, educational, and corporate spaces. Before the exposure that came with ‘To the Girl in English Class’, Abdullahi’s artistry had consistently connected the divide between orality and digitality. She is known for primarily performing live to an audience interested in the rhythmical flow of her words and the powerful lyricism they bear.

When reciting her poetry live, she performs with the same cadence that spoken poets are often known for. She enters each line with force, the last words of each rhyming line are often dragged, and dramatic pauses are inserted after lines she is most confident will catch people’s attention. She moves between whispers and screams, silences meant to be heard and amplified sounds that are supposed to be unheard. Her guttural sounds are often spoken with a throaty gut and her fricatives filter forcefully from her lips. She hisses her s’s and hammers down on her h’s. With her powerful voice and confident gait coupled with the stylish attires in which she presents and performs, she is the quintessential Nigerian spoken poet.

Her performance at the first round of the LIPFEST22 Poetry Slam is a testament to this fact. She came in forcefully with simple yet resonant punchlines: ‘I grew up on these streets/And here on these streets, education is key/But what good a key when there are no doors for the poor’ (Orange Poetry). These lines stir a spirit of resonance in listeners; by identifying as part of the population she is talking about, she is able to appeal to the imaginations of her listeners such that by the time she starts heaping rhymes and pentameters onto these uncomplicated lines, she does not lose their attention. More so, Abdullahi engages in transmedia art. Not only does she perform on the stage of large corporate events, but her poems are also on Spotify and other streaming platforms. She also performs at events organized by and flooded with popular Nigerian celebrities.

Besides her live performances, Abdullahi is very intentional about digitizing her poems, and the intentionality behind her digital output earmarks her art as Instapoetry. For instance, the same poem she rendered at LIPFEST22 was her entry for the World Bank’s #YouthActOnEDU spoken word competition for which she won first place (‘World Bank’). It is impossible not to notice the changes Abdullahi makes to the reading of the poem in its digital format.

Knowing that she is facing a virtual congregation whose attention span and tangible participation she cannot gauge or count on, Abdullahi becomes more assertive in her body language. She gesticulates with her hands and raises her eyebrow in a way that suggests that her remarks are aimed at interrogating and castigating the educational system and stakeholders in Nigeria. Also, she does not accentuate her words or so much as engage in the rise-and-fall cadence that comes with reading on a live stage. Her tone is near-even, and her words are spoken fast. She knows to rely on the element of textuality that digital videos afford. The captioning of her words on the screen of the video works to augment the punctuational mishaps that come with reciting the poem at high speed.

Rather than focus on wording her statements in such specific ways, what becomes the high point of focus is the visuals. In addition to her assertive facial expression, Abdullahi presents herself as a model Nigerian youth through her look; her bright yellow Ankara blouse is styled with blue jeans and the scarf wrapped around her head is tied in a way that screams Gen-Z aesthetics. What’s more, in the video, transitions are made from her image to frames of her writing on a notebook. The transition between her self-fashioning as the modern educated Nigerian woman to the introspective writer who is contemplatively presenting words on a page is fitting for the educational theme of the poem. It also gives off an aura of intellectualism thus commanding attention to herself and her words.

The influence of digitality on her oral persona is remarkably evident in her viral video ‘To the Girl in English Class’ (@_havfy). Despite being on different platforms from Twitter to Tik-Tok to YouTube, ‘To the Girl’ can rightly be called an Instapoem because it took flight mostly on Instagram and has garnered a huge level of engagement on this platform. In this poem, she uses the figurative device of apostrophe to address a cross-section of the Western population that gets a kick out of accent shaming and linguistic racism while at the same time schooling Africans who are neck-deep in internalized racism against themselves and people around them. The fact that she chooses to use the figurative device of apostrophe, which invokes the presence of a second pronoun ‘you’, strips them of anonymity, and holds them accountable for actions that are individually or collectively perpetuated, is very intentional. It models the method of conversationality imbued in some poetic forms of the Yoruboid dialect (Nnodim).

Furthermore, given that this poem also focuses on demystifying a stereotypical orientation about education, Abdullahi goes for an aesthetical setting that shows the influence of the West on the ideals of education promoted in Nigeria. In the background of the video, there is a vintage television model and a vase with a plant in it that gives off an autumn vibe. She wears a brown Ankara blouse that fits the background and adorns her hair and jeans, thus reflecting the Nigerian Gen-Z outlook again. The vintage TV speaks to Nigeria’s colonial past, in which people strived to get a British education, speak in a British accent, and deck their homes with interior decorations that reflected the climate of the colonial masters. To be educated at the time (and even now) was to have a TV like that in the sitting room and mementos that represented the weather-y state of existence present in European spaces. The aspiration to be Western in linguistic posturing as well as the doctrine of accentual assimilation normalized in the current day are what Abdullahi goes on to attack in her words.

Having semiotically established her line of criticism about the apostrophic ‘girl’ and her Nigerian audience using visual inferences, Abdullahi draws semantically from African orality to evoke sentiments against neo-colonial assaults against the African identity. The use of rhetorical questions all through the poem, right from the first two lines, is where she begins to expend an arsenal of oral contrivances. ‘To the girl in English class’, she says, ‘What is funny?/What is hilarious about my painful attempt to communicate in a language that is not even my own?’ (@_havfy). Rhetorical questions take on more meaningful connotations in oral circumstances, and they are deeply embedded in the constitution of the orality of Nigerian ethnic groups. As if answering her questions, Abdullahi goes on to call attention to the underlying history behind her accent and the poetic heritage it upholds. She says: ‘See, this accent/Tells a story of survival/Tells how my mother tongue endures to this day/So I expect/You treat my mother tongue with some respect’ (@_havfy).

The attempt to create a rhyming sequence with her words is obvious enough, but it is not consistent; it is not forceful. While ‘accent’, ‘expect’, and ‘respect’ rhyme, when put into the larger context of the poem, they do not exactly break the mould of the free-versed nature of the poem. This tinkering with rhyme, the almost-iambic-pentameters, and alternate rhymes reveals Abdullahi’s prioritization of the oral quality of rhythm over the written quality of rhyme. The alternation of words that end with the same consonants with words that are far-flung on different ends of the phonological spectrum makes for the rhythmical performativity that one would find being used by oral poets of Yoruboid languages like Igala.

The flaunting of her grounded feel for the oral skills of her ethnic heritage goes on with her enjambment of single words. She runs on these words which might make no sense in textual context but somehow possess extraordinary bravado when enjambed into a sentence: ‘My mouth is a babel between/Subconscious/Tongue/ Teeth’s/And vocal chords’ (@_havfy). In terms of syntactical arrangement, it is awkward to have subconscious-tongue-teeth’s-vocal-chords in a single sentence, but the oral flair with which she reads it takes away from the awkwardness and clearly conveys the arduous process that a non-native speaker goes through to utter words that somehow catch between their minds and their mouths. By also enjambing incohesive words with oral braggadocio, Abdullahi is detailing a personal struggle with the English language; she is not communicating a struggle that she does not share. The struggle to reclaim her mother tongue is as real for her as it is for many other Nigerians.

It is quite telling that in the textual captions plastered onto the video, there are notable grammatical errors made, and despite the widespread popularity of the video, there has been no attempt to rectify it. This might be due to different reasons, but what is noteworthy is that the interplay between textuality and orality aided by the digital nature of the poem has yielded a new layer of significance to the poem. By having grammatical mistakes recorded textually, it is possible to infer that a thematic emphasis is being made in the process. For instance, consider this error: ‘so escuse you, if my speach does not soothe you’ [sic]. The presentation of ‘escuse’ instead of ‘excuse’ might be in line with the tendency of Nigerians to render x’s as sibilants. And ‘soothe’ as presented here should have probably been ‘suit’. Another instance is this: ‘a clash of unyeilding cultures waring for dominance’ [sic]. In purely written form, the mistaken use of ‘unyeilding’ instead of ‘unyielding’ and the spelling of ‘warring’ as ‘waring’ might have raised more than a few eyebrows. But presented in this digital format where the Yoruboidized-oral has more dominance than the Westernized-textual, it becomes logical to read it as a subtext, a semiotic signifier of the clash between two warring linguistic heritages.

In line with the use of ludo-semiotic sub-textuality in this Instapoem, Abdullahi code-switches fiercely between English and Igala, going from offering sophisticated English words to speaking in deeply indigenous Igala proverbs that the so-called girl in English class would not understand without translation. There is, therefore, a reclamation going on here; the apostrophic ‘you’, the ‘Karens’ have to subject themselves to the translatory practice that Nigerians often have to go through every time they move between spaces and crevices that privilege either or both English and their native languages: ‘So cut me some clack/Agbiti megi neke logi ogi shin (Two elephants cannot pass a feeble bridge)…/So to the girl in English class/Ewu shoduwe (What is your name?)/Its about time you learn my own language too [sic].’

Although part of the Yoruboid language system, the people of Igala form a distinct ethnic group in Nigeria, separate from the Yoruba ethnic group. Apart from the usual accentual difficulties experienced by Nigerians in general, minority groups or ethnic subgroups have specific challenges with enunciating certain words, and they are often jeered at for this. For instance, within the Yoruboid community, the Ikales of Okitipupa in Ondo state, the Eguns of Badagry in Lagos state, and the Igalas of Kogi state, where Abdullahi comes from, are usually mocked for their distinctive accents. Thus, Abdullahi’s choice to code-switch in Igala shows that she is not just directing her criticism at an external body – at Western, imperial entities who peripherize our side of the world – her criticism is directed at her kinspeople who have internalized the assimilative policy of imperial forces and are mercilessly discriminating against their kinds.

Her literary activism is thus as inward as it is outward. Abdullahi drives home her inward activism through the production of, and participation in, skits where she combines powerful words, theatrical zest, ear-piqueing soundtracks, and collaborative presences to send forth messages of encouragement and rebuke to Nigerians. In one of the skits, titled ‘Ode to the Nigerian Spirit’, in which she alights from a Keke Napep and walks into a chaotic market street, Havfy commends the average Nigerian ‘cycling the streets of palava dey catch cruise like we no send them because wahala has turned a popular joke that compels us to laughter’. In yet another skit, called ‘This is not a Motivational Poem’, in which she acts the role of a blindfolded, battered Lady Justitia chanting despite opposition from militating forces represented by coercive hands, she warns Nigerians whose ‘tears are active participants in this play of prey, prey to [their] homes, prisoners of [their] own domes’ to vote aright.

Abdullahi’s inward form of activism is paradigmatic of how literary activism is practiced by contemporary Nigerian poets. This activism is geared towards ideological transformation. It is aimed at elevating self-worth and self-esteem as well as creating positive awareness of the unique streaks of black identity. Abdullahi is one of many Nigerian creatives whose form of activism takes this shape. Another prominent example of an Instapoet with this inclination for inward-looking activism is @waynesamuelle. Unlike @_havfy, @waynesamuelle is not exactly an internet viral sensation, but he has a considerable number of fans who follow his work of combining AI-generated visuals with emotive, emotionally charged, orally rendered poetic lines to create a surreal voice of advocacy.

Given that the images that accompany his oral lines are generated by artificial intelligence, they have an animated look to them – bright, beautiful colors, unrealistically human bodies, and perfectly crafted spaces that often depict Nigeria, his usual poetic setting, as a world of fantasy, a sci-fi utopia filled with people bearing ethereal appearances. His magical realistic depictions of Nigeria connote some kind of environmental activism and act as fodder for ecocritical analysis. As the images move and transition seamlessly in fricative, they tell a story and present a visual simulacrum that creates a collaborative interactivity between words, images, and sounds that could range from his voice to Al-enabled voices of others, like that one time he channeled David Attenborough’s voice (narrator of the National Geographic documentary) to recite poetry about the ʼmating signalsʼ of the human female specimens (@waynesamuelle). The fact that a soundtrack is always added to the motion-picture-poem intensifies the immersive interplay between digitality and orality that his poems evoke.

Every other week, Wayne releases a new reel where he talks about the most mundane issues like Christmas chicken to more topical concerns like the corrupt, crumbling state of Nigeria. In one of his reels, titled ‘ENDSARS REMEMBRANCE [sic]’, posted on 20 October, 2023, he calls out to Nigerian youths to keep up the fighting spirit and not let down the banner of activism that started in October 2020. ‘Wear your hijab’, he says, ‘Pack your dreadlocks/Slip on your Nike/Wear palm or wear Crocs/Today, we step toward a future they have kept from us/Your “Male” will say it’s dangerous/Your “Pale” will says it’s a waste of time’ (@waynesamuelle). As is noticeable, Wayne’s choice of poetic words bears the same simplicity associated with Instapoetry, but even more, he uses culturally specific terms that signify that his audiences are Nigerians whom he intends to prod with the sharp stick of poetry.

To further register his interest in addressing the domestic polis as opposed to focusing on the generic, global internet population, Wayne also uses the apostrophic ‘you’ for individuals and personifies Nigeria and Africa with feminine pronouns, while always making sure to keep his lyricism spatially grounded. In a series of Instapoems titled ‘If Nigeria was a Wedding’, Wayne, in a deep, earthy voice, extols Lagos as the ‘chief bridesmaid, the beautiful, quirky smart woman that everyone expected to marry first but somehow hasn’t found her way to the altar. She belongs to everyone and no one. No culture, no creed, no religion has really been able to put a ring on it. She is an attractive free spirit, inviting many suitors from the far away hills of Kaduna and the red sands of Edo… She goes to church on Sundays, on Mondays, worships Sango, visits Fela’s shrine on Fridays’ (@waynesamuelle). Edo state, on the other end, is the ‘spiri-koko aunty who brings her pastor to officiate the wedding’ while boasting of a handsome, skinny-jeans loving son, Benin city, who is full of rizz and is as razz as they come (@waynesamuelle). He also uses the metaphor of a wedding to praise the ‘picture perfect, sun-kissed’ divas and patriotic intellectuals of the East (@waynesamuelle).

In lyrically metaphorizing the Northern woman, Wayne collaborates with another Instagram wordsmith @thelagostourist (Hamda Koya), who is from the North. Together, they depict Northern Nigeria as a woman who paints the lovely henna of the bride but is ‘beautiful but misunderstood… a [woman] who’s got modesty and beauty’. She would ‘enter a wedding hall with head held high like the ancient Kano Walls, like Farin Wura Falls, her hijab falls…’. Wayne uses the wedding motif to also describe other African countries like Kenya, who he says is a ‘lovely quiet girl [accompanied by] her more outgoing friend Nairobi… dressed in Kitenge with kinky hair alluring as a breath of fresh air’. No doubt, it is impossible to miss the ecocritical perspectives @waynesamuelle brings to his works by spatializing women and ‘womanizing’ citied spaces. Cajetan Iheka conceptualizes this creative spatial punning practiced by creatives like @waynesamuelle in his book African Ecomedia. He says, ‘Ecomedia that focuses on urban space in Africa constitute the urban as a site of everyday precarity, a space for geopolitical-cum-ideological contestation that endangers the human and nonhuman bio-sphere, and a space for articulating future possibilities’ (187). The spatially conscious Instapoems of @waynesamuelle fit right into this description.

Furthermore, @waynesamuelle’s personification of Nigerian regions and countries in Africa as fantastical, vivacious females full of unique personalities does more than just paint a picture of the multifaceted cultural delights of Nigeria, it also arouses pride and dignity in the country. Readers-listeners-viewers cannot help but feel a sense of gratification for being a Nigerian from any of these regions. Many Nigerians in the comment section express the warm feeling of belonging the poetry series gives them. @rabialiyuumar__ says, ‘This is so beautiful I feel represented’. Another commenter remarks, ‘As a Kenyan I miss home now thanks for the beautiful piece can’t get over it it’s a masterpiece ’. Even when commenters don’t agree with the depiction of some states and regions, the conversations their antagonism generates are often enlightening. About the portrayal of Lagos as ‘belonging to everyone and no one’, @ujunwadiogo comments, ‘Wait o!! Y’all need to stop this nonsense about Lagos belonging to no one. The traditional name of Lagos is Eko. It was the Portuguese that visited in the 1500s that called it Lagos. Before there was Nigeria, Eko was and it is. Eko has people and it has culture. Don’t erase her history…’ (@waynesamuelle). A lot more comment along this line was presented as well.

The genderized nature of Wayne’s Instapoems touches on all of his themes. Often, he elevates the personality and outlook of the feminine self by personifying important phenomena as women. The woman is the iPhone, ‘the pretty daughter of a visionary named Steve Jobs’ (@waynesamuelle). The woman is ‘Lady Justice’ who meets Nigerian politicians ‘at the corridors of power’ (@waynesamuelle). The woman is a Barbie girl living in a dollhouse called Nigeria where they can’t ‘walk the streets like every night is girls’ night’ (@waynesamuelle). The woman is the human heart which keeps ‘receiving shipments from Cupid’s arrow’ (@waynesamuelle). The woman is Twitter who makes ‘bold statements [yet] does the devil’s work [and becomes the instrument with which people] chas[e] clout like a storm chases wreck’ (@waynesamuelle).

Positioning women at the centre of his poetic discourses not only projects his platform as a hub of feminist activism but it also allows for the kind of self-reflexivity that contemporary literary activism engages in. In one of the Insta poems titled ‘Your Personal Mami Water’, he attacks the common misperception that women are seductive succubi who cause the downfall of men. He spits out clearly, ‘Our enemy is not without, she is within… All your village people are living rent-free inside your own head. Your Mami water is just a projection of your own self, the creature lurking deep inside the waters of your consciousness…’ (@waynesamuelle). At the heart of this poem and many others created by Wayne is a call for ideological transformation, an advocacy for Africans to be proud of their heritage while also aiming for self-improvement by disavowing themselves of negative stereotypes and participating in the fierce struggle needed to ensure political emancipation.

Thus, as earlier stated of Abdullahi, through his Instapoetry, Wayne engages in inward-looking, ideological activism. One poem that best embodies the ethos of ideological activism in full force is ‘If Nigeria Was Disneyland’. Here, Wayne appeals to Western pop culture and appropriates Walt Disney’s Land of Magic to metaphorize the current socio-political climate of Nigeria. In its appropriated format, President Tinubu is the evil stepmother who looks at a magic mirror in Aso Rock and asks, ‘Who is the Jagabanest of them all’ (@waynesamuelle). Afrobeats would be ‘Sleeping Beauty waiting for True Love’s first kiss from Made Kuti as mainstream artists make it their duty not to stay woke and only convince the Humpty Dumpty masses to shake their booties’ (@waynesamuelle). The japaists (those who emigrate from Nigeria) are Moanas (‘Maanas’) looking for greener pastures, the proliferating skit makers are Mickey Mouses, and Gen-Zs are represented by the activist Shrek who fights against the kingdom’s status quo and the non-corrupt politician Simba who ‘will one day be king’ (@waynesamuelle).

Obviously, @waynesamuelle believes that the salvation of postcolonially decrepit nations like Nigeria lies in its Generation Z. In ideological, inward activism, the mandate is often ascribed to Gen-Zs who are open-minded and whose disillusionment with the old ways of perceiving and receiving the world has radicalized their attitude towards politics, religion, sociability, economy, and just about every way of life. This belief has held strong since the protest culture and hashtag activism that started with the #ENDSARS movement and continued vehemently with the Obidient movement. Generally, the practice of inward, ideological activism is also a by-product of the aesthetics of Gen-Z activism. Unlike millennials and baby boomers, whose focus was on revolutionizing political institutions from the top-down and defending the socio-political and cultural legitimacy of Nigeria to the outside world, Gen-Z activism centres on self-actualization, social and mental empowerment, and on enacting political changes through a re-orientation of the mind.

It is no wonder then that Piquet compares Instapoetry to self-help literature. Beyond Instapoetry, content creators like @layiwasabi, @taaooma, and @mrmacaroni1 are known for sarcastically personifying archetypal grassroots Nigerians whose unscrupulous ways contribute to the structural challenges faced by the country. Layi Wasabi, for instance, personifies the bribe-centric police officer, the hustling lawyer, and a network marketer who uses witty puns to entrap naïve customers in pyramid schemes. Beyond the entertainment value of their works, these new-age creatives recognize that to enact any kind of change, ideological transformation is first needed. What has enabled their ideological activism to thrive is the synergy between digitality and orality.

Even in more explicit forms of poetic activism that touch on exigent socio-political issues, orality is being augmented by digitality to achieve never-before-seen effects. For instance, during Nigeria’s 2023 elections, well-acclaimed Nigerian poet Iquo Dianabasi Obot released an Instapoem on her page in which she recounted the horrors that had befallen Nigeria due to bad governance and called for Nigerians to rightfully exercise their voting rights (@dianaspeak). The poem’s mix of oral vivacity and digital dynamism is an example of how even creatives with non-juvenile inclinations are tilting towards Instapoetry to extend the reach of their literary activism and appeal to the aesthetical shift of the current era.

It is worth emphasizing that the proliferation of Instapoetry in Nigerian literature and the tilt towards inward activism echo how people of colour around the world are using digital storytelling to tackle prejudices and injustices perpetrated against them. The convergence between the vibrant, protest art of the #ENDSARS movement and the #Blacklivesmatter movement in 2020 is an example (Nwakanma). This is not surprising considering that Black poetry, be it in Africa or the diaspora, is linked to poetry rendered by the griots of West Africa, for whom performance and orality were important (Niane). Conclusively, while many scholars have created concepts around new genres of poetry that have emerged from social media, there is yet to be a concrete establishment of how these new developments affect the very nature and definition of poetry. For one, contemporary poetic innovations call for a wholesome acceptance of multimodal convergences and the blurry interstices between literature and pop culture. Also, the fact that Instapoetry, as a prototype of inward literary activism, is at the nexus between Africa’s oral poetic heritage and written poetry is worth canonizing in future conceptualizations of poetry. Masters is therefore right when he posits that the poetry of this epoch has less to do with textual constrictions and more to do with amplifying the vibrations of the soul (308). Instapoetry in all its different manifestations is a testament to this truth.