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TikTok has become an important site for cultural self-representation across Africa, yet how Africanness becomes recognisable within platformed environments remains insufficiently specified. This study examines how African TikTok creators construct, negotiate, and contest Africanness through a qualitative digital ethnography of 120 public posts from Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, and Sierra Leone. Reflexive thematic analysis, informed by representation theory, performance theory, postcolonial scholarship, and platform studies, shows that Africanness is produced through multimodal cultural performance, platform-native presentation, and situated audience interpretation. The findings reveal that national specificity can coexist with broader continental belonging, while authenticity is negotiated through the recombination of inherited, contemporary, and transnational cultural repertoires. The article develops Digital Africanness as a relational framework for explaining how claims to African belonging enter platformed circulation and become subject to recognition, reinterpretation, contestation, and misrecognition, with Platform Hybridity conceptualised as a supporting process within contemporary short-form African digital cultures. Non-recognition remains a theoretical possibility rather than an empirically observed outcome.
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Thomas Sheku Marah (2026) studied this question.
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