African Emojis Are Much Better Than Apple’s

As technology infiltrates every corner of our society, increasingly consumers of gadgets are taking notice of the “whiteness” of technology that emerges at every turn—for instance, the supremacist coding that embeds language like “master” and “slave” disks.

Emojis are yet another front where racial battles are taking place online.

As characters used in text, email, and online messages, emojis or emoticons use faces and other humanlike images to express ideas and emotions. The icons serve as emotional barometer in virtual communications.

Often words, alone, on a screen are taken out of context.

However, a well-placed emoji–that sends a smile, a smirk, or a tear drop, for instance–can be that missing link that conveys feeling of emotion through an online interface that otherwise provides little room for context clues and consequently leaves ample space for misinterpretation.

In the origins of communication of emotion with typeface, people employed race-neutral, color-blind character-based emoticons. For example:

: – P

: )

: (

The introduction of emojis in yellowface began their initial association with color.

😛

🙂

🙁

Until recently, Africans and people who look like Africans have been grossly underrepresented in the popular tool that is used by millions of people everyday to connect and share their identities socially.

Alpesh Patel is the CEO of Oju Africa, an African emoji company. In April 2014, he released a collection of Afro emojis for Android devices.

Recently Apple has responded by releasing its own set of iPhone emojis with more skin tone options. However, Patel criticized Apple’s move.

For him, Apple’s emoticons only changed the skin color of their existing symbols, but the company made no effort to actually embrace the cultures of people of different skin tones, which it claimed to represent.

Whose emojis better represent African people?

You be the judge.

Apple’s emojis mistake one culture—American white—as globally universal. Besides skin tone, each character has no difference in hair texture, makeup, or appearance.

European features define the universal template for all of Apple’s emojis.

Other emojis in Apple’s set show the Santa Claus symbol in various color shades, ignoring the obvious fact that a large number of people, even many Americans, are not Christians or do not celebrate Christmas, while making the false assumption that its narrow perspective is centrally adopted by all the world’s inhabitants.

On the other hand, Patel’s emoticons display varying aspects of Black cultures.

A vibrant heart with the African continent in its center demonstrates a deep love for Africa, her people, and her cultures.

A number of Patel’s African emojis display different Black hairstyles from locs to afros and headwraps popularly worn by Black people across the globe. One emoji sports an afro comb planted into one’s hair.

Others reflect bright colors welcomed in African clothing and makeup, stylish accessories from unique sunglasses to shapely earrings, and stereo headphones of musical cultures.

Community elders are represented in his African emojis with gray hair. The intellectuals wear bow ties. Even beards and mustaches do not escape Patel’s artistic eye.

Clearly, he captures the texture and diversity of African life beyond simple shading of color, opting for cultural meaning, instead of Apple’s simplistic portrait of merely darker or lighter symbols.

The ability of Patel’s creative vision to capture a variety of African looks and emotions stems perhaps from his deep immersion in Black cultures. Patel was born in Uganda and now resides on the island nation of Mauritius.

It is quite crucial that Africans take a seat at the helm of technological innovation, or else risk being omitted from this highly important space of virtual representation.

Too often, Africans underemphasize the importance of seeing real people who bear African appearances and mannerisms reflected in the media, which now extends to often overlooked online spaces.

There is undoubtedly a benefit in seeing someone like you represented in occupations, professions, advertising, media, and yes, emojis. Seeing images of successful and interesting people who look like you have an immensely positive impact on your self-esteem and emotional well-being.

Positive self-depictions encourage audiences. They also prevent them from limiting their aspirations of their futures.

For other cultures, consuming depictions about foreign groups can help reduce their prejudices.

To be sure, Africans are constantly fed positive images about whites through Christian Bibles, representations of white Jesus, and white heroes and saviors in Hollywood films, but conversely, residents of Western nations are only fed negative images of Africans.

This disparity in representation leaves no questions as to why Africans  show lenience toward European and American visitors, yet white Europeans and Americans rather greet Africans in Europe and America with hostility and rancor.

Africans are critical of many things—our leaders, our politics, and most certainly our football teams—but being critical of media is one analytical tool that has escaped otherwise whittled African eyes.

The focus of African education has tended to concentrate heavily on rote memorization of facts but not on viewing media, technology, and other socially constructed cultural productions with a critical lens.

Generally Africans are not taught to question the images that are brought before them. We rarely ask: who is behind-the-scenes writing the facts that African children, who later become African adults, have recorded to memory?

Africans need to take a step back and ask: who wrote the history or mathematics books we are reading? Who designed the computer programs we are using? Who drew the images that we are consuming? And what biases have they brought to the table, whether consciously or subconsciously, to their products?

Only then, will the realization become apparent that a participant in consumption and not in production is only an idle mind primed to be brainwashed by others’ ways of thought.

Patel recalled how some Westerners are thus brainwashed into thinking that African nations lack capabilities of productivity.

Most of his downloads thus far have come from the US. Many of these consumers were surprised upon hearing that the company was based in Africa.

About his US patrons, Patel said: “They’ve looked at it and said ‘hang on a minute, wow, this is a really cool innovation but it’s coming from Africa.’ You know innovation is not something that belongs to the West.”

Alpesh Patel’s designing a new wave of African emojis may seem like a trivial exercise to some—especially to those who are accustomed to having others think for them–but it is quite the demonstrative statement to inscribing an African perspective that can, and should, rightfully speak for itself.

The direction for Africans to take is one where many can notice places where an African influence is lacking and add these missing and much-needed pieces of cultural understanding to rewrite knowledge—a process that will ensure that African stories not only persist but also thrive.