Did you know that there are approximately 4.66 billion active Internet users worldwide? Can you imagine all the different ways in which we all use the internet? Obasanjo’s Internet is our interview series where we speak to some of our Internet favorites on how they relate to the Internet and what it means to them and their work. This week, Mofiyinfoluwa Okupe, Writer and Founder of The Abebi Award, talks to us about how she uses Obasanjo’s Internet.
What’s the first thing you do when you wake up?
The first thing I do is say a very quick word of prayer. I just say “Thank you God for waking me up this morning.” Usually, on a good day, I will move straight into doing devotion on the You Version Bible app. I always tell myself that that should be the first app I open in the morning. But recently, I’ve been sleeping in the same bed with my mom, so the first thing I do when I wake up is to look for my mummy to see if she’s in bed. But it’s always that I talk to God first and I talk to my mummy.
How do you use the internet for work or pleasure?
I love the internet because as a writer, Medium specifically was where I published my first ever thing. And so for me, the internet, specifically through places like Medium made writing become a reality. Even when I had no other resources, when I didn’t have a large following, I didn’t have the sense and the mannerisms of a writer. It was “I’ve written this thing. I want people to see it. I want to be able to share it.”
The birthplace of my writing career is medium. And because of that, I have such a tender and nostalgic feeling towards it. The rest of my work as a writer has been championed majorly through the internet. As a writer, writing from Africa in this 21st century, a lot of the places we send our work to are International Lit mags. So I’m published in Guernica – I got published in Guernica because I DM’d the editor that I’d like to publish my work there. It was just God’s favor working for me because they don’t usually do that, but the pathways that I’ve used to be able to share my work and platform my work have been primarily through the internet. That’s on a work end.
For pleasure, I love Twitter – X, but it will always be Twitter to me. For me, it’s been because of the community that I’ve been able to build on Twitter, both for my writing and more general. I was just sharing with my friend that when I was 17/18, very new on the TL and I was in my first year of University when I was dealing with things around body image. Witnessing bigger women on Twitter who were just living their lives, posting pictures looking very confident, I don’t know how much of an effect that had on my psyche in being able to move in my body with pride and with a different consciousness. So in that way, Twitter is more than just fun for me. It’s also been a place where I have experienced a lot of mental and emotional growth, especially through community and observing and interacting with like-minded women.
What moment or episode in your life would you say captured the essence of the internet?
So I recently established the Abebi Afrononfiction Institute, which is an organization established to spotlight creative nonfiction written by African women. When the idea came, I didn’t have money for a website. I didn’t have money for anything really, so I just set up a Medium page and I put out the information. We did everything through Google Suits, Google Forums, Google Docs. The person who helped as my administrative assistant lives in the US. We were constantly on Google Meets together, constantly doing Google Sheets and for a seemingly small organization that did not have a lot of structure and backup, we received 88 submissions in our inaugural year, which is a very healthy number. And we’re able to produce the whole residency and the whole award ceremony from that. We had an award ceremony in Lagos in December and when I was looking around, I was like, “Oh my God, all this is just emails, laptop, Google Meets” and we’re able to create this really tangible powerful thing primarily through the linkage and the opportunities and the exposure that the internet offers. For me, what I took away from it is how the intangible creates the tangible. The internet is an intangible thing, right? And one of my favorite Bible verses says that “the things that are unseen are greater than what is seen and the things that are seen are derived from what is unseen.” So especially for those of us who are in literary organizations and literary communities, If you check it, our modes of communication and our modes of community building almost exclusively start virtually. They start through the internet, WhatsApp groups, emails, and literary magazines. They all exist on the internet.
From that starting point, we’re able to extrapolate into these amazing physical testaments to what started virtually. So being at the awards ceremony in December last year and just watching everything happen, the people who are coming to attend, the writers whose works were shared on Isele, another African lit magazine. Everything happened on the internet and we were sitting in and watching the physical manifestation of all those many emails, all those many keyboard taps, we were living in the manifestation of it and it just felt very powerful to me to see what can be derived from virtual spaces.
Your favorite social media platform and why?
It’s Twitter, Twitter, Twitter. I hate that now they have made people be able to write long things on Twitter because when I see “see more” I’m just like, “Wow, who are you,” go and write in the newspaper, Punch is calling you. Guardian is calling you.
I love tweets because they force concision and brevity and so people have to communicate their entire thoughts in a limited amount. It forces you to condense and figure out what is really important. And for me, I love Twitter because it’s a virtual scrapbook of all the people that I’ve been since being online. Sometimes I love to go and look up my tweets from 2017 and see what was going on or see what I was talking about. It’s so beautiful for me to see the parallels, right? I could be tweeting about a poem in 2017 and I still thought about that poem 2 days ago. Seeing the continuity and the consistency in who I’ve been online and in curating an online persona more than that for me, Twitter because of threads specifically, helps me to process my thoughts in real-time. I have at least three or four essays that originated as tweets. Like their origin points were tweets or threads because it allows me to just bounce thoughts with myself or with other people and then I can go back and be like, oh, this is an interesting thought, let me build on it. But Twitter always allows me that constant expression, and articulation that I’m able to later weave into something bigger. But it’s a starting point. And I love that the audience if you curate it well enough, are people that elevate everything that you do. I see a tweet from somebody and it reminds me that actually, I haven’t read my bible today. Let me get on that. I see a tweet about somebody talking about fitness and I’m like, oh my God, I need to get back into the gym or I’m thinking about like healthy eating, I see somebody talking about low-carb diets.
So for me, it’s also the multifaceted resources. It’s not just about my writing, it can be about fashion, it can be about anything and the endless concise nature of it. And even though people call it echo chambers, I just call it being around like-minded people. The benefits that ensue from that are very, very precious to me.
Do you remember the first time something you posted went viral? What was it? How did it make you feel?
There was a time when somebody posted a picture of four very handsome men. I can’t remember them now. And they were like, “Which one must go?” and I quoted it saying “Nobody is going anywhere.” Then it made it to all these viral pages and my cousin sent it to me saying “Is this what you are doing on Twitter?”
Another moment that I think – OK, this one is a little more heartfelt. 2022 was a very, very rough year for me. So towards the end, I just tweeted like – it wasn’t a prayer, but it was about how I’ve cried too much this year and I don’t want to cry next year. I want to be joyful next year and it was just an earnest tweet. It got like 230K likes. People were talking about how hard the year had been for them as well. People were encouraging me. It was so sweet and I was like, wow, I had an actual good viral moment. It’s not that, you know, I tweeted something thirsty and now 500 people have liked it and I’m covering my face.
It went really far and just recently I tweeted what I call poem prayers, and it got to like 5/6 different kinds of those accounts on Instagram that repost things. People kept sending it to me saying, “oh my God, look at what you said, Oh my God, look at what you said.”
What’s the most outrage you have ever generated over something you posted? How did you react to it?
It’s always about fatphobia. It’s always about how people talk about fat women. I’m trying to think of a particular instance because I’ve had quite a few. But the last one I can think of is there was someone whose handle, I can’t remember it now, I thought was problematic and I was like, “We need to just think about the ways that we talk about fat women’s bodies and people were berating me with insults, telling me I should get into the gym, telling me that is it because I am not fine. All these kinds of insults. So usually whenever there’s outrage on and about something I’ve said it’s about women’s rights or it’s about fat women.
There was another one, Fupagate where a relatively slim woman kept talking about her fupa and how she was disturbed about her fupa and I was like, “Ma, you don’t have a fupa.” Let’s talk about bodies in a realistic way. If you are afraid of being fat, it doesn’t mean you have a fupa, right? And that’s another thing. I think I challenge internalized fatphobia a lot online because I’ll be like, “Why are you afraid of being fat?” Like you particularly. Then people find out they have all these deeply seated thoughts about fat people that I’m constantly checking and challenging. So it’s always about fat women and people believing that they can talk about fat women anyhow. And I just will never stand for that and my mouth can get a bit sharp and then everything deteriorates from there.
What rules do you live by on the internet?
In very recent times, it’s not a rule but I ask myself, “Do I need to say this?” I think that’s because I have such a big Twitter persona, especially when I was a little younger, I was very expressive on the internet. I think there is an element of the recklessness of youth that is interwoven into that. And so I would never pause and decide if I truly want to share this information. Now I’ve gotten to a place where that happens very often.
I also now don’t engage in any kind of vitriol or trolling. I won’t buy into it. Before I used to be very argumentative but now I tell myself “This person that I’m engaging with, are they worth my time? Are they operating in good faith? Do they actually want to learn something or are they trying to pick a fight?” And once I can assess those questions and they are not what I need, I don’t engage.
Another thing that I do now is mass report and block suspicious stuff without interacting with it. Before, If I see it, I’ll quote it and be like, “oh my God, how can somebody do this?” Meanwhile, that’s also amplifying whatever strange thing that is. So now I take the rule of mass reporting and trying to engage the infrastructure that helps to improve online spaces a little bit. I engage it a lot more now. I report, report, report, constantly report tweets. Whenever I see anything bigoted, misogynistic, or abusive, before I go on a long tirade about it, I report the tweet. Sometimes the accounts have been taken down, which makes me very happy.
What is your guiltiest online pleasure?
Scrolling the replies of things for hours and just laughing as if I don’t have anything else to do. I especially love doing that for really funny tweets. I will go through all the quotes, one by one, I’ll go through the replies of the quotes. Then I will go through the original replies. I’ll send them to my friends.
Especially when I try to get to the bottom of gist, like maybe there is tea on the TL and it’s so convoluted like a spider web and I know that it’s not that deep and I should just give up. It’s a lie. I will go from timeline to timeline. If somebody is private, I’ll say “Please do any of my friends follow this person? They’ve locked their account.” Trying to get to the bottom of tea even though it is a time-wasting endeavor. Those are my two major guilty pleasures.
Would you say you have an online persona?
I would say I do. And contrary to most people, my online persona doesn’t vary too much from my in real-life persona. It’s the same sense of humor. It’s the same exuberance.
I’m a very exuberant person. I think that shows up a lot on my socials. The only thing I will say is that because I’m a writer and a lot of my Twitter is full of very ‘writerly’ sentences, I think people expect to meet me and I’ll be talking like Wole Soyinka or something like that. But I’m very chatty, I would say in person, I’m very unassuming and I just like going with the vibe in a way that people are like, “Oh my God, is this the writer, thinker …” Yeah I am all those people but I also love a good laugh. I also love some banter. I also think I curated my online persona, especially my Twitter around being this very confident, outspoken person even from when I was much younger.
As I said, I started becoming quite popular on Twitter, when I was 17,18, 19 ish and that was a time of a lot of transformation and growth for me as a person and so a lot of that happened in real-time, online. And so now it’s interesting for me to see how patterns and how the persona has evolved but some of the things that are my core traits, like my expressiveness, my writing, and my faith, have all stayed the same throughout constant iterations of my persona. And so it’s also interesting to use social media to track that and see what stays and what goes away.
What’s your favorite emoji and why?
Oh my God, my favorite emoji is the brown heart and it is because brown is my favorite color. There is something about the brown heart that looks very warm, very old-timey, vintage, like sepia and it’s just like my thing.
I love the brown heart. The brown hearts combined with the sparkles, that’s my signature emoji combination because I’m like, wow, real love and light, right? I hate the red heart for instance because I think it’s so basic. In my writer’s mind like wow “brown, warm, soil, trees, plants, love” just jam everything together in my head like that.
Are you particular about your feed?
In recent times, I have been. So I was telling my sister this – last year for some reason I was becoming very obsessed with marriage visuals at a point. Like my whole feed was constantly full of Aso Ebi, lace, wedding gown, alaga, it was almost claustrophobic and I asked myself why. I worked through some things at the point and I was like, nah, I’m going to consciously interact with different things online so that my algorithm can rewire and rebuild itself.
I also think that because we’re in online places so much, I think of the feed as kind of like places you frequent in real life. So if I’m entering a season of my life where I’m trying to prioritize things of the spirit, I’m trying to prioritize my faith, I’m trying to prioritize, you know, wholesome things; family, healthy eating, it becomes prevalent for me to also pattern my social or my online visitations in that same way. So I believe in restructuring your feed. I follow so many of these very lovely faith-based content creators on Instagram who write all these tiny things on a beige board and it’s so pretty and I made sure that I started clicking on them and interacting with them a lot more. Same thing with hairstyles for black people, and clothes for fat women, so that your feed doesn’t constantly, propel you into a place of constantly trying to change your appearance to fit with a reality that is not yours. I remember one of my friends saying that she only follows plus-size fashion influencers because she wants to see bodies that look like hers and stop aspiring to another person’s body and it works. Or for me, dark-skinned women who don’t wear weave because I barely wear wigs these days. So looking for natural hairstyles, all that kind of stuff. And what you find out is if you curate your feed according to the values that you are trying to embody, it makes your social media experience more enriching because it is feeding the things that need to be fed and it’s starving the things that need to be starved. Whereas if you keep feeding what needs to be starved through social media, you create for yourself, this vacuous hunger that can’t be sated, where you’re setting yourself up for something that you actually cannot achieve or that is not your own cup of tea, or you are convincing yourself by constantly consuming that content that that is what you must have, and that is what you must do. But when you curate your social media presence to the values that you aspire to, or to the values that you currently embody, It creates a synergy that I think aids development and a stronger sense of self.
YouTube or TikTok? Which do you prefer and why?
YouTube. I am not on TikTok at all. I love YouTube because everything is on YouTube and because of how well organized it is. I love watching sermons on YouTube. That is like my happy place.
Which Nigerian creator do you think the world needs to see and hear more of?
Mazino Malaka. She is a faith-based writer and content creator. Her aesthetic is amazing. It’s so clean and bright and her podcast You Can Rest Here, is like drinking water from a fresh spring. The other person I was going to call is the lady who does ‘the complete the songs.’ I don’t know her name. She goes on the road and gives people the mic to sing. Her videos never fail to make me laugh. They make my whole day and things like seeing when she gives people money, people are always so surprised. They’re like, “Oh wow for me?” and you can see the genuine shock and surprise, and emotion on their faces. I love it.
Who is the coolest person you follow and the coolest person who follows you?
The coolest person I follow is my brother Tomisin Okupe. He’s very cool. He’s so swaggy. He has this production company called Lazy TV and I just love watching their stuff. They did a montage for either NATIVE or one of the things that happened in December and it was so cool. I was feeling all the FOMO.
The coolest person that follows me is probably Goshtwriter Mel, my friend Mel, she’s a singer and songwriter and she’s very cool. She skates. She’s very hip. When you say cool, I think of alte vibes, cool sunglasses, red hair.
What is your favorite Nigerian podcast?
My favorite Nigerian podcast is You Can Rest Here by Mazino Malaka. Certainly.
Have you ever hooked up with someone you met online? Did you regret it?
Yes, I have hooked up with people I met online. No, I did not regret it. My current relationship aside, I met my last two partners online.
5 people you’d love to see answer these questions
Layi Wasabi, Niyi Okeowo, Bamidele, Ashley Okoli and Solis.
Read previous Obasanjo’s Internet entries here
