Wode Maya - The Pan-African Vlogger Performing Pan-Africanism from Below

Imagine travelling around African and Caribbean countries and highlighting the beauty and diversity of the physical landscape and of African peoples and their histories and cultures, but more so their commonalities, whilst patronizing and promoting the businesses run by Global Africans. This has been the journey of Ghanaian vlogger, Wode Maya (Berthold Kobina Winkler Ackon),[1] whose Facebook page to date has 2.9 million followers.  His YouTube site on which he has posted 1.4K videos, has 1.8 million subscribers. Wode Maya’s mission can be interpreted as one that aims to bring together the Global African community or Pan-Africanism from below.

Kobina (Kobby) Ackon adopted the name and current brand “Wode Maya” from Chinese Mandarin that translates as “Oh my God!” “My goodness!” or “Oh my.”[2]   The name foregrounds the surprises Ackon encounters on his digital journey and those he sought to reveal to the world through his Pan African travels.

Wode Maya’s success is a consequence of two important factors. First, his engaging personality. He is full of curiosity, joviality, humility, and congeniality. With his wife, Kenyan YouTuber Miss Trudy (Gertrude Awino Juma), together they embody pan-Africanism. His respect for other cultures and peoples is steeped in the African tradition of ubuntu and conviviality. Second, his success reflects the African peoples’ demand for a united Africa and positive narratives about Global Africans. Suddenly, ordinary folk, those who can afford internet credit, can participate through watching short videos and virtual excursions of life in other African and Caribbean countries, many of which they may not be able to visit because of affordability or due to the enormous international travel hurdles that Africans face. Many followers are introduced to aspects of their own countries that they had no knowledge of or would never visit. 

While the internet can be used to build community, authoritarian regimes have tended to shut down internet connectivity to prevent the use of social media for debate and protest mobilization by resistance groups.[3] Wode Maya’s style allows him to tackle the entertaining and the serious issues preoccupying and dividing Global Africans with humour.

Wode Maya began his vlogging in 2013, when he was an Aeronautical Engineering student in China, to challenge the ignorance and crude stereotypes held by Chinese people about Africa.  His plan was to present the real Africa to a Chinese audience. Since then, he has travelled to 20 African countries, and eight Black majority countries in the Caribbean and South America promoting their distinctiveness as well as their commonalities. One similarity he consistently emphasizes is that of the marketplace - the layout of the stalls, the hustle and bustle, and the joviality of the traders. His followers can relate, whether they are in Makola in Accra, Ghana, or Coronation Street market in Kingston, Jamaica. Food is another element that features in his videos, from frying kapado in Malawi, braai in Cape Town, to jerk or fried fish on the north coast of Jamaica. Wode Maya revels in identifying how African food cultures travel.

In relation to members of Global Africa in the Caribbean, Wode Maya showed their retention of African cultural practices by displaying how people have adapted their African heritage across the centuries. He focuses on interviewing those who seek to promote connections with Africa, and those who are aspiring businesspeople and creatives, especially local vloggers or content creators. From big cultural events, such as carnival in Trinidad and Crop Over in Barbados, to cooking on an open fire in Jamaica, he revels in the lived experiences of Global Africans.

Like most successful travel writers, and vloggers, Wode Maya is non-judgmental, keen to learn, to try new experiences, and to promote African/ Black people’s entrepreneurship, especially those who have returned to the continent. One of his goals is to encourage a return to the continent of Africans languishing in Europe and America, encouraging them “to make Africa home again”.  He promotes the returnees - the Burundian investor building beautiful homes in Bujumbura, Burundi – dubbed by the western media as the poorest country in Africa. He found an African-American woman whose company, Black Ivy, built 400 houses in Ghana, and the Zimbabweans who returned to retire or to grow businesses. 

After the American President Donald Trump, in a speech to the US Congress, said the “African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of”,[4] Wode Maya returned to Lesotho to showcase the country, much to the enthusiasm of his supporters in Lesotho, with many requesting that he tagged Donald Trump in his videos.

Wode Maya’s advocacy has been so successful that prominent individuals in the countries that he visits, including Mia Mottley in Barbados, are willing to meet with him. The casual encounter with the Barbadian Prime Minister, on the street during the Crop Over festival, forced continental Africans to make comments, such as “it would be impossible for African leaders to be in a crowd like that. It tells you how much their people hate them”. 

Travelling in Africa and between countries with majority African heritage populations is not an easy feat. Like other Africans, Wode Maya encounters obstacles to African unity and mobility. He advocates for a “borderless Africa”, challenging the restrictive visa requirements in place in Africa and Caribbean countries that serve against African and Black people’s mobility. His followers in those countries are keen to have him showcase their countries and are apologetic for his treatment by their governments. In one video, he met a South Sudanese in Ghana who had to pay US$200 for a visa to enter Ghana, and decided to host him in his own apartment, while asking why an African should pay so much to enter another African country.

There is also the physical difficulty of travelling between those countries. One still has to transit through Europe or the USA to get to the Caribbean. Despite many talks of direct flights between Accra and Jamaica, Lagos and Kingston – nothing has been sustained. It is also quite difficult to travel from South America and the Eastern Caribbean to Jamaica. 

Some of the challenges Wode Maya faces also reveal what divides Global Africa. While openly a Christian, Wode Maya, as with most successful travellers, must accommodate the different manifestations of religion and culture that he sees amongst the African people. One example is the way in which Christianity had impacted African culture and critical faculties. His African followers’ reaction to his coverage of Crop Over in Barbados, which involved scantily-clad women dancing, was a case in point. Some followers based on the continent wrote messages, such as “Jesus Christ is coming back repent please”, and said he would lose followers by showing ‘nudity’; others criticized Barbadian women as “shameless”, whilst some wanted a ticket to Barbados, to be “in his luggage”, and more coverage of the festival. The controversy over dress in the festival in the Caribbean necessitates reflecting on how Africans on the continent have adopted religious conservatism to the detriment and denial of their own historical and cultural practices.

Wherever Wode Maya goes, he unearths and retells African history. He educates. This sometimes comes into conflict with those who want to forget and/or ignore the uncomfortable aspects of history.  In a June 2025 visit to the Ashanti Kingdom of Ghana, he upset a lot of people by highlighting the role that the Ashanti ruling class played in the transatlantic slave trade. According to Akosua Adomako Perbi, [5] “Asante … was the greatest slave trading and slave owning state in pre-colonial Ghana and at the height of its power exercised authority over nearly the whole modern Ghana as we know it today.” Even though the Asante’s role in the slave trade is also well-documented by European scholars, aggrieved members of the Ashanti demanded an apology from Wode Maya stating the fact that Asantes were also sold into slavery. No doubt, members of Asante who fell afoul of the ruling class were traded, and the complexity of African history must be taught.

Social media is a new space for capital accumulation. What starts out as a fun activity has grown into a serious business venture. While Wode Maya enjoys a lot of popular goodwill, it would be interesting to watch how he continues to transform his business model and whether it can remain and retain the ethical principles common to Global Africans in its intent and actions.  His videos demonstrate the potential of the digital space to unite Global African people, to tell our own stories, without the intermediation of western media through which most African conventional news media get their content.

Patricia Daley is Professor of the Human Geography of Africa in the School of Geography and the Environment.

Endnotes

[1] https://wodemaya.me/africa-to-the-world/

[2]EN“Wǒ de” is a pinyin that translates as my or mine. “ya” expresses surprise, “má” is an exclamatory particle. https://chinese.yabla.com/chinese-english-pinyin-dictionary.php?define=…, https://chinese.yabla.com/chinese-english-pinyin-dictionary.php?define=…

[3] Amber Murrey (2022). A decolonial political geography of resistance and digital infrastructural harm in Cameroon and Ethiopia. Globalizations, 20(6), 967–993. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2022.2149162

[4] Khanyisile Ngcobo & Mayeni Jones, “Lesotho shocked by Trump's remarks that 'nobody has heard of the country”, BBC News, 5 March 2025. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0q18x0192yo

[5] Akosua Adomako Perbi (2019) A history of indigenous slavery in Ghana: from  the 15^th  to the 19^th Century. Sub Saharan Publishers. p.xv

See also Akosua Adomako Perbi (1992) ‘The relationship between domestic slave trade and the external slave trade in pre-colonial Ghana’, Research Review 8 (1-2) 64.