Recently rapper Vic Mensa was a guest on the “One54 Africa” podcast with Akbar Gbajabiamila and comedian Godfrey, and he praised streamer Darren “IShowSpeed Watkins Jr.’s trek across Africa.

Speed spent four weeks livestreaming across Africa to bring his huge global audience into markets, cities, and cultural moments that rarely trend on feeds. The tour covered roughly 20 countries in 28 days and included stops from Angola to Senegal, a live audience at the Africa Cup of Nations final, and on-the-ground streams that drew millions of viewers. 

Mensa, who co-founded the Black Star Line Festival with Chance the Rapper in Accra, Ghana, gave Speed his flowers for shifting the optics of harmful stereotypes about the continent. “Speed's tour is singlehandedly undoing a massive amount of propaganda in the minds of so many,” Mensa said. “Not just the youth, either, like just in the minds of so many American people.”

“I see elder black people. I see younger—I see white kids saying similar things [like], ‘Oh, I didn't know everyone wasn't in loincloths running from baboons.’ Which sounds ridiculous but, also, Americans are not educated,” Mensa continued. “They are able to keep this massive finesse going because Americans are not educated. Americans not only don't have education, they have constant propaganda that is anti-intellectual force-fed to them.”

Mensa shared that Speed’s livestreams have given the truth to so many viewers (especially Americans) who consume “alternative facts,” laugh, and deny truth and science. When Gbajabiamila asked if Mensa thought Speed’s African tour would actually bring people to the continent, Mensa talked about the streamer’s record-breaking viewership and how much of a beast it is all its own. 

“It's almost like they're traveling with him,” Mensa said. “You watch somebody go through a whole continent, and some of these kids are probably watching him like five, 10 hours a day … They’re experiencing Africa with him.”

Mensa mused over Speed’s streams where he asked questions about history, like why the Sphinx had no nose and why he couldn’t purchase diamonds in Botswana despite the country being a top diamond producer? His innocence and honest inquiries planted seeds for his viewers.

“Speed being there and experiencing it firsthand, asking why the statue has no nose and receiving …stupid responses…it plants a seed of doubt,” Mensa said. “It's like literally eroding the colonial myth because that's how they keep the thing going, is by these contracts and these false histories,” Mensa explained.

Speed’s African tour was not only eye-opening for his viewers, but it was also eye-opening for him. Many people watched him unlearn history in real time. He shared in a clip, “This tour [opened] my eyes … it sparked up something deep within me, very deep, like something from the root of me. It kinda [talked] to me in terms of like, I can do this.”