When Beijing-born video producer, Fyjo Molly, relocated from Berlin to Johannesburg three years ago, she was enthusiastic about the move. It would be her first time in Africa, but as someone who enjoys immersing herself in different cultures, she was looking forward to the new experience.She fell in love with Johannesburg, a city that she felt had very little in common with most of what she had seen and heard in mainstream media. In 2018, she decided to work on a collaborative video project with a 10-person team from China. Eventually, only two members of the team traveled to Johannesburg with the rest stating they had concerns regarding “safety and disease in Africa.”
Molly says, “I knew that China’s mostly state-ran mainstream media offered a very simplistic, sometimes biased view of the continent, but I had not realized the extent to which it affected everyday people’s opinions.” It was then that she decided that she was going to share her experiences on the continent to show the Africa most Chinese people do not get to see.
Earlier this year, she launched her Instagram and YouTube channels with the goal of challenging stereotypes prevalent in Chinese and western media. She does this through making fun, quirky videos of her experiences in South Africa, but also when traveling round the continent to countries including Ethiopia, Zambia and others.
The story of another Chinese vlogger on the continent follows a different path but has similar objectives to Molly. Shanghai-born Zhao Huiling was 12 when her family moved from China to Ghana where she lived until she was 18 years old. In a recent episode of the China Africa podcast, she talks about a fun, exciting childhood filled with lots of friends and adventures.
When she returned to China as a young adult, she grew frustrated with the stereotypes of Africans rampant in Chinese popular culture. With Africa becoming an increasingly popular travel destination for Chinese people, she found herself being asked more and more to give recommendations on where people should go, what they should do, what it is like to travel and live in Africa etc. She decided to feed this curiosity and tackle the ignorance in her own words, “showcasing Africa’s great, vibrant, creative scene to a Chinese audience.”