Tiktok storytelling and the rise of Elsa Majimbo

“Increasingly, what we’re after on social media is not narrative or personality but moments of audiovisual eloquence (the ‘vibe’)… the vibe (is) chill Gen-Z good taste, the world of a teenager whose parents have given up on curfews and screen-time restrictions: midnight-basement-desktop-computer vibes.

"These brief flashes of seemingly normal life, compressed into short videos, are among TikTok’s bread-and-butter genres, and they have taken over… Many vibes don’t have specific names, but some do. Saudade, the Portuguese word for a bittersweet longing, could count as a vibe.

"So, too, could the Japanese iki, an attitude of casually disinterested elegance, or the German fernweh, the longing to be somewhere far away, evoked by distant vistas… (Hygge, the Danish quality of contented coziness, is a vibe… Vibes are a medium for feeling, the kind of abstract understanding that comes before words put a name to experience.

"That pre-linguistic quality makes them well suited to a social-media landscape that is increasingly prioritising audio, video, and images over text. Through our screens, vibes are being constantly emitted and received…,” so writes The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka. 

These words evoke Tiktok and how it is impacting society and storytelling. And Kenya’s poster girl for this phenomenon is Elsa Majimbo, the now award-winning Kenyan comedian and internet sensation who rose to fame during the 2020 Covid lockdown.

Ms Majimbo is now making major waves in the United States of America where she lives. In 2021, Ms Majimbo announced on X (formerly Twitter) that she had acquired an ideal property in Los Angeles, California. What catapulted Ms Majimbo from Nairobi to Los Angeles is something that defies proper explanation: the power of social media, especially the power of short videos on Tiktok.

The New Yorker’s Khiara Ortiz reports that Ms Majimbo “now has more than four million followers across Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, has been featured on a digital cover of Teen Vogue, and was named a top creator by Forbes, in 2022”.

It all started like a joke. In early 2020, during the Covid-19 quarantine period, Ms Majimbo started her satirical monologues usually featuring “her eating potato chips, leaning back to a pillow and using a pair of tiny 1990’s sunglasses as a prop”. These monologues featured on one of America’s biggest entertainment platforms, Comedy Central.

Ms Majimbo was applauded by superstars like Naomi Campbell, Lupita Nyong’o, Anderson Cooper, Snoop Dogg and many others. She is now an ambassador for Rihanna’s fashion brand (Fenty) where she showcases the brand’s glasses in every shade. Ms Majimbo’s story shows the power of dreams and storytelling in the age of Tiktok.

Tiktok’s power of storytelling is augmented by short, clear videos. Like a good story, a good video transports one to new worlds of silent valleys, of breathtaking peaks, of ripe fruits new plucked, of plants in bloom in the African savannah, of red blossoms in the morning, of ghostly wisps of vapour floating in the air, of the constellation of the sun’s coneshaped beams of light shimmering through windows, of the colours of a garden saturated by sunlight, and of bright, whitepink flowers. 

She probably always had dreams. She may have enjoyed Nairobi especially when the night is cool. The stars sprinkled across the sky like grains of salt. And the chirps of crickets in the bougainvillea comforting. And the hum of the silence in the darkness. But Ms Majimbo also had dreams to get away as far as possible from Nairobi.

To be exposed to new worlds. To reinvent herself to become someone new and uninhibited. Tiktok (and other social media platforms) provided the stage. Though Tiktok, like a river, carries hate like phantom jellyfish and general miscellaneous nastiness along with it, it is an ideal platform for storytelling because it has enormous reach with over a billion active uses.

In a world of computers, phones and tablets that collect the data of people’s lives from hours slept, steps taken, songs listened to and places visited, Tiktok lends itself as a platform for today’s generation of young people — especially for posting videos.

A Tiktok video is typically short and flashy; shimmering and dancing behind a screen like something that swoops, dives, and flickers in and out — a glitching hologram.

Therefore, content creators from comedians (like Ms Majimbo), musicians and writers could all benefit from learning how to use Tiktok. For booklovers, Tiktok has BookTok, a community where booklovers can share reviews and other information on books. And one of the identifying features across Booktok is “no plot, just vibes” novels, a genre becoming increasingly celebrated.

The cornerstone of the “no plot, just vibes” genre is that the books recommended are not necessarily plot-driven but are dialogue-driven.