Kasongo and the Warthog: TikTok Memes and Archives of Kenyan Youth Popular Culture.

Abstract

This paper explores TikTok as a dynamic arena for collective contestation in Kenya, where young content creators repurpose the popular song “Kasongo” by crafting memes—understood here as units of meaning appropriated and redeployed to express critique in local social commentary. By focusing on the Kasongo meme, the study analyses how creators reimagine not just the song, but a range of older popular texts, recontextualising them within contemporary Kenyan socio-political realities. Through TikTok, Kenyan youth are actively refashioning elements of popular heritage and leveraging them to challenge authority and critique power structures. The paper explains how TikTok enables youth to navigate and articulate their lived realities—their ‘local daily lifeworld.’ Methodologically, it applies textual analysis to TikTok videos, reading them as signifiers within a broader cultural discourse in which exaggeration, caricature, and laughter combine to produce a composite grotesque that is then lampooned. Here, grotesquerie is deployed as a deliberate technique of social critique: close analysis of selected texts reveals the precise objects and mechanisms of this critique and demonstrates TikTok’s appeal to Kenyan youth. While this practice echoes Kenya’s broader historical tradition of using popular music for socio-political commentary, social media stands out for democratizing access to cultural archives and fostering solidarity within imagined online communities. From a corpus of 100 sampled TikTok videos utilising the Kasongo meme, 22 are analysed to show how the song is repurposed to reflect contemporary issues of concern. The paper concludes by showing how this form of online activism contests dominant narratives, empowers youth, and demonstrates the transformative potential of social media to reshape cultural archives for specific causes.