What You Can Expect To Find In An African Social Network

By Elnora McCullough


An African social network is an online community site where people of Afro origin can meet and share in a safe and familiar environment. More and more of such websites are springing up on the net and they are becoming increasingly popular.

The websites are not only attractive persons who reside in Africa but to black folks worldwide. It does not matter if they have been members of the Diaspora for generations or if they are new migrants abroad, they still gravitate to such socializing websites. This illustrates a fundamental unity that bonds the peoples together regardless of their histories.

As with other websites of similar nature such as Face Book and My Space, the Afro varieties are commonly used for connecting with friends. People maintain a page relating to themselves. They share photographs and video etc. Members all have a list of friends or connections and as people interconnect with each other the network of the members grows. It is not unusual for some people to have over one thousand friends on such sites.

It is not always easy to recognise the difference between a site for people from Africa and a site for everybody. This is due to the fact that they are generally free to join and anyone can join up. Therefore you may see people of all different ethnic groups featured on there. They simply have an interest or relationship with Afro people in some way. Still, the majority of the people are from Africa or the Diaspora and it is mainly people who want to maintain some links with home.

Some sites are more specific. There are those that relate to a specific country. There are a number of Nigerian sharing sites for example. When you go on there you see people discussing issues regarding their countries and even speaking in their home variety of pigeon English or in their native dialects.

There are some sites who try to be more than just a hangout for socialising. They attempt to provide a platform for news provision. Ghana Web is just such a website that tries to do this. The offer serious news about the country but at the same time members can comment and chat about the stories with others. Sites such as this also provide a platform for members to upload their own news stories and opinion articles.

Classifieds are also an extremely popular element of these websites. People use them to sell or rent real estate. They post their cars and other items for sale as well. However, perhaps the most popular use of the website is for dating purposes. Dating can take place just through general introductions within the network of each member or it happens through specific ads which are placed and answered. It is difficult to say how many of the relationships made in this way translate into marriages for life but certainly a lot of friends are made in this way.

An African social network can be a lot of fun and you are encouraged to give it a try. You can meet people just like you and they are a great place to keep in touch with what is going on back home. The good thing is that they are easy to find and easy to join.




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