A crowd forms around him. Someone shouts his name before the camera settles. In one video, the frame swings from sky to asphalt to a flash of color, then lands on a face held open by curiosity.
“We are here!” IShowSpeed shouts, with the energy of an NFL Super Bowl Sunday. He gives his location, then keeps moving with no pause to help you get your bearings. You arrive inside the moment and either keep up or fall behind.
That’s how Darren Watkins Jr. moves through the world — livestreaming, with millions watching. The 21-year-old, better known by his YouTube handle IShowSpeed, often shortened to Speed, draws an audience of some 50 million followers.
When he announced last December that he would spend nearly a month livestreaming across Africa, the reaction on camera tipped quickly into a new level of excitement.
Speed laughed as his plan began to sink in. “Africa’s gonna be crazy,” he said, half amused, half bracing himself. By then, he already knew what “crazy” tended to mean.
Speed’s rise comes from his ability to stream his experiences live longer than most people can remain composed. He began as a teenager in Ohio streaming video games from his PlayStation, first on Twitch and then at a massive scale on YouTube. During the COVID-19 pandemic, confinement worked in his favor.
Bedroom streams turned his high-voltage persona into a signature and drew an audience. When the world reopened, he took the same format outside, moving into IRL or “in real life” streaming: streets, crowds and chance encounters became the content. In public spaces, crowds formed and reactions escalated. His endurance built scale and brought exposure, not all of it welcome.
While on tour in China in late 2023, Speed encountered a man who appeared to be a fan. The man rushed Speed’s car holding a bouquet of cotton. Another incident came later in the stream when a man handed him a banana in a box. Monkey noises followed. Speed jumped out and chased the man down the street, the camera rolling as long as it could keep up.
In the summer of 2024 in Oslo, there was nowhere for Speed to go. A hostile crowd closed in as he tried to reach his vehicle. Hands pulled at his hair. Speed later said that he injured his ankle in the crush and would never return there again.
In Africa, he was met differently. The tour opened on Dec. 29 in Angola, where an outpouring of love set the tone. By the end of a long day moving through Luanda, the country’s capital, Speed appeared visibly overwhelmed by the welcome he had received.
“That’s why the people out here look like family,” he said. He kept returning to the same observation, repeating it like something he was still testing out loud. “So many people out here look like me, chat,” addressing the live chat room.
Around 3 million viewers were watching live when he added, almost offhandedly, “Yeah, I’m part Angolan,” promising to share his DNA test results soon. With up to 20 countries scheduled on his Africa tour, Angola was already making him feel at home.
In South Africa, hearing the Xhosa language for the first time left him speechless. Employing many click sounds, it operates outside Western speech habits and often leaves first-timers mesmerized.
Speed arrived in Africa largely unprepared for what he encountered. In Eswatini, that gap became clear, exposing the distance between Black America and the Africa many imagine they know.
Still, he was given a new name, dressed in ceremonial clothing and taken in as their own. Belonging arrived as an offering. The Western reflex that acceptance and belonging must be earned was quietly laid to rest. All of this took place while he was being hosted by one of the world’s last absolute monarchies, a reality that surprised many viewers with its near-mythical quality.
Where African royalty often survives elsewhere as metaphor or memory, here it functions as living authority, present in daily life and governing the country. Black America has long forged its icons under pressure. In Eswatini, authority did not need to be invented in response to erasure; it had been there all along.
Botswana rerouted the conversation yet again. Inside a diamond trading center, Speed learned that the country ranks among the world’s largest exporters of rough diamonds.
Viewers watching live began tracing that path with Speed. Clips circulated, mapping a pipeline shaped for decades by De Beers, with stones routed to cutting and trading hubs in Israel, India and Europe. Botswana holds the land and labor. Branding, resale and markups happen elsewhere.
The livestream gave the imbalance immediacy. When Speed held up a stone worth millions, extraction stopped feeling abstract. Power, and its abuse in diamond trading, came sharply into view. That pattern echoed across the tour.
The diamond trade showed the asymmetric aspect of extraction: Value lifted from the ground in one place gives way to power, profit and authority elsewhere.
Online, the same logic holds. Across the continent, Speed encountered local content creators already livestreaming from their cities and daily lives, in spite of risk to their bodies and loved ones, and while having less support and reach. Their clips circulate widely, but the power to shape how Africa is understood online remains in the hands of outsiders like Speed.
Speed arrives carrying that power by default. Millions watch his livestreams. Sponsors swarm his orbit. That infrastructure exists because he was born in the United States, inside the system that built the major platforms, their algorithms and the sponsor economy that determines what scales, what circulates and what stalls. Power travels with him, almost shaping the livestream before he does.
In Kenya, days later, that dynamic surfaced with clarity. Speed met Ugandan creator Rango “Tenge Tenge,” who had flown in just to see him. Standing side by side, their livestream cracked open with high energy and a run of backflips. Tenge, visibly overwhelmed, kept repeating how much the moment meant to him. The exchange carried joy and asymmetry at once.
Another local creator, referred to as “Ethiopian Speed” (@iamsamson25), joined him at his next stop in Addis Ababa. Then, Tenge came along. The trio snapped into sync, and the spark caught fast. Three voices, one current.
As Speed moved on, his presence in East Africa had already shifted the field, pulling millions of viewers into contact with people, histories and traditions they had never encountered. The local creators he met benefited from that same surge, their audiences expanding in his wake.
Online attention follows power. The people who control reach decide what gets seen and how it is framed. For Africa, that control has long sat outside the continent, shaping its image from the outside in.
That dynamic explains why Africa so often appears through Western eyes, unfolding as a cliche. The pattern is familiar: The camera angles downward, the continent is rendered as being in need, someone — usually a Westerner — arrives with resources, documents the lack of things, delivers assistance and then promptly moves on. The narrative closes neatly, authority remains rooted in Western morality, and the image of Africa is left essentially unchanged.
MrBeast, a white American billionaire YouTuber also known as “Jimmy” Donaldson, represents the most influential version of that model. The videos of MrBeast, ranked by Forbes in 2024 as the highest-paid YouTube creator, center philanthropy as content, funding surgeries, rebuilding homes and financing public works across continents.
When MrBeast recently traveled through Africa, wells were drilled, clinics were supported and aid was distributed. The work mattered, and many lives have been improved. But the same narrative arc holds steady: There is a Western arrival and an intervention by the moral West, followed by a result that is showcased, applauded and then left behind.
IShowSpeed operates on a different frequency. He shows up live and stays there indefinitely, no fix in mind, just an urge to connect. The viewer processes the content at Speed’s pace, accompanying him through all the uncertainty he may face. Depicted in a livestream long enough, Africa stops looking like a problem to solve.
By the time he reached Zambia, the weight of what he had been absorbing became hard to carry. As the sun dropped over the capital Lusaka, Speed stood in the back of a pickup truck struggling to hold it together. “I haven’t been anywhere here where I didn’t feel like I belonged,” he said.
Responses flooded in. Watching how he was received, viewers described their own assumptions collapsing. Recognition traveled through Speed, pulling them closer to Africa and closer to themselves.
One viewer, Caroline Jones, a TikTok user living in California, cried through her reaction. Watching the streams unsettled everything she thought she understood about the continent and her distance from it.
“To see a Black man from the United States go back to Africa and be treated like a human, with respect and love, changed something in me,” she said. “I can’t wait to touch the soil myself.”
North Africa complicated that recognition.
In Egypt, access moved through permits and pressure. Speed became the first person to livestream from inside the Great Pyramid, a permission hard-won through negotiations with the local power and control structures. Security hovered close. Fans who surged toward him were cut off with a single swat.
Still, Cairo created space to breathe. On a felucca drifting along the Nile, a half-baked dare to jump overboard dissolved into music blaring. The boat forgot its function. Skipper and streamer locked in, turning the deck into a floating dance floor.
In Algeria, moments of excitement gave way to sharper tension. Inside a sports arena, he came into contact with a group of ultras, football supporters with a long history of political confrontation. They reacted with hostility to the camera itself, throwing food and forcing him out.
Algerians rushed to explain, both on his livestream and in the comments, that Speed’s race was not the issue. The resistance was to the filming itself. In a country shaped by surveillance, protest and state control, cameras carry deep historical and political weight.
For many viewers watching, that distinction was easy to miss. What registered instead was a broader pattern beginning to take shape in North Africa.
In the south and east, Blackness moved with ease and acceptance. In the north, it passed through older hierarchies and unresolved anxieties. The camera intensified that tension without having to invent it.
The difference revealed less about Speed than about how race, power and belonging operate unevenly across the continent, and how each place chooses to present itself.
As the journey moved west to Senegal, the reception softened again. Crowds gathered without the same edge, and the livestream returned to a familiar warmth. Since the tour began, his subscriber count has grown by roughly 4 million, crossing 50 million on his 21st birthday while he was livestreaming from Nigeria.
Weeks of staying live have changed the way Africa is seen. At their best, Speed’s long streams have reordered attention. Moving deeper into West Africa, he has passed through sites shaped by the Atlantic slave trade, where millions were taken from their continent. Viewers are in live confrontation with histories that shaped Black life on both sides of the ocean.
With just a few countries ahead, it remains open whether that attention will endure once the tour ends, or if viewers will treat this as a passing moment.
The internet has never been one uniform experience. What’s changing is how many experiences are now happening live. Unedited encounters play out in real time, allowing people from around the world to meet each other before those moments are shaped into a story.
For now, at least, IShowSpeed is leading that change.
Credit: newlinesmag
“We are here!” IShowSpeed shouts, with the energy of an NFL Super Bowl Sunday. He gives his location, then keeps moving with no pause to help you get your bearings. You arrive inside the moment and either keep up or fall behind.
That’s how Darren Watkins Jr. moves through the world — livestreaming, with millions watching. The 21-year-old, better known by his YouTube handle IShowSpeed, often shortened to Speed, draws an audience of some 50 million followers.
When he announced last December that he would spend nearly a month livestreaming across Africa, the reaction on camera tipped quickly into a new level of excitement.
Speed laughed as his plan began to sink in. “Africa’s gonna be crazy,” he said, half amused, half bracing himself. By then, he already knew what “crazy” tended to mean.
Speed’s rise comes from his ability to stream his experiences live longer than most people can remain composed. He began as a teenager in Ohio streaming video games from his PlayStation, first on Twitch and then at a massive scale on YouTube. During the COVID-19 pandemic, confinement worked in his favor.
Bedroom streams turned his high-voltage persona into a signature and drew an audience. When the world reopened, he took the same format outside, moving into IRL or “in real life” streaming: streets, crowds and chance encounters became the content. In public spaces, crowds formed and reactions escalated. His endurance built scale and brought exposure, not all of it welcome.
While on tour in China in late 2023, Speed encountered a man who appeared to be a fan. The man rushed Speed’s car holding a bouquet of cotton. Another incident came later in the stream when a man handed him a banana in a box. Monkey noises followed. Speed jumped out and chased the man down the street, the camera rolling as long as it could keep up.
In the summer of 2024 in Oslo, there was nowhere for Speed to go. A hostile crowd closed in as he tried to reach his vehicle. Hands pulled at his hair. Speed later said that he injured his ankle in the crush and would never return there again.
In Africa, he was met differently. The tour opened on Dec. 29 in Angola, where an outpouring of love set the tone. By the end of a long day moving through Luanda, the country’s capital, Speed appeared visibly overwhelmed by the welcome he had received.
“That’s why the people out here look like family,” he said. He kept returning to the same observation, repeating it like something he was still testing out loud. “So many people out here look like me, chat,” addressing the live chat room.
Around 3 million viewers were watching live when he added, almost offhandedly, “Yeah, I’m part Angolan,” promising to share his DNA test results soon. With up to 20 countries scheduled on his Africa tour, Angola was already making him feel at home.
In South Africa, hearing the Xhosa language for the first time left him speechless. Employing many click sounds, it operates outside Western speech habits and often leaves first-timers mesmerized.
Speed arrived in Africa largely unprepared for what he encountered. In Eswatini, that gap became clear, exposing the distance between Black America and the Africa many imagine they know.
Still, he was given a new name, dressed in ceremonial clothing and taken in as their own. Belonging arrived as an offering. The Western reflex that acceptance and belonging must be earned was quietly laid to rest. All of this took place while he was being hosted by one of the world’s last absolute monarchies, a reality that surprised many viewers with its near-mythical quality.
Where African royalty often survives elsewhere as metaphor or memory, here it functions as living authority, present in daily life and governing the country. Black America has long forged its icons under pressure. In Eswatini, authority did not need to be invented in response to erasure; it had been there all along.
Botswana rerouted the conversation yet again. Inside a diamond trading center, Speed learned that the country ranks among the world’s largest exporters of rough diamonds.
Viewers watching live began tracing that path with Speed. Clips circulated, mapping a pipeline shaped for decades by De Beers, with stones routed to cutting and trading hubs in Israel, India and Europe. Botswana holds the land and labor. Branding, resale and markups happen elsewhere.
The livestream gave the imbalance immediacy. When Speed held up a stone worth millions, extraction stopped feeling abstract. Power, and its abuse in diamond trading, came sharply into view. That pattern echoed across the tour.
The diamond trade showed the asymmetric aspect of extraction: Value lifted from the ground in one place gives way to power, profit and authority elsewhere.
Online, the same logic holds. Across the continent, Speed encountered local content creators already livestreaming from their cities and daily lives, in spite of risk to their bodies and loved ones, and while having less support and reach. Their clips circulate widely, but the power to shape how Africa is understood online remains in the hands of outsiders like Speed.
Speed arrives carrying that power by default. Millions watch his livestreams. Sponsors swarm his orbit. That infrastructure exists because he was born in the United States, inside the system that built the major platforms, their algorithms and the sponsor economy that determines what scales, what circulates and what stalls. Power travels with him, almost shaping the livestream before he does.
In Kenya, days later, that dynamic surfaced with clarity. Speed met Ugandan creator Rango “Tenge Tenge,” who had flown in just to see him. Standing side by side, their livestream cracked open with high energy and a run of backflips. Tenge, visibly overwhelmed, kept repeating how much the moment meant to him. The exchange carried joy and asymmetry at once.
Another local creator, referred to as “Ethiopian Speed” (@iamsamson25), joined him at his next stop in Addis Ababa. Then, Tenge came along. The trio snapped into sync, and the spark caught fast. Three voices, one current.
As Speed moved on, his presence in East Africa had already shifted the field, pulling millions of viewers into contact with people, histories and traditions they had never encountered. The local creators he met benefited from that same surge, their audiences expanding in his wake.
Online attention follows power. The people who control reach decide what gets seen and how it is framed. For Africa, that control has long sat outside the continent, shaping its image from the outside in.
That dynamic explains why Africa so often appears through Western eyes, unfolding as a cliche. The pattern is familiar: The camera angles downward, the continent is rendered as being in need, someone — usually a Westerner — arrives with resources, documents the lack of things, delivers assistance and then promptly moves on. The narrative closes neatly, authority remains rooted in Western morality, and the image of Africa is left essentially unchanged.
MrBeast, a white American billionaire YouTuber also known as “Jimmy” Donaldson, represents the most influential version of that model. The videos of MrBeast, ranked by Forbes in 2024 as the highest-paid YouTube creator, center philanthropy as content, funding surgeries, rebuilding homes and financing public works across continents.
When MrBeast recently traveled through Africa, wells were drilled, clinics were supported and aid was distributed. The work mattered, and many lives have been improved. But the same narrative arc holds steady: There is a Western arrival and an intervention by the moral West, followed by a result that is showcased, applauded and then left behind.
IShowSpeed operates on a different frequency. He shows up live and stays there indefinitely, no fix in mind, just an urge to connect. The viewer processes the content at Speed’s pace, accompanying him through all the uncertainty he may face. Depicted in a livestream long enough, Africa stops looking like a problem to solve.
By the time he reached Zambia, the weight of what he had been absorbing became hard to carry. As the sun dropped over the capital Lusaka, Speed stood in the back of a pickup truck struggling to hold it together. “I haven’t been anywhere here where I didn’t feel like I belonged,” he said.
Responses flooded in. Watching how he was received, viewers described their own assumptions collapsing. Recognition traveled through Speed, pulling them closer to Africa and closer to themselves.
One viewer, Caroline Jones, a TikTok user living in California, cried through her reaction. Watching the streams unsettled everything she thought she understood about the continent and her distance from it.
“To see a Black man from the United States go back to Africa and be treated like a human, with respect and love, changed something in me,” she said. “I can’t wait to touch the soil myself.”
North Africa complicated that recognition.
In Egypt, access moved through permits and pressure. Speed became the first person to livestream from inside the Great Pyramid, a permission hard-won through negotiations with the local power and control structures. Security hovered close. Fans who surged toward him were cut off with a single swat.
Still, Cairo created space to breathe. On a felucca drifting along the Nile, a half-baked dare to jump overboard dissolved into music blaring. The boat forgot its function. Skipper and streamer locked in, turning the deck into a floating dance floor.
In Algeria, moments of excitement gave way to sharper tension. Inside a sports arena, he came into contact with a group of ultras, football supporters with a long history of political confrontation. They reacted with hostility to the camera itself, throwing food and forcing him out.
Algerians rushed to explain, both on his livestream and in the comments, that Speed’s race was not the issue. The resistance was to the filming itself. In a country shaped by surveillance, protest and state control, cameras carry deep historical and political weight.
For many viewers watching, that distinction was easy to miss. What registered instead was a broader pattern beginning to take shape in North Africa.
In the south and east, Blackness moved with ease and acceptance. In the north, it passed through older hierarchies and unresolved anxieties. The camera intensified that tension without having to invent it.
The difference revealed less about Speed than about how race, power and belonging operate unevenly across the continent, and how each place chooses to present itself.
As the journey moved west to Senegal, the reception softened again. Crowds gathered without the same edge, and the livestream returned to a familiar warmth. Since the tour began, his subscriber count has grown by roughly 4 million, crossing 50 million on his 21st birthday while he was livestreaming from Nigeria.
Weeks of staying live have changed the way Africa is seen. At their best, Speed’s long streams have reordered attention. Moving deeper into West Africa, he has passed through sites shaped by the Atlantic slave trade, where millions were taken from their continent. Viewers are in live confrontation with histories that shaped Black life on both sides of the ocean.
With just a few countries ahead, it remains open whether that attention will endure once the tour ends, or if viewers will treat this as a passing moment.
The internet has never been one uniform experience. What’s changing is how many experiences are now happening live. Unedited encounters play out in real time, allowing people from around the world to meet each other before those moments are shaped into a story.
For now, at least, IShowSpeed is leading that change.
Credit: newlinesmag
