Lojede’s ‘Afrotods’ Promotes Cultural Identity in Black Children 

Vanessa Obioha

Filmmaker, actor, writer and creative entrepreneur Fabian Adeoye Lojede has launched a new project, ‘The Afrotods,’ designed for Black children with a connection to African identity. Afrotods is built around Afroville, a fictional analogy for a modern Black world. An ideal modern black world in the eyes of Lojede is one where a child can travel to any city in Nigeria—or across Africa—and naturally learn the local language, “just like when you want to go to Italy for your studies and you have to learn how to speak Italian.”

Lojede’s foray into children’s content is driven by a longstanding concern: the lack of media that truly represents Black kids.

“I’m a Pan-Africanist, and one of the key things that I see is that our children, black kids generally, there’s no content out there for them that talks to them. There’s lots of content that you might see done by Europeans or foreign channels, but there’s almost a caricatureness in it, particularly in the way they speak,” he said during a recent encounter.

He pointed to common depictions of African children interacting with lions or giraffes.

“First of all, nobody talks like that. They’ll tell a story of an African kid and a lion. Many of our kids have never even seen a lion. They saw cosmopolitanism in their world. Even the ones in the villages, how many of them have seen elephants and giraffes? So there was that aspect of ‘how do we talk to them in a manner in which they are used to?’ These children live online now”

To avoid coming across as preachy, Lojede crafted Afrotods so that its messages are subtle and value-based. This required speaking with parents to understand their concerns about the content their children consume. Many highlighted a disconnect in value systems, especially in how children in popular shows address adults, often in ways that are culturally alien.

“We never had to learn our culture,” he said. “Our culture wasn’t something that was an academic process. We lived it. But now we have to, in some instances, teach our kids their culture. It was unheard of to have Yoruba or Igbo teachers privately teach the kids the language in their own country. Now, that’s a thing.”

With ‘The Afrotods,’ Lojede hopes to gently shift that narrative. As much as he wants children to absorb core values, he also wants them to have fun. His main goal, he said, is for “any child or anyone that lays claim to some form of African identity, to be able to see themselves in a very subtle way, not necessarily in a traditional cultural sense, but more in terms of value and identity.

“Because the beauty about Africa or African identity is that it’s so diverse that you can’t narrow it down to one particular thing. So we’re not going into specific traditional cultures. It is more about those unifying value systems that we would like to see in the modern world with our kids.”

‘The Afrotods’ is presented as an animation and has a YouTube Channel. Lojede hints at plans to develop a narrative animated app for it, but for now, it is available as an animated e-book that can be downloaded on phones or tablets. A French version is in the works, alongside adaptations in other African languages such as Yoruba and Zulu.