Online comics African style

The blog 3Bute, pronounced tribute, of Nigerian Bunmi John Oloruntoba adapts other writers' stories about Africa into three-page online comics. Next, the comics are wrapped in 'mashable' layer that lets the readers add their own content.

Before you know it, the cartoon is bespeckled with a few dozen clickable dots, which lead to other web pages like a Flickr picture, a Tweet, a YouTube video of a band from the town where the comic is set, or a downloadable map of that town. This generates a new form of comics and adds a lot of new context to the original story, that becomes a 'living', interactive narrative, and connects readers.

Cyberpunk

Crowdsourcing is the term for using the help of the general public to solve a problem, find and answer to a question or improve an invention. A very successful example of crowdsourcing is the internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia - its over 22 million articles have been written by volunteers from around the globe.

"The most fun for us is to discover overlooked travel or music journalism on the web," says Oloruntoba. "For instance a tiny blog post written by Chris Kirkley at Sahelsounds.com about his visit to an mp3 market in Mauritania.

A few months after I adapted it, it was embraced as a great example of 'cyberpunk' that merged the digital with the African urban landscape. It also got featured on the popular blog Boing Boing. We collaborated with the BBC Focus on Africa magazine, too, and made a three-page story about the life of the late Cesaria Evoria."

Single story problem

3Bute also reworked ten shortlisted stories for The Caine Prize for African Writing. The organisation intends to invite other visual artists like illustrators, infographic designers, painters, cartoonists and photographers to create 3butes.

According to the initiators, the extra context which 3Bute is looking for is missing in African narratives. They believe all the tags and other additions by the public organically becomes the contextual world of the story. 3Bute wants solve the 'single story problem' as described by bestseller author Chimamanda Adichie.

More than zebras and Maasai

Many people, when they hear the word 'Africa', think of war, or hunger, or zebras, or the Maasai people. It is a simplistic image that doesn't match the richness and complexity of the continent. "Our goal is to render Africa in a more engaging and immersive way," says Oloruntoba. "I want to get as close as possible to a 'remix effect' that enables the reader to see things in a whole new context."

"Blogging also helped me realise that the entire multimedia context missing from African narratives is already out there on Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and so on. By means of the 3Bute.com audience interaction layer this entire context can be crowdsourced and added to African stories and journalism on the web. This way, a larger audience can engage and interact better with those stories."

Source: allAfrica