YouTube series helps African immigrants find connections, community in Nova Scotia

A team of African immigrants in Halifax have created a YouTube web series to help keep other African immigrants informed on issues specific to their new community.

The show, which is called Community Update, was created by Gbenga Akintokun. Promise Akoi is the current host. 

“This is a platform where African immigrants have found expression,” Akintokun told the Halifax Examiner in a recent interview. “It’s kind of like a showcase platform where we also talk about issues that are going on in the community, where we pass information about what is going on around us here in Canada.” 

Gnenga Akintokun is the creator of Community Update. Credit: Contributed by Gbenga Akintokun

Akintokun recorded the first episode of Community Update in February. He said the platform showcases businesses within, and that provide services to, the African immigrant community so that “people can get to know where to get what.”

He said the show has also included interviews with experts within the community to discuss issues specific to the African immigrant community.

“We had a medical doctor here who talked about some of the things you need to do as the weather is changing,” Akintokun said. “Remember that we came from a region where our normal temperature is like 30 degrees, so coming to this, it’s new for a lot of people. We brought in someone who would explain, especially to the newly-landed [immigrants], what they need to do.”

Akintokun, his wife, Modele, and their three children, moved to Halifax from Lagos, Nigeria in 2016. Akintokun later graduated from NSCC where he studied journalism and television production.

He later worked at CBC Halifax and with Brian Daly as part of CBC’s former African Nova Scotian Content Unit.

He now owns M4 Media, a video production company and studio where he and a group of African immigrant volunteers film and produce Community Update.

“The feedback has been amazing and that’s what has kept us going,” he said.  

Akintokun and Akoi said Africans and newcomers have a natural inclination to seek each other out upon arriving in their new environment.

Akintoku said there are several societies and organizations that work to bring them together such as the African Diaspora Association of the Maritimes (ADAM), and the Association of Nigerians in Nova Scotia (ANNS).

It was at ANNS annual general meeting where he and Akoi, a fellow Nigerian, first met.

“We also had a couple of people who have come to host [Community Update] and gone, but Promise has been quite consistent and committed to this and we wouldn’t have probably come this far without him,” Akintokun said.

Akoi, who moved to Halifax from Nigeria with his wife and children in 2018, said it was at the ANNS AGM where Akintokun first approached him about possibly collaborating.

“I guess he thought I was able to express my views and he needed people with those qualities who would be able to say things the way they are, who will be committed to a cause, which is supporting and giving back to our communities,” Akoi said.

Akoi agrees there is a commonality among newly arrived Africans in Nova Scotia and in Canada.

“There’s one thing that is common; we are immigrants. People that are moving to a different place all together for some different reasons,” Akoi said. ”It could be economic, it could be born out of crisis in their different countries, which is not the case with me… that’s the number one thing that ties these people together.”

Akoi and Akintokun said they also want to grow the platform to help strengthen bridges between the African immigrant community and the African Nova Scotian communities to “actually come together as one.”

“Because we’ve had, all the time, people within this community, the Black community here in Nova Scotia, wanting to know where their ancestors came from,” Akoi said.

“Some never had the opportunity of going there. They don’t even know how their people dressed regionally. Getting in contact with people who have come to meet you in this space, it’s something I feel is an opportunity that we should be able to embrace and take advantage of.”