Social Network Platforms and the Oshiwambo Practice of Eengano

Indigenous peoples’ appropriation of social media offers opportunities for scholars to investigate how ICTs can be harnessed to increase the resilience of communities. This chapter describes insights from experimenting with digital networks in the Oshiwambo practice of riddles to persist language and cultural values and beliefs. Traditionally, families played Eengano during gatherings around the evening fire. Due to increased rural-to-urban migration and rural technology use (e.g. cellphones, social media), young people are increasingly unfamiliar with Eengano, and this contributes to language loss and cultural gaps between older and younger people. We trialed Eengano on Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram with younger and older people in Namibia, to determine the potential of these platforms for online play and assembling a riddle dictionary. Our findings indicate that each platform has different features that afford and undermine different aspects of play and expression. Critical to our study’s integrity was analyzing all data, considering that all play was done in Oshiwambo, which contrasts with the way English dominates African technology research. A qualitative method using an interpretivist approach was employed, comprising of observing online participation of riddles and telephonic interviews with the participants. To discover knowledge and patterns, and to acquire a deeper understanding of how the participants used social media to practice riddles, content analysis was used. The findings led to the conclusion that social media networks (Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram) can be used to successfully play Eengano, providing unique affordances such as permanency and accessibility of content that is missing in the traditional, oral practice. However, social media networks also disrupted the order of the play of Eengano with some constraints such as asynchrony, that lets a user participate in the play regardless of the time of day or to start a new discussion irrespective of the rules or riddle trail. WhatsApp was the most used platform for online riddling followed by Facebook, while Instagram was hardly used.