Afropolitan Cities, Explore

No, Africa Isn’t Your Spiritual Retreat

A Call-Out to Exploitative Travel Influencers Who Treat the Continent Like a Stage Set

The notification made my stomach drop.

Another influencer—this one with half a million followers—had just posted a carousel titled “How Africa Saved My Soul.” There she was, draped in tourist-market kente, posing with local children (who, needless to say, didn’t consent to becoming props in her personal-brand journey), and waxing poetic about finding her “authentic self” during a whirlwind seven-day trip.

The comments? Predictably nauseating.
“You’re so brave for going there!”
“This is so inspiring!”
“I need this energy in my life.”

Each heart-eye emoji felt like a small violence—another pixel in the new romantic colonialism that reduces an entire continent to a mood board for Western enlightenment.

I screenshotted the post and sent it to my group chat with one line: “We need to talk about this.”
Because we do.

This isn’t about gatekeeping travel or suggesting Africa should be off-limits to outsiders. It’s about calling out a specific kind of spiritual and aesthetic extractivism—where African bodies, cultures, and landscapes become backdrops in someone else’s hero narrative.

The Commodification of African Spirituality

Let’s start with the root: the systematic repackaging of African spirituality into a wellness aesthetic for Western consumption.

On Instagram, you’ll find self-styled gurus offering “ancestral healing sessions” and “tribal meditations” inspired by a single trip to Ghana or Kenya. They host expensive retreats promising “African soul alignment,” often with zero cultural grounding or community accountability.

The issue isn’t that African spiritual traditions lack value. Quite the opposite—they offer profound teachings on community, balance, and sacred ecology. The problem is how they’re lifted wholesale from their contexts, stripped of lineage, and sold back to audiences who will never learn their names, let alone their origins.

When an influencer markets “ancient African wisdom” without mentioning the specific ethnic group, oral tradition, or cosmological system it comes from, they’re not celebrating Africa—they’re erasing it.

Extraction + Profit – Attribution = Theft.
And when that theft is spiritual, it becomes even more violent—because what’s being stolen isn’t just knowledge, it’s memory, meaning, and dignity.

The Orphanage Photo Op Industrial Complex

Nothing crystallizes the ethical failure of influencer tourism quite like the orphanage photoshoot.

You’ve seen them: white influencers flanked by smiling Black children, captioned with declarations like “These kids changed my life forever.” The posts rack up thousands of likes and zero critical engagement. No questions about consent. No notes about poverty-driven institutionalization. No mention that these children are being instrumentalized for digital clout.

UNICEF reports that up to 80% of children in African orphanages have living parents. Many so-called orphanages exist primarily to profit from voluntourism, not to protect the vulnerable.

Yet influencers still line up for their moment of “service,” displacing local workers, reinforcing savior narratives, and feeding a content machine that exploits both emotion and inequality.

Here’s the truth: if your humanitarianism requires an audience, it’s not compassion—it’s performance. And if your content features children you don’t know and didn’t protect, you’re not an advocate. You’re a user.

The Safari-to-Enlightenment Pipeline

Let’s talk about the influencer safari circuit—because it’s become a genre of its own.

The formula is almost laughable:

  • Gifted luxury safari
  • Golden hour giraffe shot
  • Caption about “feeling connected to the earth”
  • Optional line about conservation (without context)

But what gets left out is telling. No mention of how many safari lodges were built on land stolen from Indigenous communities. No discussion of how conservation in Africa often continues colonial legacies of removing people from ecosystems they’ve sustained for generations.

Instead, we get aestheticized environmentalism, where African landscapes are reduced to Instagram backdrops for enlightenment narratives that have nothing to do with ecology—and even less to do with justice.

Wildlife becomes metaphor. Wilderness becomes myth. And African people become invisible.

The Language of New-Age Colonialism

Words matter. Especially when they sanitize exploitation.

Africa is rarely described as complex, urban, modern. Instead, influencers call it “raw,” “tribal,” “untouched,” “spiritual”—as if 1.3 billion people are part of a living museum waiting to be discovered.

African joy is framed as miraculous despite poverty. African resilience is aestheticized without reference to historical theft or current inequality. And the influencer is never just a tourist—they’re a seeker, a prophet, a pioneer on a personal quest for truth.

This isn’t language—it’s branding.
And it mirrors the very rhetoric that underpinned colonial conquest: the “noble savage,” the “virgin land,” the “dark continent” waiting for light.

If your language turns 54 nations into a metaphor for your personal growth, you’re not describing Africa—you’re distorting it.

The Economics of Exploitation

Let’s follow the money, because it always reveals the power.

Influencers profit immensely from Africa-themed content.

  • Brand deals with travel and wellness companies
  • Paid retreats
  • Sponsored posts and affiliate links
  • Book deals about their “transformation”

Meanwhile, the communities they feature get… nothing.

The children in the photos don’t get royalties. The elders whose rituals get filmed don’t get licensing rights. The local artisans whose work is aestheticized in flat lays don’t get credit—or customers.

These influencers have the reach and revenue to fund sustainable projects or amplify local voices. But visibility without redistribution is exploitation. Period.

If your platform benefits from Africa, your platform should benefit Africans. Otherwise, it’s just colonialism in high resolution.

The Audience Is Complicit

Let’s not let followers off the hook.

Every time someone comments, “This is so inspiring,” under a photo of a child who can’t give informed consent, they’re enabling harm. Every time someone saves a post about “African soul healing” without asking about lineage or respect, they’re complicit in appropriation.

The audience is not passive. Their engagement fuels the algorithm that rewards exploitative content. Their silence grants social license to influencers who should be held accountable.

If you love Africa, your engagement should reflect that. That means asking questions. That means supporting creators and businesses rooted on the continent. That means disrupting the performance economy that turns African life into Western lifestyle content.

What Real Cultural Exchange Looks Like

Let’s be clear: the solution isn’t isolation—it’s transformation.

Africa is not off-limits. It’s not a secret. It’s not a relic. It’s a continent full of artists, thinkers, activists, healers, technologists, and everyday people doing extraordinary things. They don’t need saving. They need to be centered.

So here’s what respectful travel and content creation might look like:

  • Partner with local creators instead of speaking for them.
  • Credit traditions, not just aesthetics.
  • Seek consent—and understand what true consent looks like.
  • Use your platform to redistribute opportunity and revenue.
  • Tell the story with the community, not about them.

And finally: stop coming here to be saved.

Africa isn’t your retreat. It’s not a metaphor. It’s not a hashtag. It’s a living, breathing continent full of histories, futures, and people who deserve more than to be someone’s spiritual accessory.

Until influencers and their audiences are ready to confront the colonial patterns they’re replicating in pixels and captions, their “awakening” will continue to be someone else’s erasure.

Have you seen this kind of content on your timeline? Drop a comment below or tag us in the most outrageous influencer posts you’ve seen. Let’s name it, challenge it, and change the narrative.
Read next: “African Wellness Isn’t a Trend — It’s a Return Home”

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