“Am I Your Coequal?!”: Memes and Changing Meanings in the Digital Subversion of Ghanaian Hierarchies

Abstract

Capturing the zeitgeist of youthful challenges to the status quo in Ghana, a video of an anonymous young person challenging an older politician with a derisive call of “Tweaa!” went viral in 2014. Reentextualizations of the encounter were soon circulating online in the form of memes, songs, and hashtags and offline in joking exchanges everywhere from vegetable markets to parliament. This article traces the many ironic reembeddings of the tweaa clip across these contexts, as young people used tweaa to subvert and interrogate Ghana’s rigid social hierarchies—ultimately producing an enduring shift in the vocabulary of protest in Ghana. Tweaa, once a casual interjection of disapproval, is now explicitly seen as iconic of the disenfranchised challenging those in power: a verb meaning “to protest inept authority.” This case study of memetic circulation suggests that memes not only discursively produce publics but can effect seismic semiotic shifts in everyday language.