Reimagining Feminist Digital Worlds

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InterviewsJune/July 2025
Feminist

Photo Illustration by Ezinne Osueke / THE REPUBLIC. Source Ref: ANN DARAMOLA, PEXELS. 

THE REPUBLIC INTERVIEWS

Reimagining Feminist Digital Worlds

The founder of PARIWO and creator of the social media platform, neno, Ann Daramola, discusses building technology by and for African women and reimagining digital platforms that centre Black African experiences.
Feminist

Photo Illustration by Ezinne Osueke / THE REPUBLIC. Source Ref: ANN DARAMOLA, PEXELS. 

THE REPUBLIC INTERVIEWS

Reimagining Feminist Digital Worlds

The founder of PARIWO and creator of the social media platform, neno, Ann Daramola, discusses building technology by and for African women and reimagining digital platforms that centre Black African experiences.

I got the chance to join the public beta test for neno last year after discovering PARIWO. The name PARIWO—a Yoruba word meaning “to make noise”— describes the ecosystem of digital publishing tools and platforms created to amplify voices from the margins. neno, meaning “word” in Swahili, is PARIWO’s flagship product, a community-owned and story-based social media platform, built with the intention to create spaces where marginalized voices can gather and share their stories in ways that reflect their own contexts and needs, with algorithms designed to be organic and non-toxic.

PARIWO is led by Ann Daramola, a software engineer and entrepreneur with 15 years of technical experience across companies including Disney and Glossier. Daramola, an African woman of Yoruba descent born in Nigeria, blends her technical expertise, feminist principles and continental and diasporic ties, with her work as a community organizer advocating for Black tech workers and as a curator of Black African stories throughout the diaspora.

This conversation with Ann Daramola takes on special significance at a moment when African women’s digital existence stands at critical crossroads in an increasingly anti-activist internet where all major platforms are now owned by far-right leaning men; where technology enables hypervisible organizing while at the same time amplifying existing systems of power that marginalize Black African voices.

By centring themselves in conversations about who builds, critiques and reimagines technology, African women, like Daramola, are dispelling centuries of repressive discourse. Through neno, Daramola is reimagining platform architecture itself attuned to the histories, users and contexts of Africans and the Black diaspora as a direct challenge to the governance models of western tech giants. This work is particularly urgent as we witness platforms like Twitter/X and Meta abandon content moderation systems, directly impacting precarious communities and activist movements online, and reflecting deep-set power imbalances in the digital economy.

What Daramola articulates so powerfully in her work with PARIWO and neno is that ‘technology is just an amplification and acceleration of our material conditions.’ By shifting centres to the margins, Daramola and other Afro-Feminist technologists are working with an entirely different set of raw ingredients, reimagining our digital worlds from their very foundations.

Our conversation continues below and has been edited for brevity and clarity.

OLOLADE FANIYI

Let’s start with your journey to PARIWO and neno.social. What experiences led you to see building digital platforms as necessary for African feminist and queer communities, and what key moments shaped how you understand what’s at stake in these spaces?

ANN DARAMOLA

PARIWO (and all the projects in its ecosystem) is less about building digital spaces for people at the margins of society, and more about amplifying how we already show up for each other in our material (non-digital) realities. Technology is just an amplification and acceleration of our material conditions, which is to say that our material conditions are the raw ingredients for any technology we create. So, if we exist in an ableist, racist, misogynistic world, our technology will also be ableist, racist, and misogynistic, but… louder.

However, when we shift our centres to the margins, whether the margins of race, gender, disability, sexuality, artistry, faith, we find a different set of raw ingredients to work with. That is where I’ve positioned the technology and protocol, I call PARIWO, and the tools built with it, namely the social network called neno.

I’ve spent most of my life in the margins, first as a Nigerian immigrant navigating American Midwest whiteness, then in South Central Los Angeles. By the time I left university, I had been the only Black woman in all my engineering courses and have often been the only Black woman in the tech companies I’ve worked in for the past ten years.

I remember sitting in a meeting with colleagues and hearing one manager say, out loud, with his own mouth, while other people were listening, that he would have never hired me if he knew, among other things, how well I could code. As astounding as that moment was, it wasn’t the first or last time my identity would seem to threaten the people around me at work. No one expects the Black girl developer, and certainly not one who looks and thinks like someone from that gendered, Black, and African centre.

And that centre is brilliant. It literally shines with possibility. We can trace the lineage of the binary maths that are the foundation of computing today through imperial colonialism to indigenous West African divination systems still in use today. Somewhere along the road of imperial colonialism, our indigenous, pre-colonial ways of being in relationship with each other and with the world around us got flattened and whitewashed.

I discovered the works of Black American feminists through internet spaces on websites like Blogger, LiveJournal, and eventually Twitter and Tumblr, where Black people occupied their centre unapologetically. It’s how I discovered Audre Lorde, who wrote ‘I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.’

‘Your silence will not protect you,’ I wrote in one of my journals and then on one of my Twitter accounts. ‘So make noise.’ And that is how PARIWO came to be.

OLOLADE FANIYI

African activists have been discussing digital rights long before recent social media migrations. What patterns of harm have you observed in mainstream platforms, and how do these current migrations connect to the longer history of African feminist and queer experiences online?

ANN DARAMOLA

As a reminder, the material realities in which we exist are the raw ingredients for our digital realities, neither of which are fixed points of space or time. So, when we are asking for digital rights, what we are really searching for is an acknowledgement of human rights, something that has not been afforded Black African people in over 500 years. Unless and until Black Africans can demand, seize, and reinforce the right to be human in our material reality, we will always be struggling for power in the digital.

This isn’t to say that the digital doesn’t impact the material, because it certainly does. In fact, it’s because marginalized communities found each other in the digital that we can even be having this conversation today. Before the proliferation of today’s social media, activists had anonymity on their side. We could communicate beyond the reach of state governments simply because the state did not understand how to find us online.

From forums and chatrooms to obscure comment sections in blogs, marginalized communities were able to find each other and escape, however briefly, the oppression of their material conditions. But as the Internet becomes more interwoven with our institutions, we continue to experience harm at a larger, more harmful scale.

Today, any digital communication tool is subject to the prying eyes of power brokers, and unless you are using encrypted safety measures, you can assume that your privacy and anonymity online is non-existent.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t use or build social media platforms. It means that, more than ever, marginalized people are looking for spaces to gather, to see each other, to know that they are not alone. If we can find a different set of raw ingredients to make different kinds of tech that help us develop different kinds of relationships with each other, we can help our communities find each other again.

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OLOLADE FANIYI

You’re currently developing neno.social. What specific experiences with digital campaigns and community building made you realize that adapting existing platforms wasn’t enough?

ANN DARAMOLA

Way back in the summer of 2009 on Twitter, a rapper named Wale started attaching the hashtag #ThatsAfrican to some very African tweets. The idea of ‘Black Twitter’ was still nascent, but immediately potent and recognizable. But the ‘Black’ in Black Twitter was, and still remains, ‘Black American’.

What was remarkable was that Africans—mostly Nigerians—were coming out to share their experiences, and we could see not only the wide range of African life, but also the unmistakable commonalities across the Black African diaspora. Dots that would have taken years to connect took less than a day to crystalize in people’s imaginations of Blackness. That is what I mean by the digital world being an amplification and acceleration of our material realities.

The material reality was still the raw ingredient, and there was still antiblack racism to contend with. Not knowing what they were seeing, the white people who ran Twitter censored the hashtag, and shortly after, many white men took to their platforms to ask questions like ‘#ThatsAfrican—When Twitter Went Racist?’

I wrote about it because of how thrilled I was to see the Africas come together in that moment. It was like a peek into a future where the raw ingredients of our digital reality were not antiblack racism, but a self-gazing Black African diasporic reality: specific and uncommon, connected through culture that remains across space and time.

We are so close, and neno brings us even closer. We’re still in semi-private beta, but you can head to https://neno.social and join the conversation. There are a couple hundred of us in there now, and we are nearing our 10,000th story, with new features coming out every month.

I’ve built dozens of applications over my career, but only a few have been for the margins. Imagine a section of the web that is connected to the unique and universal Black African experience, searchable, social, and built to last. With PARIWO and neno, we have an opportunity to take all our frustrations and outrage at platforms we can’t control and transform them into a tangible product that’s infused with our values, our culture, our genius.

OLOLADE FANIYI

Digital platforms are increasingly shaping how activism and knowledge production happen. What are your thoughts on the ‘platformization’ of African feminist and queer organizing, both its risks and possibilities?

ANN DARAMOLA

The digital world is an amplification of the work happening offline. We often find ourselves platforming individuals in feminist and queer spaces because of a core human desire for salvation through connection. It gives us hope that there are people who can see the world as it’s broken and tell the truth about it, seemingly without fear of the consequences. That’s an important and necessary function of the activist on social media platforms – a motivating and catalytic position needed to create material change.

Most recently, we saw the power of this in how Black feminists organized to bring aid to Black Africans stuck in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, and before that, how feminists organized information channels during the End SARS protests of October 2020.

Things start to collapse when we realize that our society doesn’t actually treat women, children and people of marginalized genders as first-class citizens. This doesn’t mean that only men are responsible for the disparity; cis, straight women are some of the most formidable reinforcements of these social standards. We quickly reach our limits with digital organizing when we come up against issues like transphobia, classism, and how we treat children and poor people, because any work done online requires the raw ingredients of human society to sustain it.

Nigerians and other West African states are still contending with a transphobic and homophobic culture that allows us to unlook the suffering that trans and queer people experience offline, which means that we will continue to see that dynamic amplified in our online spaces as well.

While digital platforms give trans and queer people avenues for advocacy that otherwise don’t exist in the mainstreams of our material reality, the material conditions still impact just how far our sense of liberation can go. The dispensations of power that form our societies put anyone who is not an able-bodied straight man at risk the farther away they go from conforming to the roles assigned to them. Trans and queer people, along with disabled people and all the intersections of identity are about as far from that able-bodied straight man centre as you can get.

Without a society that reinforces the feminist lens through which our activist spaces operate, and without a feminist lens that can critically examine the margins, we continue to take the tiniest of steps towards true equality, and the people marginalized even within the margins will continue to be harmed.

OLOLADE FANIYI

How does your approach to content moderation on Neno differ from mainstream platforms that often either over-police or under-protect African feminist and queer communities? What practices have you found effective for addressing harm without reproducing punitive systems?

ANN DARAMOLA

Because neno is still so new, we have the advantage of being able to actually see each other’s stories throughout the app. And because the raw ingredients of marginalized experiences are being amplified, we face a different set of problems than most other social media platforms.

Where Twitter’s white, liberal leanings leave it open to infiltration by white supremacist trolls, neno is still figuring out how to get people to realize that no one is going to jump in your mentions and start gaslighting your experience. The digital PTSD is real, and people are still realizing that it is possible to be in community online and not stumble over homophobia or misogyny, or unprovoked colourist takes.

We’ve not seen harm at the scale to which I’ve witnessed on other platforms simply because we’re not at that scale. As we continue to grow, we plan to integrate a more African way of community into the platform by using digital tools that promote communal gathering and consensus building rather than top-down mandates.

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OLOLADE FANIYI

You’ve mentioned the importance of feminist principles in building digital communities. What core feminist values have you embedded directly into neno’s platform architecture?

ANN DARAMOLA

One feminist value that often goes overlooked is that to acknowledge our inherent humanity as women and people of the margins, we are also acknowledging our capacity to do harm, regardless of how marginalized we may be. This means that whenever we imagine new features for the platform, we also imagine how those features might do harm, and work towards making that transparent as we develop. We can’t stop harm from happening, but we can anticipate that it will happen and use community guidelines to address it.

Because the people in neno have themselves experienced harm from other platforms, both digital and physical, they are less likely to do harm, or to amplify harmful behaviour. But it is only a matter of time before we encounter an incident of harm in our community, and what we’re working towards through the communal, indigenous, African way of building, are tools that will keep us in the community as long as possible.

OLOLADE FANIYI

We’ve seen several African feminist initiatives experimenting with digital spaces, from WhatsApp groups to archives and knowledge-sharing projects. How does neno speak to these existing efforts, and what specific gaps are you trying to address?

ANN DARAMOLA

I’m very bullish on the internet as a democratic, decentralized technology. In fact, I’m counting on the web, which is an application built on top of the internet, to last long beyond any app or social media platform. This means that while it’s important that we find our favourite corners of any social media platform, it’s also necessary that we are able to build archives that outlast those platforms as well. And that is what the Internet was designed to do.

African feminists have done an incredible amount of thinking and knowledge production on social media, but those platforms, because they aren’t built for our prolific and polyphasic relationships with each other, cannot sustain the weight of our work for more than one generation. It is nearly impossible to find the work that Black feminists were doing on the blogs in the early 2000s, let alone the meandering and disjointed, but still amazing conversations we had on Twitter before the rise of generative AI.

Even institutions like the Internet Archive can’t capture the myriad kinds of Blackness and Africanness found on the web today.

neno, as a project of PARIWO, addresses this by implementing features from major social platforms, providing storytelling tools in a social form, and pulling those stories into a decentralized database called the Nenobase. neno, meaning ‘word’ in Swahili, gives us a way to gather our stories and preserve them beyond any singular platform.

OLOLADE FANIYI

Digital spaces often reproduce extractive relationships. How do your values shape your technical and design choices at neno? What specific examples set your approach apart from mainstream platforms?

ANN DARAMOLA

Fundamentally, I believe that the first African nation to fully elevate itself from the weight of what bell hooks called ongoing ‘imperialist white supremacist heteropatriarchy,’ will do so by treating marginalized genders as first-class citizens. This doesn’t happen by chance, and it certainly isn’t something that will just be given to any marginalized gender. This is power we’re talking about, and, as my mother taught me, ‘Only power pass power.’ That is to say, only power can move power. But, if you are not taught how to get power, how can you move power?

If you define power, as I do, as the ability to create change, then you can see it in everything you do, including building a social media app. Octavia E. Butler, speaking through her protagonist Lauren Olamina in Parable of the Sower, wrote ‘All that you touch / You Change / All that you Change / Changes you.’

Teaching people to recognize and wield their power is what I’ve built into the decisions I make with neno. This radiates through the way I design each feature, knowing that the people who are using the app are shaping it, that the app does not belong to me, and that I am merely a steward for the time being. Because I relinquish control as the inventor and instead participate as a citizen of the community, this elevates us all to first-class status within the platform.

There is no plan to ‘verify’ people and compromise their right to anonymity and privacy, and there is every plan to care for our well-being by creating thoughtful interfaces that attend to our varying levels of ability.

We don’t need to wait on any African nation to finally figure out that they’re doing a disservice to themselves by leaving people at the margins unprotected. We can use the digital world to start that work by teaching each other how to see each other as first-class citizens. The terms of service have embedded these values; your stories do not belong to anyone but you, and if we want to use them to promote neno, we will ask for your permission before doing so. Your stories are powerful, after all, and I want us to learn to honour that.

OLOLADE FANIYI

Many platforms start with promises of safety and accountability but struggle to maintain these values as they grow. How are you thinking about power, governance, and community ownership in the long-term?

ANN DARAMOLA

As mentioned above, I’ve been using a communal governance model to roll out new features and think through ownership in the long-term as a mutually beneficial position. As Internet citizens, we are not used to taking ownership of the platforms where we congregate. We just kind of show up, figure out the interface, and go from there. We’ve been taught, Internet generation after Internet generation, that these things are free to use, and we don’t need to consider the costs.

And yet, our expectations of these platforms keep climbing. We demand a certain set of features, a certain level of moderation, as we should, except, these platforms weren’t built or designed with African ways of knowing and being in mind.

When we decide we want a different set of raw ingredients, we need to educate ourselves and each other about the costs of maintaining these platforms both at the material level (servers are cheap, but monitoring is expensive!), and at the relational level. How we talk about ourselves, and how we talk about each other will absolutely be amplified in the digital spaces we build.

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OLOLADE FANIYI

How do you navigate the tension between platform sustainability and resisting pressure to scale quickly or adopt Silicon Valley models? What does care-centred and sustainable community ownership look like in practice?

ANN DARAMOLA

Nature doesn’t scale. It spreads and connects. This is the model I’m using to build the foundations of PARIWO, neno, and other tools within this ecosystem. I’m playing a long game, and it’s in our best interest to get as deeply rooted as possible before reaching for the skies. This means that the story that we need different raw ingredients is more important than having all those raw ingredients available right away.

As that story spreads, it connects with people who can run with it, build their own things, or invest in what we already have in motion. It’s the power of story that I’m counting on here, which is why I’m not surprised that the first users of neno are amazing storytellers themselves.

When I crowdfunded for PARIWO in the summer of 2024, I was met with almost-belligerent lines of questioning from mostly Black African men demanding to see a business plan and to know how the project would be sustained. After all, the goals of any social media project must be profit. This experience is familiar to any Black woman who is fundraising in tech. The tech industry is inherently extractive and wants anyone participating in it to move accordingly.

Only one of those men did what he was supposed to: invest generously in the work a Black African woman was doing simply because he understood the imbalance of power at play. I am deeply grateful to him, and to my tribe of siblings, friends, and parents who trust me with this vision. This is what community ownership looks like behind the websites, apps, and social media profiles.

Also, my centre is Black, African and gendered. Silicon ke? I’m the granddaughter of farmers, and the daughter of the most brilliant teachers of their generation. We are sustained by community, by connection. We know and speak real truths, not artificially inflated values or intelligences. Truth-telling is crucial to any community-building work we undertake, and in a time of rising global fascism, the ability to speak truth is ever so urgent.

OLOLADE FANIYI

Looking at the history of African feminist/queer digital organizing, what patterns have you observed in terms of sustainability and community ownership? How are these informing your current work?

ANN DARAMOLA

I’ve always wielded feminism more as a tool than an identity. One of the most powerful tools of feminism is the permission for women and marginalized genders to take up space. You’re going to die whether you do or don’t, so you might as well take up the space. Make noise. Be bright. Be colourful. Sòrò sókè. Pariwo. This is the throughline I’ve experienced in all African-feminist organizing: the unrelenting space-taking that is necessary and urgent in order to create change.

With that in mind, I look for opportunities to take up space, not just in the writing I do, but also in the way the interfaces are designed, using bright and colourful images, and offering a visual loudness to the work. This is in contrast to the minimalist and stark interfaces that are starting to shape the web today. Artists like Lulu Kitololo and the archival work of Jepchumba Cheluget’s African Digital Art inspire the way I design graphics and build interfaces to bring a bit of PARIWO, that is, noisemaking, to the identity of the platforms we’re imagining. The boldness of design makes the work easier to attend to on a psychological level, which draws people back to the platform.

Another key feminist tool I use is what bell hooks described as ‘up close and personal’ in her book, Feminism is for Everybody. We are human beings, not numbers in a spreadsheet. If I want people to use neno, I have to be in relationship with them beyond neno because the digital is merely an amplification of our material conditions.

The best sustained feminist work can’t be accessed online because it is embedded in the relationships we create with each other offline. At the end of the day, I will know this PARIWO project succeeded based on how many relationships have been transformed by the stories we gathered and told each other along the way.

OLOLADE FANIYI

Looking beyond individual platforms, what would it take to build truly liberatory digital infrastructure for African social movements?

ANN DARAMOLA

I’m going to repeat this again, and I hope you’re not tired of me saying this. Our material conditions are the raw ingredients for any digital infrastructure we hope to build. Until we have done the work to reshape our relationships with each other in our physical worlds, until we recreate stories of how we know who is human and who is worth protecting because they are human beings, we don’t stand a chance in the digital reality.

Neno is just a tool to facilitate the way we gather and tell those stories. Thank you for letting me tell that story here⎈

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