Who gets to tell the story of a community?
For much of Uganda’s modern history, the answer has been journalists, broadcasters, filmmakers, historians and, occasionally, politicians. Communities were often spoken about before they had the means to speak for themselves.
Social media is changing that equation.
Ugandan content creator Nacho Necha offers an interesting example. Through TikTok, he has made Runyankole, Ankole culture and everyday Western Ugandan experiences part of his digital identity.
The significance is not simply that an Ankole creator is on TikTok.
It is that Ankole is not something he leaves behind when he enters the digital world.
In an internet increasingly dominated by the same global sounds, dances, jokes and visual trends, local identity can easily disappear beneath the pressure to become universally understandable. Everyone is encouraged to speak the same digital language.
Nacho has done something different: he has made his own language part of the product.
That matters.
A viewer does not have to live in Mbarara, Bushenyi, Ntungamo or elsewhere in Western Uganda to encounter Runyankole through his content. A smartphone can carry a local expression, joke, conversation or cultural reference from one community to thousands of people who may never have physically travelled there.
This changes cultural storytelling.
For generations, communities depended on outsiders to document them. A television crew arrived, filmed, interviewed people and left. A journalist wrote a feature. A filmmaker produced a documentary. The community became the subject.
Social media introduces another possibility: the community can become the storyteller.
Nacho is part of this transition.
His interactions with prominent Ugandans, including President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni and religious leaders, have also demonstrated how a creator can carry a regional identity into national conversations.
And this exposes an assumption worth questioning: must becoming nationally relevant require abandoning regional identity?
Why should a Munyankore have to sound less Munyankore to become Ugandan enough for a national audience?
There is no contradiction between the two.
A person can be deeply Ankole and still participate in a national or global conversation. Indeed, the very things that make the creator local may be what make him interesting to everyone else.
There is another dimension to this story.
Young Ugandans are often described as the future custodians of culture. But what does that actually mean in an age when culture is increasingly consumed through screens?
We cannot simply tell young people to preserve culture while expecting them to communicate exactly as their grandparents did.
Culture has always changed its vessels.
The oral storyteller had the village gathering. Later generations had books, radio, newspapers and television. Today there is TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and whatever comes next.
The question is not whether culture should enter these spaces.
It already has.
The question is what happens when young people begin carrying their languages and identities into them deliberately.
A Runyankole video may appear trivial compared with a historical documentary or a cultural archive. But culture is not preserved only through grand monuments. Sometimes it survives in a phrase, a joke, an accent, a greeting, a story or the way somebody describes ordinary life.
Digital creators are therefore doing something that cultural institutions sometimes struggle to do: they are documenting the present while it is still happening.
But creators cannot carry this responsibility alone.
Elders possess memories. Parents transmit language. Cultural institutions preserve knowledge. Schools shape what young people consider valuable. Journalists and filmmakers provide deeper documentation. Creators bring these worlds into the digital spaces where younger audiences already spend their time.
The challenge is to connect them.
Uganda has dozens of languages and cultural traditions. Many contain histories that have never been properly documented; others are slowly disappearing from everyday use. Yet the same young people who are sometimes accused of abandoning culture now possess tools that previous generations could only have imagined.
A smartphone can be a camera.
A TikTok account can become an archive.
A local language can become a global search term.
That is why Nacho Necha’s digital journey deserves attention beyond the entertainment value of social media.
He represents a broader possibility: that Ugandans do not have to wait for someone else to introduce their cultures to the world.
They can introduce themselves.
And perhaps this is the more profound shift. The internet has not merely given individuals larger audiences; it has given communities new instruments of self-representation.
Ankole does not need permission to exist online.
It is already there.
The question is what stories its young people will choose to tell next—and whether we will recognise those stories as part of the preservation of a culture, rather than dismissing them as merely content.
