Who Gets to Tell the Story? Decolonizing Content Strategy in 2026
By Yema Lumumba
African history gets written without African historians, products “inspired by” Indigenous cultures get marketed without a single Indigenous voice getting consulted, and social justice campaigns are run after being drafted solely in cushy boardrooms. In short, every day, content gets published about communities without them being an active part of it. So, how do we better?
The question of who gets to tell the story is as old as stories themselves. But in the age of content strategy, algorithms, and viral campaigns, it has never been more important to make sure the right voices are a part of the content symphony.
The Narrative Has Always Been a Power Structure
Long before the internet, controlling the story meant controlling the worldview. Colonial powers didn't just occupy land, they have always occupied imagination. Think about school textbooks, maps of trade, or the glamorized depiction of Casablanca in movies. Not only did they decide when which “primitive” civilizations were “discovered”, they also managed to chose what was worth remembering and what could safely be forgotten or erased.
Today, despite digital monopolies, we have many ways to change the narrative landscapes. Social media platforms give communities direct access to audiences, and most importantly to each other. While the gatekeepers are now in the form of shadowbans or mass report campaigns, many movements like #BlackLivesMatter, the Arab Springs or more recently the “Gen Z protests” were solidified and amplified online, largely by the communities most affected. the “Gen Z protests” . That being said, the infrastructure of content distribution and the mechanics of who gets platforms and gets to profit are harder to shift as quickly.
When "Diversity" Becomes a Content Strategy
Here is a pattern many of us have seen: a brand or organization decides it wants to be more “inclusive”. So it hires a consultant, runs a campaign during Black History Month, Pride, or during election times, posts a carefully designed graphic with the right hashtags, and… calls it done.
This is not accountably, nor diversity or decolonization. This is decoration.
True decolonization of content strategy requires something much more uncomfortable: actually passing the mic. It means not just featuring diverse voices, but trusting them to shape the narrative from the beginning. It means hiring community members not as spokespeople, but as strategists, editors, and decision-makers. It means accepting that your brand's or institution’s story might need to be rewritten; not simply repackaged.
The difference is not aesthetic. It is structural.
What Decolonized Content Actually Looks Like
So what does it look like in practice? Here are a few things worth considering:
Whose knowledge is being centered? When you produce content about a community, culture, or historical event, ask who the primary sources are. Are they members of the community itself? Are they academics or institutions that have historically spoken about rather than with that community?
Who benefits from the content? If a campaign raises awareness about a community's struggles but the engagement, followers, and revenue flow back to an outside organization, something is off. Decolonized content asks: does this story serve the people it's about?
Who has editorial power? Featuring a guest writer from a marginalized community while maintaining full editorial control over what they can say is not inclusion. Real inclusion means sharing the power to shape what gets published and how.
Is the complexity respected? Colonial narratives flatten. They reduce rich, living cultures to single stories: the struggling continent, the exotic tradition, the grateful recipient of aid. Decolonized content insists on complexity, contradiction, and humanity.
The Role of Digital Communication Strategy
This is where digital marketing and content strategy have a specific responsibility, and a specific opportunity.
The tools we use every day SEO, audience segmentation, content calendars, distribution strategies do not have to stay neutral. They reflect assumptions about whose stories are worth amplifying and whose audiences matter. An algorithm trained on historically biased data will reproduce that bias at scale. So when thinking of your next campaign idea, how about you look into the adoption rate of BlueSky instead of Twitter among your target audience? Or ask the upcoming influencer in your native language if they’d be willing to step in?
Digital communication strategists can choose to curate and amplify community-led narratives. They can use their platform access to lift stories and voices that would otherwise be buried. They can design campaigns that don't just reach diverse audiences, but are genuinely built with them.
Of course, this requires intentionality at every step. It requires asking, at every point in the process: who is in the writing room? Behind the camera? In front of the microphone? And who should be?
A Shift in Mindset, Not Just Methodology
Ultimately, decolonizing content strategy isn’t just a checklist. It is a continuous practice of listening, unlearning, and redistributing narrative power.
It asks us to sit with discomfort. To recognize that some of the most effective content we have produced may have been built on someone else's story, told without their consent, for someone else's benefit.
It invites us to imagine something different: a media landscape where communities are not the subject of stories, but the authors of them. Where history is not a backdrop for a brand campaign, but a living, complicated, powerful resource that belongs to the people who live with it and its consequences.
The story has always been there. The question is whether we are finally ready to let the right people tell it.
