On Valentine’s Day, Joy Kalekye says she received a call from a friend who sounded really worried. She told her to check social media because someone had posted a video of her.
The clip shows Kalekye, then a 19-year-old student, standing on her own by the side of a busy road in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, looking down at her phone. Whoever is filming walks towards her, and says: “Hi, I like how you look.”
It was an encounter Kalekye had forgotten all about.
“I realised, oh, it’s this Russian guy that I met last year,” she told the BBC World Service. After watching the video, she understood that he had been recording her.
Kalekye features in one of several videos posted online, showing a man approaching women in Kenya and Ghana, who don’t appear to know they are being filmed.
He touches their hair, holds their hands, asks for their number, and to meet up with him later.
