From village moran to a TikTok star

At 6am every day, Kili Paul is all set to take his family’s herd of cattle out to graze in Lugoba village in Tanzania.

This has been his job since he dropped out of secondary school due to financial issues. In addition to being the family’s designated herder, he had to start training to become a Maasai warrior, or Moran, in line with the dictates of his community’s traditions.

“I dropped out of high school one month after joining because of finances and immediately started doing odd jobs, including working as a hairdresser. I mostly did braids and other things, but at some point I decided to go back to the village. My dad immediately put me to work for the family, herding cattle and training to be a warrior,” Kili Paul said.

The Maa ethnic group has largely maintained its cultural traditions despite many years of contact with the rest of the world. To this day, the Maa people continue to wear their traditional attire, which includes the ‘Maasai shuka’.

Paul’s life in the village was already pre-determined by his elders. He was destined to become Moran, get himself a wife from his tribe, settle down and start a family of his own. He, however, decided to sidestep that conventional path.

Although to everyone he was just another young man living in the village, the wonders of technology did not escape his interest. With a phone in his hand, curiosity about social apps got the better of him.

It is this curiosity that has now seen him join the group of famous young content creators.

Household name

“There is no electricity where I live. I have to walk 10 kilometres to the nearest town to charge my phone. If I am lucky I may get a bodaboda ride. I started this journey by posting random videos of my life in the village. I thereafter decided to do a video of an Indian song and it was a hit. I would lip-sync to the words because I do not speak Indian. It received a lot of positive reactions. This resulted in TikTok reaching out to me and that was when my journey as a content creator began,” he explains.

Indian music and movies have a big influence in Tanzania and this, he says, is the reason the art came easily to him.

It was, however, not something he had planned. Late afternoons became his ideal time to record videos.

That, he explains, is the best time for recording outdoors, especially if one is relying on the sun as the source of lighting.

When he was starting out, memorising the words and recording videos would take him up to two days but after months of practising, he is now able to do everything in a day.

“Creation of a song is not easy. There are actually three people involved: there is the author of the song, a singer and lastly an actor who actually lip-syncs to the song during a movie. The Indian language is not easy but Paul says if one likes something it definitely becomes easy to do,” he said.

And true to his advice on passion, Kili’s pastime activity has literally changed his life. In his village he might still be Kili Paul, the 26-year-old Maasai herder, but in India his is a household name among the crème de la crème of Bollywood.

Talks with Netflix

This has made him one of the most-sought-after digital content creators both locally and internationally.

“I now speak to renowned artists from India such as Jubin Nautiyal, Sidhart Malothra, Nora Fatehi and Guru Randhwa. They share and like my posts and I have even collaborated with some of them. This has been one of the main reasons my following on Instagram has grown to more than one million in a short period of time. I am so happy. This motivates me to do more,” he said.

These high-profile interactions have opened doors in a way he never would have imagined.

He says he is currently in talks with Netflix India for a possible collaboration. 

“I am so excited about this. I do not want to say much about it but very soon I will be featuring in music videos and even movies,” Kili Paul said.

He advises young people to work hard and leverage technology to become job creators. This, he says, would help the many youths who are wasting away with nothing to do at home. 

Social media, he notes, is not a place to just post lavish lifestyles or nudes. If used well, he further says, tech platforms can really open doors.

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