How Tanzania's Maasai siblings became TikTok global superstars

The growing internet usage made it possible for two Maasai siblings, Kili and Neema Paul, to excite their Bollywood fans. The two rose to fame after they started posting videos of themselves lip-syncing to Bollywood hit songs on social media platform, TikTok.

School dropout Kilimanjaro Paul, as his father named him after Africa’s highest mountain, never expected he would one day become one of the world’s stars.

“My real name is Yusuph as I was registered in school, but my father named me Kilimanjaro after the mountain so everyone close to me used to call me Kili as a short form of Kilimanjaro,” says Kili Paul.

Neema and her brother Kill were both born and raised at Lugoba in Chalinze, Tanzania’s Coast Region, where they also took their primary education before acquiring secondary education.

Kili (28) says school life was like roller-coaster for them, as they moved from Lugoba to the capital city, Dodoma.

Due to the financial difficulties his family faced at the time Kili had to drop out of school, leaving only his sister, Neema, to finish the race.

After sometime he became a hair dresser, a talent many Maasai boys have.

But the business wasn’t paying him enough, he then decided to move to Shinyanga to find a better life before returning to his village, Lugoba, to continue his family activities of cattle rearing.

“My past life was a hustle. I didn’t want to stay at home with my mom doing nothing,” explains Kili.

Curiosity brought him to social media platforms including TikTok with a growing number of users from all over the world.

At first Kili created a video on TikTok lip sync Rwandan award-winning vocalist, songwriter, guitarist, recording producer, and actor, Bruce Melody’s song ‘Katerina’ but the video clip didn’t get much attention.

However, Kili didn’t mind as he was only doing it for fun.

The most groundbreaking video was of ‘Raatan Lambiyan’, a song from the Bollywood movie called ‘Shershaal’. The two Maasai siblings received a lot of positive comments and their video got millions of viewers in just a day.

Dressed in Maasai attire, Kili and Neema went viral, drew the attention of millions of Bollywood fans after releasing their second lip sync video of the song ‘Zaalima’ from the movie ‘Raees’ which was sung by Bollywood stars Harshdeep Kaur and Arjit Singh

The two siblings explained that since their childhood, they used to spend hours watching Indian movies but can’t speak or even understand the language. They loved to mimic the dance to the songs

“We used to watch Indian movies in our village’s local cinema, that’s when I developed an interest to their songs and dance movies. They say, if you like something, it will be easier to learn,” says Kili.

Kili created TikTok videos a lot for sometimes before bringing his sister to the spotlight.

He said he inspired her to do so as she too enjoys Bollywood films like his brother.

“At first I was shy, but the following day I mastered it,” she says excitedly

She added that there were times she got into an argument with her brother over it. “I am sometimes tired or the song is too difficult to lip sync but Kili always finds a way to make me do it, in the end we create a beautiful well-crafted lip sync video clip,” details Neema.

Apart from lip sync, Neema’s number one priority in dream is acting, still there are processes to make sure one day she will be in the movie but through this, she knows one day she will be the best.

Now Neema has an Instagram account with almost 172 followers, where she promotes herself by reposting their video that she walks together with her brother, despite Kili controlling what is needed to be posted.

Social media culture is not that popular in their village as most of the villagers don’t spend that time in the online world, even his sister, Neema, though she enjoys the recording, she is not aware of the online world.

“It’s not easy for others to understand your goals and intentions of what you’re doing, that’s the reason why most of us fail in the process because we are scared by what others will think about us.”

Kili does not allow the views of others to kill his dream and hobbies of recording and lip sync the songs he loves as his family and friends don’t seem to like what he is doing until now.

“My family and friends thought that what I was doing was a waste of time, but their negative views didn’t let me kill my vibe, now they have started to realise that I was right and sometimes they wish I had been famous a long time ago.” he says.

After being successful and making their names known all over the world including getting the chance of meeting some Indian artistes, this year is going to be another milestone for them.

“We come from a small village on the outskirts of town, so I never thought that my dream of becoming a star and being in front of a camera would someday come true,” said Neema.

As they mentioned to The Beat, Kili and Neema won’t stop creating contents because they make them happy and very popular and their status has changed in the community.

“Now I have to prepare two separate contents, the reason is that my followers differ from network usage, for example most of Instagram users are Indians while those of Tiktok are Americans,” said Kili.

Among the things they’re going to produce include Bollywood dialogue contents, Bollywood comedies and recap of the short films about Bollywood movies.

That includes lip sync for Instagram and dance videos while in TikTok they will record short films that will be enjoyed by their fans.

As the world watch them, the siblings have announced that they are ready to start working on their new video for their subscribers.