Khabane Lame, also known as Khaby, is a Senegalese with Italian citizenship who lives in the city of Chivasso, in the region of Turin, is one of the biggest current phenomena on TikTok.
With more than 51,3 million followers (as we write this article), the 21-year-old is the most followed Italian on the social network and his videos are successful all over the world.
The formula is simple, without even saying a word, Lame reacts ironically to some exaggerated tutorials that teach complicated methods for simple things.
An example of this is his most viewed video, which already has 232 million views, in which he shows a person cutting a banana with a cleaver and then peeling the fruit with his hands.
In his videos, Khabane does not usually speak, something that is possibly one of the reasons for his success, since his faces and mouths that show nonconformity with the tutorials are what end up making people laugh.
Furthermore, by not using verbal language, he ends up overcoming the language barrier more easily, making his videos universal and highly viewed here in Brazil, for example.
However, the Italian's TikTok account did not start with this premise, he made videos that can be considered normal by the standards of the Chinese network. Among them, dubbings and some parodies, the first of which, which was deleted, was posted in March 2020, he disinfects his hands using alcohol gel.
Even today, his content is not just a reaction to tutorials, despite these being the most successful, and even before exploding into the world, the boy was already a domestic success.
Even before the banana video, the young man already had a considerable 3 million followers. The role of the tutorials was just to catapult Khaby and place him in the top 100 worldwide on TikTok.
Turn success into income
Despite the good numbers, Khabane Lame still cannot consider himself a person who has content creation as his main source of income. However, this is what he intends to do in the short term. “It’s a big wish of mine, I already have several projects in mind”, he says in an interview with Courierof Sera.
The young man also intends to help his parents, who immigrated to Italy when he was just one year old.
According to him, people are usually ashamed to say they live in that location, but Khabane says he doesn't have that feeling. “Public housing is a place I owe everything to. They taught me education and allowed me to cultivate many bonds,” he says.
But the boy has certainly come much further than he intended when he created his TikTok account just over a year ago, as a way to kill the boredom of staying at home due to the lockdown measures. social isolation adopted in the country. “Like me, my parents didn’t expect all of this and they are amazed. I hope to continue like this”, adds the tiktoker.
With information from Vanity Fair , Corriere della Sierra and Olhar Digital
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