If you are addicted to Instagram, you might have encountered an influencer named Brennan Ekoyu who goes by the handle ‘Brennan Baby’. Brennan is a young 18-year-old social media influencer from Uganda who became a TikTok star soon after he started uploading videos on the platform. As per his profiles and social media interviews, he learned about TikTok during the Covid-19 lockdown. His success story is one of those rare silver linings of the pandemic.
Brennan gained popularity by uploading videos where he imitated girls and teachers in high school and created scenes in different situations. He has three elder brothers and belongs to the Kumam tribe. Brennan Baby attended St Joseph’s SS Nahhalama school.
In some of the most popular videos, he can be seen wearing blue lipstick and running away crying in slow motion after his character’s boyfriend cheats on him. In a video posted on January 12, Brennan baby acted as a girl who saves her boyfriend from water by shielding him but her boyfriend saves another girl. Brennan then leaves crying.
In a video posted on January 25, Brennan Baby acted as a girl who was walking with her boyfriend and a female friend. Brennan sits to pick up a book and notices the boyfriend and another female friend holding hands behind the back. Feeling cheated, Brennan walks away crying in slow motion.
In a video posted on February 3, Brennan Baby dressed as a girl was seen sitting next to a boy. The girl notices a message on the boy’s phone that read “I love you babe”. Feeling cheated, the girl runs away. The quality of the video showed professionalism in creating the videos.
While he posts short videos on TikTok and Instagram, Brennan Baby has compilation videos of the best clips on YouTube. For instance, in one of the videos on YouTube, he published a compilation of videos where he depicted “How Different GIRLS Behave at SCHOOL”.
In an interview, he said that during the lockdown he was bored at home. One day, he went through her mother’s phone and explored funny videos. He got inspired to create similar videos. Soon after, he joined TikTok and other social media platforms and started creating content. Initially, he used his mother’s phone but bought one for himself.
Speaking about his school-themed videos, he said it was easy to create such content as he encountered similar situations during school days. One of the initial viral videos was where he acted to depict how girls behave when it is time for a lunch break, but the teacher decides to continue teaching. The response he got for the video encouraged him to create more content. He often uses his mother’s old clothes, wig, and accessories for the videos. Interestingly, he said in an interview that his mother helps him to dress up for the videos. Besides making videos, Ekoyu likes to knit and play table tennis.
Experience with cyberbullying
With fame comes the trolling. Every social media influencer, good or bad, faces some type of cyberbullying, and Ekoyu’s experience was no different. Because of the type of content he makes, he often gets subjected to cyberbullying. During an interview, he revealed it was not easy for him to rejoin the school as boys were bullying him, assuming he was gay.
He said, “Some people abuse me that why I act like a girl and not act a boy character because I am a boy… But I like acting like a girl because girls are dramatic and sincerely nothing is interesting about boys’ lives. I don’t think anything is interesting to act about them, and I will never act about them.”
The blue-lipstick-wearing boy who runs in slow-motion in his videos has over 69,000 followers and 164 million views on TikTok, 226,000 followers on Instagram, and over 10,000 subscribers on YouTube.
