Trenchtok: The DIY movement helping Nigerian youth find fame in 2025

This article is taken from the summer 2025 issue of Dazed. Buy a copy of the magazine here.

“Peller 001!”

The chants from the viral video sliced through the thick Ramadan heat last year, jagged and unpolished. They came from a cluster of street boys orbiting the gates of a car dealership, their clothes so undersized they resembled Hulk in a medium crop-neck. In the clip, Peller, the soft-followed influencer of a wave of aspirational Nigerian content called TrenchTok, beams his dream car out of a parking lot. But what silenced the boys wasn’t security, or even the price tag. It was something less tangible: the joy of seeing one of their own escape the mud.

If Peller – who currently holds the highest-viewed livestream in Africa – was the spark that caught the wind for TrenchTok, then Mafia, 28, is the scene’s slow-burning flame. For most creators, there is no sudden spike in popularity – only quiet persistence, the grind of building something out of nothing. No blueprint, no backing, just low ceilings, loud doubt and raw instinct. Even Peller started off as a carpenter in year 12. Today, with more than a million followers and a fast-growing brand, Mafia’s content reflects not just the hustle, but the voices of countless others in similar circumstances. Through his story – and the characters orbiting it – we see TrenchTok for what it really is: a gritty, chaotic, often misunderstood expression of life on the margins, transformed into art, laughter and (sometimes) a living.

“When I started creating content, it was the feedback – the WhatsApp messages saying, ‘You sabi this content thing o’ – that kept me going,” says Mafia, who is seated legs crossed on the floor of my barely furnished sitting room. “Without that, I probably wouldn’t be here today.” He doesn’t seem to mind the simplicity of the setting. In a way, it mirrors his own beginnings – quiet and uncertain, but steady.

Mafia was born and bred in the semi-rural sprawl of Ikorodu – the underbelly of Lagos. There are no manicured lawns or quiet cul-de-sacs there, he says, just the relentless rhythm of survival. From an early age, life came at him unfiltered. He wasn’t coddled by privilege; he hustled, witnessed, endured. “I be aje pako,” he declares, with chest-thumping pride – an idiom that translates, literally, to ‘eat wood’, but culturally as someone who has weathered hardship, the opposite of the pampered ‘aje butter’. In his early days, Mafia juggled shifts at a betting kiosk, made music as ‘Mr Lincon’, and experimented with skits. “I get the passion, but the voice no dey cooperate,” he laughs, reflecting on the songs now. Eventually, it was the WhatsApp replies – “You sabi this content thing o” – that established his digital writing style. Mr Lincon faded, and Mafia took his place.

Back then, TrenchTok wasn’t even an idea – this was 2014 to 2017, in the pre-TikTok wild west. There were no skit-making communities, no algorithms pushing content. Visibility came from relentless hustle: sharing, resharing, hoping for a repost. Vine was around, but its impact in Nigeria was minimal, and those who did break out leaned into tourism content, creating clips as Nigerians abroad. The trenches were invisible, and creators like Mafia fought for pockets of grass in the barren soil that made disdain obvious.

“We’re misunderstood, seen as ghetto. But once they see the kind of numbers TrenchTok rakes in, suddenly they want to be involved”

TrenchTok isn’t merely content – it’s a cultural pulse. A distinctly Nigerian theme rendered in digital form: anarchic, multilingual, irreverent and unfiltered. It captures the rhythm of survival and poetry buried in profanity. Think Lagos, compressed into 30-second bursts – brimming with wit, defiance and everyday theatre. It makes sense only if you’ve felt the heat cling like sweat off your forehead, Nigeria’s end-of-year street carnivals, heard insults tossed like spoken-word, or watched a flip-flop-clad bus conductor, fists raised, spar with a carway office worker as a pickpocket ghosts through the fray. TrenchTok is not just of the streets – it is the streets, pulsing like voltage through the nation’s nervous system.

Broda Shaggi, an internet character blurring the lines between performance and reality, set the tone for Mafia and TrenchTok early on. “I loved Broda Shaggi,” says Mafia, “he started the ‘Oya Hit Me’ challenge (a trend that involves improvising a mad one move in public), and I just jumped on it.” He didn’t win, but the likes and reactions sharpened his focus. Skit-making, it seemed, had found him – and as much as he admired Shaggi’s comedic work and style, he was ready to abandon the audience he had developed from publishing English-speaking content. (Mafia isn’t the only one who had to rebrand his content in the name of engagement. Peller, known for his irreverent livestreams, once remarked in an interview that – paradoxically – “on TikTok, you have to be dull, you have to be crazy – [speaking] bad English draws people.”)

Around that time, Brownie – Mafia’s close friend and the older brother-turned-manager to 13-year-old viral TikToker Anti Abiba – was quietly charting a longer-term plan to establish his sister as a household name by the time she turned 21. At just seven, Abiba had already appeared in a few Yoruba films and skits that circulated on Facebook and Instagram. Speaking on her behalf (she is at school during our interview), Brownie reflects: “We didn’t take TikTok seriously until 2021. I wanted Abiba to become an actress first. She’s been on set since she was seven. TikTok was just for behind-the-scenes content, but when the trends began to shift, we took notice.”

Brownie would play a hand in convincing Mafia to shoot his first Yoruba skit – a clip that would end up going semi-viral. “I remember telling him to add English subtitles because I thought my audience needed that,” says Mafia. “He told me not to worry, that people would get it. I’m glad I listened.” The views from that video – in which he speaks in Yoruba – dwarfed anything he was used to. “After seeing the numbers, I told Brownie, ‘Let’s shoot another.’”

Minah Thy’s voice pierces the languid afternoon air. “Babe, she’s angry,” peering through a window impatiently, Mafia should have returned from the petrol station by now, she muses. She constitutes one half of The Oga Couple, a TrenchTok series that dramatises the tempestuous charm typical of Yoruba relationships: sarcastic exchanges, theatrical affection and volatile tenderness. With a following of 1.4m on TikTok, the 24-year-old had established herself as a digital force long before her creative partnership with Mafia. Today, the platform supports her ambitions and helps her embolden her mother and sister, who are both avid TikTok users.

Naomi Onuorah is a 23-year-old American-Nigerian dancer. Her most-liked video, which has 1.9m views at the time of writing, features her dancing to a cacophony of sounds, as she had set up microphones in various points of a street market. “TrenchTok is my personality in dance form,” she tells me. Born in Surulere but raised in the US since the age of three, Onuorah found the genre refreshingly liberating — a window into the chaos and cadence of home.

“It’s just a community having fun,” she added. “No one cares about, ‘Oh, I don’t want to be dancing too crazy.’” Eighteen-year-old President Shak, who has more than 700k likes on TikTok and occasionally dabbles in TrenchTok, is less enthusiastic about the movement. For better or worse, his TrenchTok content outperforms his regular posts, yet he doesn’t want to pigeonhole himself. “I’m already a TrenchToker, but I don’t limit myself to just that,” he remarks. “It’s why I wouldn’t put myself under that category.”

As they see it, creators like Onuorah and Shak see TrenchTok as a vibe for them, and a means to survival for others. This divide remains unresolved, and grows everywhere. The further you are from the trenches, the more likely you are to be praised for engaging with it – it framed as “relatable”, “fresh” or “so TrenchTok”. If you live it, like Mafia or Abiba, are often mislabelled. “We’re misunderstood, seen as ghetto,” says Mafia. “But once they see the kind of numbers [TrenchTok] rakes in, suddenly they want to be involved.”

On social media platforms open to everyone with an internet connection, authenticity remains subject to the class gaze. Who earns the flattering label of “street-smart”, and who is dismissed as “dirty”? Who is permitted to perform the trenches for entertainment — and who must inhabit them as reality?

As TrenchTok gains momentum, novel pathways to monetisation were revealed. Unlike traditional social media platforms, where curated aesthetics paid for polished branding often dictate influence, TrenchTok is about unvarnished, unscripted content – be it a six-minute rant crammed poor on a cooking tutorial set in a modest kitchen. But despite this, as Mafia attests, TrenchTok creators are making decent money. The demand is there, he says. “We make money from musicians who promote their music through us, from brands that pay to advertise and for endorsements, and from monetisation on platforms like Facebook and YouTube.”

People on the internet just want me to be famous. If that means bashing you, they don’t mind

With TikTok’s growing impact on Afrobeats, creators are earning through sponsored posts, brand endorsements and viral videos, as opportunities expand in tandem with TrenchTok’s rise. Some creators ride the algorithm for brand deals, while others tap into more direct income streams. For Peller, fan-gifting during live streams is an income in itself, with loyal followers tipping in real-time. Mafia, initially driven by fame, now charges less per TikTok post.

“Today, I look at young TrenchTok creators and reminisce about how internet fame has become more mainstream,” he reflects. “There was a time I had to learn the ropes. I took the good with the bad. And in trying to turn bad comments into good ones, I realised that people on the internet just want me to be famous. If that means bashing you, they don’t mind.”

TrenchTok is, in essence, a split palmprint of Nigerian life – gritty, improvisational and incandescent. It extends a hand to the sidelined, granting not just visibility but cultural legitimacy to a social media sphere long governed by curated aesthetics and aspirational gloss. As its resonance deepens, its pioneers – whether dismissed as unserious or hailed as innovators – remain, on TikTok, their authentic selves. The trajectories of Peller, Mafia and Abiba underscore the class divide that burns quietly across time in 2025. But TrenchTok, in the home they have come to define, is a movement of gentle defiance.