Since its meteoric rise to popularity in 2020, TikTok has grown to be the social media platform of the moment in Nigeria, drawing an audience of over 15 million people. As the platform becomes a ubiquitous part of the Nigerian social media experience, a group of media-savvy users has also risen to popularity.

One of them is the TikTok creator popularly known as Purple Speedy whose signature of wearing purple outfits in her far-reaching videos has propelled her to stardom on the platform with over six million followers and more than 100 million likes on her videos.

Purple Speedy (born Peace Pever Anpee) however was born far from the glitz that her social media reflects, growing up in a middle-class family in Gboko, Benue state. The first time she heard of TikTok was in 2019, joining the platform to observe the drama sketches on it before being drawn to its music and dance culture. “What I basically loved from TikTok was the acting,” Purple Speedy says. “In fact, if you check my first video on TikTok, it was me mimicking a particular person. So, I wanted to do acting.

“But then, I saw trends on TikTok that I really loved and they were dance trends. When I got to know about TikTok and I saw the trends, there was a dance class at my school. The dance class was at 5. After my lectures, I’d change and go to dance class. So, from there, I started hopping on TikTok trends. That was how I got to know about TikTok. It started in 2019, but I started content creation in 2020.”

From balancing her university degree with her content creation career, Purple Speedy has become one of te most popular faces on TikTok and she puts it down to consistency and being alive to popular trends. “You have to follow trends if you are a content creator,” she explains. “There are things like trends, you have to follow them, and you have to make a difference. You have to make a unique thing when there’s a particular trend for people to know, ‘Oh. This particular person is on the app.’”

When she originally joined the platform, Purple Speedy used to look up to creators like Liquorose and Jenni Frank who fueled her ambition to make it mega and it’s now a thing of joy for her to collaborate with them in some capacity. “There were people on the app that actually inspired me to want to do what they were doing,” Purple Speedy says. “Liquorose was one of the people that inspired me and the other person was Jenni Frank. She was doing more of the acting. When I left, I still decided to come back because I got a better phone.”

Going on, she adds, “Recently, Liquorose was able to identify me and she called to say she loves what I’m doing and that I should keep it up and it’s going to take me places. I feel like it’s basically TikTok that brought the platform for them to be able to identify me. It feels really good. I feel really honoured, honestly.”

According to her, TikTok is only at the beginning of its rise and will continue to entertain Nigerians for years. “I see TikTok in the next five years far bigger than it is right now,” she says. “The reason why I’m saying that is because some of us are living testimonies of how TikTok has actually helped us move from, I’d say, zero to hero. It’s just basically that little thing that you do that can excite one to three people.”