About

African Kid Crying With A Knife is a reaction image of Nigerian actor Chinedu Ikedieze crying in the 2008 Nigerian film Intelligent Student. However, despite popular belief, the actor was in his 30s when the film was released. In 2018, the image was adopted by memes about tricks played on people when they were young, specifically in the X Niggas and "Grade 3 Me" memes.

Origin

In 2008, the film Intelligent Students was released in Nigeria. In the film, a character played by Chinedu Ikedieze can be seen holding up a machete, dropping it and clutching his head as he cries (clip below).

The earliest known clip of the meme was posted on April 14th, 2016 by Vine ^[1] user aswad. The post received more than 72 million loops, 31,000 likes and 14,000 revines in three years (shown below).

Precursor

A similar meme, Crying Kid With Gun, which originates from a photoset on Shutterstock, has existed shortly before this one.

Spread

About one week later, Twitter ^[2] user @spikereed tweeted the clip with the caption "When u cheated on her 62 times and u find out she went to lunch once with a co worker." The post received more than 23,000 likes and 21,000 retweets (shown below, left).

On May 26th, 2016, Twitter ^[3] user @thatKiddPedroo posted an image from the scene with the caption, "when you accidentally send your mom a dick pic and you hear her in the other room fingering herself" (shown below, right).

Several months later, on August 31st, actor and professional wrestler Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson re-shared a variation of the meme from the @HoodClips Instagram page. The post received more than 4 million views and 400,000 likes in three years (shown below).

On June 12th, 2017, Twitter user @NikeAllah shared the clip to Twitter. The post received more than 2.1 million views, 3,800 likes and 1,600 retweets in less than three years (shown below).

THIS VINE OF AN AFRICAN KID CRYING WITH A MACHETE WILL NEVER GET OLD HAAHAHHA pic.twitter.com/jO5DaBhUOY

— Huda (@NikeAllah) January 13, 2017

On March 21th, 2018, PewDiePie uploaded an episode of his show Meme Review in which he looked examples of the meme on minute 8:57 and minute 9:38 (shown below).

On August 14th, 2019, Vulture^[4] published a piece on the meme.

Various Examples

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Search Interest

External References