Nollywood actor, Osita Iheme, known as Pawpaw, has been included in a circulating global roundup of people whose childhood or early-screen moments later turned them into internet legends.

The Pulse report groups him with faces whose young images outlived the original clip or film and became meme language. For Pawpaw that path started in early-2000s Yoruba and Igbo comedies, especially the Aki and Pawpaw pairing with Chinedu Ikedieze.

His small stature and elastic expressions made stills and short scenes easy to reuse long after the movies left the video club.

Those clips travelled further than Nollywood’s old distribution maps. Years later, American stars and brands used Pawpaw reaction videos the way the rest of the internet uses reaction GIFs. The face that sold village-comedy DVDs became a global shorthand for mischief, shock and side-eye.

There is a wrinkle the list language can miss. Iheme was a young-looking adult when many of those films were shot, not a toddler filmed by accident. The “as kids” frame is about how the internet received the image, not a precise birth certificate. He has since spoken about watching old scenes return as jokes he does not control.

The honour, if it is that, is double-edged. It confirms that a Nollywood comic built one of Africa’s most exported faces. It also shows how little of that second life he was paid to design.