Xenophobic posts mislabel a photo of a local oddity from the country of Georgia – a train carriage converted into a river bridge – to sustain a harmful stereotype of Zimbabwe.
MARY ALEXANDER • 8 FEBRUARY 2024
A photo of a large rusted vehicle lying across a river is doing the rounds on social media with the claim it’s an “old school bus turned into a bridge in Zimbabwe”.*
The claim was posted by the anti-migrant X/Twitter account #PutSouthAfricansfirst on 24 January 2024. It’s since been reposted across Facebook and X here, here, here, here and here.
Zimbabwe shares a 200 kilometre border with South Africa’s northern Limpopo province.
The country and its people are often targets of xenophobia in South Africa. Over the years, this has flared into violence. Popular movements such as Put South Africans First and Operation Dudula oppose migration from elsewhere in Africa.
The claim repeats a harmful stereotype that Zimbabwe is falling apart, so poor – in this false example – it has to use buses for bridges. (In a counterclaim on X , the photo has been described as “some of the bridges in South Africa”.)
But not only is the vehicle not an “old school bus”, the photo was shot a hemisphere away from Zimbabwe.
‘Resourceful repurposing’ by Georgian engineers
A Google Lens search for the image’s source led to a post on the travel site TripAdvisor. This puts the photo’s location in the Samtskhe-Javakheti region of Georgia, a country on the border between eastern Europe and western Asia.
Social media posts from late 2023 describe the photo as showing an “old abandoned train wagon used as a bridge”.
Old abandoned train wagon used as a bridge. pic.twitter.com/jsJcjuvUIb
— Lars-Johan Larsson (@LarsJohanL) November 29, 2023
We googled “train carriage bridge Georgia”. This returned many other photos, of what is clearly the same bridge, on the stock image sites Shutterstock, Dreamstime, Alamy and Flickr. All say it crosses the Paravani river near the town of Akhalkalaki in southern Georgia.
The carriage bridge features in the 2017 book Abandoned Wrecks by Chris McNab, and in galleries of photos from the book on the CNN and Architectural Digest websites.
A 2018 review of Abandoned Wrecks gives a longer description:
Akhalkalaki, Georgia – Showing a resourceful repurposing, Georgian engineers have converted this old train carriage into a functional river bridge, each end of the carriage set on concrete plinths. Such arrangements are not uncommon – carriage bridges are also seen in India and other parts of the world.
The bridge, now a little worse for wear and covered in graffiti, can be seen on Google Maps and Google Street View.
It’s in Georgia, not Zimbabwe.
* Some Facebook and Instagram users may have deleted their posts after Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program rated their claims as untrue.
Published by Africa Check on 14 February 2024